How to Read a Poem
BY Terry Eagleton
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)

As we spend more time in the world, we choose whether or not to permit our sense of the beautiful to expand to include the not-so-beautiful, the lackluster, even the ostensibly ugly. I guess everybody has to do this in some form, make this choice, even when they’re not artists. We have to decide, in the words of The Desiderata, whether we agree that, “with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” It just makes sense that, as poets, we go on from our beginning stages to make those kinds of decisions in our work. British critic Terry Eagleton faults the English symbolist poet Algernon Charles Swinburne with choosing a conventional beauty of line, word, and rhythm that makes much of his work very graceful but, in the end, rather “narcotic.” Here is a sample of what Eagleton sees as the “worst” of Swinburne:

When Eagleton uses the word “narcotic” here, I think of Muzak. I remember the unsettling feeling I had on hearing a really gritty rock song smoothed out into Muzak while I waited in line at the bank. Another word for “narcotic” often comes up in workshops when rhyme is used well but creates an effect the writer may not want… an effect often described as “sing-songy.” Indeed, “sing-songy” and “narcotic” have their functions, but when you look at some of the most memorable poems, you will often find cracks in these urns.

We have to decide, in the words of The Desiderata, whether we agree that, ‘with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.’

Even John Donne himself (who actually coined the phrase describing a poem as a “well-wrought urn” in his “Canonization”) made room for gracelessness in his work. I’m thinking of Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, where at least two instances of gracelessness can be seen. As early as line 1 — “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You” — we are introduced to a graceless line break that is repeated in line 12: “Take me to You, imprison me, for I.” In the wake of modernism and e.e. cummings, contemporary readers may not be particularly shocked at lines that break between a subject and a verb. But in terms of syntactical units, this is simply not a normal place to take a breath within a sentence and is therefore not an expected place for a line break. Nowhere else in the sonnet are breaks made without first being “authorized” by the presence of a comma or end-punctuation, except for a break between “bend / your force” at the line 3 enjambment, probably severing the verb from its direct object in order to dramatize the process of bending. A poet writing sonnets in the seventeenth century would certainly be pushing into zones of awkwardness (not to mention critical charges of “cleverness”) in doing so. But that is part of the beauty of John Donne’s work, his willingness to sacrifice flow and perfection to, as it were, a higher power. Here, he is asking God to take him by force, to temper his heart, to wrench him into being a more faithful believer. It’s a very physical poem with lots of hard consonance to underscore the degree of spiritual violence Donne is summoning. Troping himself (or his soul-as-himself) as a town occupied by an ungodly force, the speaker asks God to storm the city walls that enclose his heart, doing whatever — shock and awe? — it takes, even if some infrastructure must be destroyed, to reclaim the town and “make [it] new.” Similarly, these extreme line breaks dramatize the degree to which the speaker recognizes his need for unusual force. The unspoken “backstory” could be that it was the path of least resistance — harmonious going-with-the-flow, a sense of seeming unity between subjects and objects — that led the speaker to be “usurpt” by this ungodly “other” in the first place. Moreover, the extreme line breaks at lines 1 and 12 expose the two pronouns, “I” and “you”, that have been separated because the “enemie” has interposed itself between the believer and his God. These breaks are graceless indeed: they mark the division the speaker aches to heal by the restoration of heavenly grace.