Woman with Hat, by René Gruau, circa 1928
If the meaning is too readily found, it is not poetry. Unless one has a clear understanding of poetic devices, for example, the difference between metaphor and symbolism, many poems can’t be fully understood.
There is a lot to be said for writing poetry unfettered by metre and rhymes. John Keats (1795–1821) had raised this very topic two centuries ago. Keats’ work was vehemently rejected during his lifetime, although he is regarded today as the best lyrical Romantic poet of all time. Quite a few of his poetry was written in sonnet form—something that may have contributed to his wide-scale unpopularity amongst his critics.
Romanticism was a poetry movement that can be defined as poetry about nature and love while having emphasis on personal experience. It was more concerned with feeling and emotion than with form. Around the 18th century, the sonnet, which had always been a rather favourable form of writing, fell out of favour. An art form adapted from the original 13th-century form, the sonnet had been brought to fame, earlier, by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, but, for whatever reason, critics had fallen out of favour with the sonnet. Romantics still wrote, of course, and still wrote Romantic sonnets professing their love to everything possible under the sun, but they were looked upon in a negative light by the British critics of the time.
Keats sent the following salvo across the bows of those poets who still fervently clung to the unnatural format of the sonnet. Although he stuck to the iambic pentameter in his poem, he deviated from the known rhyme schemes. It would have been hypocritical for Keats to write a poem lamenting the death of originality without attempting to do something different—and it is this difference itself that highlights Keats’ meaning so thoroughly.
On the Sonnet (circa 1818)
If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of painéd loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.
The sonnet form and its short structure demand complete and utter minimalism in terms of imagery. Therefore Keats relied on metaphor (‘Sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy’) and the use of known symbolism (‘dead leaves in the bay wreath crown’) to convey the core message of his poem. These poetic devices are employed by poets to convey ideas in a succinct manner, and Keats masterfully wove these into his poem, otherwise it might have ended up a hot mess.
‘To fit the naked foot of Poesy’. By capitalizing the word ‘Poesy’, Keats referenced the Greek goddess of Poetry. The reference to the ‘foot’ of Poesy has a dual meaning: the poetic foot, which in this case is the rigid iambic pentameter, as well as the historical meaning. Sandals were often loose, and needed to be custom tightened. This customisation is what Keats believed they should do for the goddess of Poesy. He believed that only alternate and customised forms of rhyme should benefit poetry, not forcing it into a restrictive form such as the sonnet.
The symbolic meaning of ‘dead leaves in the bay wreath crown’ is in reference to the poet laureate, the highest form of recognition in England. He, therefore, emphasised that the idea of forcing poetry into such outdated modes of art as the sonnet needed to be re-examined. For Keats, originality was what best fits poetry, and what needed to be exploited.
Decades earlier, even Shakespeare (circa 1564–1616) lamented the overuse of poetic conceits (extended metaphor) and mocked the Romantic poets of the time who were wont to take metaphor a tad too far with the following poem, Sonnet CXXX (130):
My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun;
Carol is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Love it or hate it, poetic devices remain the mainstay of composing meaningful and interesting poetry, whether you follow your own Muse or adhere to the design format of restrictive poetic forms such as the sonnet—but everything in moderation. The overuse of, for example, alliteration, may drown out your carefully crafted metaphor, thereby rendering the poem a hot mess. The ideal that any poet strives for is to optimise the available poetic devices. However, the same design principle that applies to interior design and landscaping a garden, applies to poetry; namely, your eyes need a place to REST. Less is most definitely more.
Happy quills!
Suzette