浅谈诗歌的定义(2)

December came:

“Twas not the same!”

I did not know

Fidelity

Would serve me so.

Frost, hunger, snow

And now, ah me,

Too late to go!

This poem contains only a few words. It is about a swallow which did not migrate with the other birds, and is now suffering in despair in the cold winter. Some of the words, such as “faithful”, “fickle” and “fidelity”, may remind you of the way we talk about love and marriage. In fact, the poem is about people in love, and uses the swallow as an image. The poem has two stanzas, and there is a gap between them. The first section shows that the summer fidelity seems right and good, and the second section shows that fidelity has brought suffering and despair when winter comes. Here we can see that the different sections of a poem always relate to each other. In this poem, the first section is about summer and hope; the second section is about winter and despair. So the two sections of this poem contrast with each other. They are set in opposite seasons, and express opposite feelings about fidelity. Through rereading the poem, I found more details fit into the contrast structure: on the one side summer “shone” its “sweetest” in “August”; on the other side, “December” was “frost, hunger, snow”. Contempt for other swallows in summer changes to envy them in winter. The season, emotions and opinions are all part of the basic contrast which gives shape to the poem.

Based on what we have talked above, we may find the theme of this poem, which is also the writer’s purpose. “The Faithful Swallow” is about people’s hopes and disappointments, and expresses the contrast between them. Hardy contrasts the bright idealistic hopes people have when they are young with the misery and despair they come to in the end. The sudden opposition between the two stanzas adds to the effect of the poem, because it expresses how hope is crushed by cruel experience, very starkly and suddenly. In real life Hardy may have learned the misery of disappointment over many years of slow change as he grew older. In the poem the sharp contrast between the two stanzas heightens the painfulness of disappointment by making it seem to happen in a moment.

Usually speaking, the swallow is quite an ordinary bird in our mind. But in this poem the author endows the swallow some other meanings. We can see it clearly even from the title “The Faithful Swallow”. Then after reading and analyzing this poem, the reader may think carefully whether to be faithful is on earth good or not. “To be faithful” leads the poor swallow into the misery. The same things often happen in our real life. Sometimes we do something faithfully and meet trouble. Thus we can see that poetry can generate our imagination. We may think more about what the life is, and what kind of attitude we should have toward life. This is the basic function of poetry----to educate people, and enrich their life experience.

Understanding poetry relies on treating poems as crises from unwritten stories, so we may find the elements which together make up the experience the poem conveys. However, in some poetry, the vital elements are expressed in images rather than direct language. Then we must rereading the poem and find what the image represents. Remember: Poets do not make their experiences live in characters or a story; poetry explains its meaning in any pattern of words which evokes a feeling and communicates the poet’s complex idea. It is necessary to be flexible, therefore, in approaching poems.

From what we have discussed above, we can see that every word, every sentence of poem, must reach its utmost intensity. That is to say, it must be different from common language in expressing ideas. Poets should use source materials as much as possible offered by the language itself, and then based on some literary techniques such as association, imagination, simile, metaphor, contrast, comparison, rhyme, sarcastic, etc as well as some life experience to express the underlying meanings. The successful poems have no extra word. The good poem is just like a tree, which forms its own structure and organizes by itself. The good poem is also an organism, in which every part must serve a useful purpose and every part must cooperate with one another to show the inner life of the poem. As for the readers, while we are reading poems, we are enjoying a process of appreciation. We are appreciating not only the happiness, but also the bitterness of poems. Samuel Johnson once said: "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." (from Preface to Shakespeare)

In my opinion, poetry is a composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense of experience, characterized by the use of condensed language, as well as literary techniques. Poetry is the most outstanding representative of people’s life, so reading poems is also the process of understanding the profound meanings of our life.

Bibliography:

[1] Forrest G. Robinson: 《剑桥文学指南 哈代》，上海教育出版社，2001年版

[2] 劳•坡林：《怎样欣赏英美诗歌》，北京出版社，1985年版

[3]童庆炳主编：《文学理论教程》，高等教育出版社，1997年版

[4]王佐良：《英诗的境界》，三联书店出版社，1996年版

[5]赵世平：《英诗知识与赏析》，陕西师范大学出版社，1992年版