Visitations Revisited
Wordsmith: The Work is the Word
My main critic, a man I've known for 40 years, suggested that stanza 2 needed different punctuation. Here is the original poem:
Here's the poem with stanza 2 re-punctuated:Visitations [1]We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.
Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.
Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.
Is this latter version better? Clearer? More intelligible?Visitations [2]We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.
Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize,
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.
Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.
Labels: Death
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 6:19 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I suppose that, with poetry, there's poetic license, so there are no hard and fast rules, but if I were to unspool the second stanza and read it as prose, I'd submit that the punctuation in the "corrected" version no longer makes grammatical sense: you're supposed to separate independent clauses with a comma-conjunction if you're not using a semicolon. What's more, placing a comma between a verb and an object also makes no grammatical sense. Let's look here:
...direct to seize, what lies for us yet still...
Compare:
I'm going to seize, that rabbit.
See? Unnecessary comma.
The locution "what lies..." is the beginning of a noun clause functioning as the accusative of seize, so a comma after the verb strikes me as most unwarranted.
As for this:
"...heard it all before/And from the horse's mouth..."
—I think a comma is needed if we assume that what comes after the "And" is an independent clause. It might not be, though: it could be read as an infinitive phrase (given the "to seize"), and clauses normally have subjects with finite verbs.
And may I offer the comma rant that I occasionally do for my coworkers? If you ask many folks what a comma is for, they'll often say it's there "to mark a pause." This makes me tear my hair out—not because commas never mark pauses (they can), but because, if that's your guide for when to insert a comma, you're going to end up putting commas where they aren't needed and omitting commas where they are needed.
I offer the above rant because I feel that the "correction" to your second stanza was made precisely for the sake of marking a (dramatic) pause. I strongly feel that the comma after "seize" has absolutely no business being there, for the reason given earlier in this comment.
My two scents, said the skunk.
Thanks, Kevin. Actually, I have revised the poem, and I saw the problems even before I read your comment. You are right, of course, about commas. I didn't intend that comma before "seize" to be a pause-clause.
Tomorrow will reveal my current and (hopefully) final working solution to this poetic problem!
Jeffery Hodges
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