No.15 - June 2021
As I End the Refrain - Thrust Home!
Contemporary formal poets, and this has been true for a few generations now, are much drawn to complex forms that employ a lot of repetition—the sestina, villanelle, pantoum and triolet being particular favorites. Repetition is, or can be, a particularly potent weapon in the poet’s arsenal.
In prose, not so much, unless it’s prose delivered orally: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” For Winston Churchill here, and others similarly, the devices of oratory (in this case, anaphora) are the devices of poetry, the original oral literary form.
But for the most part in prose, narrative or expository, it’s a bad idea, and we give it a pejorative name: redundancy. Our teachers of composition—and they are right to do so—warn us against it, and if they haven’t gotten the message across, our word processing program will point out what hapless redundancies remain.
But “repetition in word and phrase and in idea is the very essence of poetry,” according to Theodore Roethke, quoted by Edward Hirsch in his A Poet’s Glossary. Poetry, in a preliterate culture, was the state of the art of communication, because of all the devices of repetition that served as mnemonic aids, from Homeric epithets to rhyme and alliteration.
Extreme devices of repetition, like the repeated lines of a villanelle, are also, let’s admit it, a way of showing off our cleverness in manipulating language, and I have to say – what’s wrong with that? There are different motivations for creating art. It can come from pain and isolation, as W. H. Auden suggested was the case with W. B. Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”). Maybe it seems like a good way to make a dishonest buck (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” – Samuel Johnson). But it’s also a way of saying “Look at me!” And it can be a pretty good way.
Sestinas, villanelles, pantoums…there’s another way of using repetition in a poem, and it doesn’t seem to get used as often by contemporary poets, and that’s the refrain--although for songwriters, it’s their bread and butter, from Cole Porter (“…makin’ whoopee”) to Bob Dylan (“It’s all over now, Baby Blue”) to Willie Dixon (“I’m your hoochie coochie man…”) to Joni Mitchell (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”) to L L Cool J (“Goin’ back to Cali…I don’t think so”).
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was certainly not afraid of using poetry, and repetition, to say “Look at me!” when he extemporaneously composed a ballade while fighting a duel. My favorite translation of Rostand’s ballade is delivered by Jose Ferrer in the movie:
Yeats was fond of refrains, and used them for a variety of purposes. In "The Stolen Child," the effect is magical (…”From a world more full of weeping than you can understand”). In "Easter 1916," it’s stirring and tragic (“A terrible beauty is born”—and I’ve always thought that would be a great name for an Irish folk group – the Terrible Beauties). In "The Wild Old Wicked Man" it’s enigmatic (“Daybreak and a candle end”). In "For Anne Gregory" it’s playful until it turns serious (“Only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair”).
Thomas Hardy, in a poem I’ve talked about before, "During Wind and Rain," uses two alternating refrains (“Ah, no, the years, O!” and “Ah, no, the years, the years”), and the effect is somehow to create even more of a gathering menace than a single refrain could have done.
Rudyard Kipling’s "Danny Deever” is almost all refrain. With its vernacular language, rollicking rhythm and use of repetition, it’s almost like an old barracks room drinking song, which underscores—by playing against it—its chilling nature.
So what happened? Why isn’t the refrain as popular a device today as the circling end words of the sestina, or the patterns of repetition in the villanelle or pantoum?
Maybe because we’re afraid we’ll sound as though we’re trying to be Yeats, and no one can be Yeats.
Maybe it has something to do with the amicable divorce, or at least century-long trial separation, between poetry and song that came with the ascent of free verse. Song won custody of the refrain.
T. S. Eliot used a refrain of sorts in “The Waste Land” (‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”), and it’s a powerful use of repetition in free verse, but it’s not exactly a refrain.
Which is not to say that you can’t make a refrain work in a free verse, or sorta-free-verse, poem. My V-V colleague David Graham uses one to wonderful effect in his poem “In Praise of the Coelacanth,” which is in a mostly but not entirely three-beat accentual line (when I use this form, I call the results my Bob Seger mid-tempo rockers). The poem handles truth much the way jesting Pilate did, and the refrain both endorses and undercuts the phantasmagoric ignis fatuus of truths that only Robert Ripley could fully appreciate. You can read the poem in this issue of Verse-Virtual.
Poetry mostly won custody of anaphora, a rhetorical device in which the repetition comes at the beginning of a line (all those lines that start with “Who…” in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), or shared custody with Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr., but occasionally a song like Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” gets visitation privileges.
Edward Hirsch says that “the ballade is now mostly a form of light verse, as in Dorothy Parker’s “Ballade at 35.” And perhaps he’s right, and perhaps that’s true of refrains in general, but light verse isn’t always frivolous. W. H. Auden mocks the stirring ballad (and creates his own verse form variation) in "O What Is That Sound?”, but his mockery is in the service of a frightening evocation of a police state. W. D. Snodgrass’s refrain in "These Trees Stand..." (“Snodgrass is walking through the universe”) sounds a note of comic self-mockery, but in the service of a poem that touches loss and isolation.
Dudley Randall uses the ballade form to write “The Southern Road,” a searing poem about a Black G.I. in World War II heading from his home in the north to a basic training center in the south. Randall, inspired by the ballades of Francois Villon, said of writing the poem, “ [the] ballade form has been adapted into English poetry, but poets have diminished it into a trivial thing—light verse, vers de societe. I wanted to restore its gravity, its power… I wanted to use the ballade form with its repeated rhyme sounds and refrain, to induce in the reader a hypnotic state, but more like one of nightmare than of dream, as I told of the bestial South. I also wanted to introduce tension and complexity into the poem by mingling love and repulsion, and by extending the bestiality into other times and places, like the Middle Ages, when people were burned at the stake for slight differences of doctrine. These technical problems made the poem fascinating to write.
And are we so certain that "Ballade at 35" is all that light?
Contemporary formal poets, and this has been true for a few generations now, are much drawn to complex forms that employ a lot of repetition—the sestina, villanelle, pantoum and triolet being particular favorites. Repetition is, or can be, a particularly potent weapon in the poet’s arsenal.
In prose, not so much, unless it’s prose delivered orally: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” For Winston Churchill here, and others similarly, the devices of oratory (in this case, anaphora) are the devices of poetry, the original oral literary form.
But for the most part in prose, narrative or expository, it’s a bad idea, and we give it a pejorative name: redundancy. Our teachers of composition—and they are right to do so—warn us against it, and if they haven’t gotten the message across, our word processing program will point out what hapless redundancies remain.
But “repetition in word and phrase and in idea is the very essence of poetry,” according to Theodore Roethke, quoted by Edward Hirsch in his A Poet’s Glossary. Poetry, in a preliterate culture, was the state of the art of communication, because of all the devices of repetition that served as mnemonic aids, from Homeric epithets to rhyme and alliteration.
Extreme devices of repetition, like the repeated lines of a villanelle, are also, let’s admit it, a way of showing off our cleverness in manipulating language, and I have to say – what’s wrong with that? There are different motivations for creating art. It can come from pain and isolation, as W. H. Auden suggested was the case with W. B. Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”). Maybe it seems like a good way to make a dishonest buck (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” – Samuel Johnson). But it’s also a way of saying “Look at me!” And it can be a pretty good way.
Sestinas, villanelles, pantoums…there’s another way of using repetition in a poem, and it doesn’t seem to get used as often by contemporary poets, and that’s the refrain--although for songwriters, it’s their bread and butter, from Cole Porter (“…makin’ whoopee”) to Bob Dylan (“It’s all over now, Baby Blue”) to Willie Dixon (“I’m your hoochie coochie man…”) to Joni Mitchell (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”) to L L Cool J (“Goin’ back to Cali…I don’t think so”).
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was certainly not afraid of using poetry, and repetition, to say “Look at me!” when he extemporaneously composed a ballade while fighting a duel. My favorite translation of Rostand’s ballade is delivered by Jose Ferrer in the movie:
Cyrano: Why yes, a poet if you will; So while we fence, I'll make you a Ballade Extempore. The Ballade, sir, is formed Of three stanzas of eight lines each- And a refrain of four. I'll compose one while I fight with you; and at the end of the last line- thrust home! Lightly I toss my hat away, Languidly over my arm let fall The cloak that covers my bright array- Then out swords, and to work withal! A Launcelot, in his Lady's hall... A Spartacus, at the Hippodrome!... I dally awhile with you, dear jackal, Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home! Where shall I skewer my peacock?... Nay, Better for you to have shunned this brawl!- Here, in the heart, thro' your ribbons gay? -In the belly, under your silken shawl? Hark, how the steel rights musical! Mark how my point floats, light as the foam, Ready to drive you back to the wall, Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home! Ho, for a rime!... You are white as whey- You break, you cower, you cringe, you ... crawl! Tac!- and I parry your last essay: So may the turn of the hand forestall Life with its honey, death with its gall; So may the turn of my fancy roam Free, for a time, till the rimes recall, Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home! Prince! Pray God, that is Lord of all, Pardon your soul, for your time has come! Beat- pass- fling you aslant, asprawl- Then as I end the refrain... (He lunges; Valvert staggers back and falls into the arms of his friends. Cyrano recovers, and salutes.) -Thrust home!
Thomas Hardy, in a poem I’ve talked about before, "During Wind and Rain," uses two alternating refrains (“Ah, no, the years, O!” and “Ah, no, the years, the years”), and the effect is somehow to create even more of a gathering menace than a single refrain could have done.
Rudyard Kipling’s "Danny Deever” is almost all refrain. With its vernacular language, rollicking rhythm and use of repetition, it’s almost like an old barracks room drinking song, which underscores—by playing against it—its chilling nature.
So what happened? Why isn’t the refrain as popular a device today as the circling end words of the sestina, or the patterns of repetition in the villanelle or pantoum?
Maybe because we’re afraid we’ll sound as though we’re trying to be Yeats, and no one can be Yeats.
Maybe it has something to do with the amicable divorce, or at least century-long trial separation, between poetry and song that came with the ascent of free verse. Song won custody of the refrain.
T. S. Eliot used a refrain of sorts in “The Waste Land” (‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”), and it’s a powerful use of repetition in free verse, but it’s not exactly a refrain.
Which is not to say that you can’t make a refrain work in a free verse, or sorta-free-verse, poem. My V-V colleague David Graham uses one to wonderful effect in his poem “In Praise of the Coelacanth,” which is in a mostly but not entirely three-beat accentual line (when I use this form, I call the results my Bob Seger mid-tempo rockers). The poem handles truth much the way jesting Pilate did, and the refrain both endorses and undercuts the phantasmagoric ignis fatuus of truths that only Robert Ripley could fully appreciate. You can read the poem in this issue of Verse-Virtual.
Poetry mostly won custody of anaphora, a rhetorical device in which the repetition comes at the beginning of a line (all those lines that start with “Who…” in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), or shared custody with Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr., but occasionally a song like Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” gets visitation privileges.
Edward Hirsch says that “the ballade is now mostly a form of light verse, as in Dorothy Parker’s “Ballade at 35.” And perhaps he’s right, and perhaps that’s true of refrains in general, but light verse isn’t always frivolous. W. H. Auden mocks the stirring ballad (and creates his own verse form variation) in "O What Is That Sound?”, but his mockery is in the service of a frightening evocation of a police state. W. D. Snodgrass’s refrain in "These Trees Stand..." (“Snodgrass is walking through the universe”) sounds a note of comic self-mockery, but in the service of a poem that touches loss and isolation.
Dudley Randall uses the ballade form to write “The Southern Road,” a searing poem about a Black G.I. in World War II heading from his home in the north to a basic training center in the south. Randall, inspired by the ballades of Francois Villon, said of writing the poem, “ [the] ballade form has been adapted into English poetry, but poets have diminished it into a trivial thing—light verse, vers de societe. I wanted to restore its gravity, its power… I wanted to use the ballade form with its repeated rhyme sounds and refrain, to induce in the reader a hypnotic state, but more like one of nightmare than of dream, as I told of the bestial South. I also wanted to introduce tension and complexity into the poem by mingling love and repulsion, and by extending the bestiality into other times and places, like the Middle Ages, when people were burned at the stake for slight differences of doctrine. These technical problems made the poem fascinating to write.
And are we so certain that "Ballade at 35" is all that light?
©2021 Tad Richards
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