What is modern poetry Techniques of modern poetry
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The following tape recorded program is a presentation of the National Association of educational
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broadcasters. What is modern poetry.
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The University of Chicago radio office presents Alan Simpson in the fourth program of
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this series of discussions and readings entitled techniques of modern
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poetry. The text was originally written by C. Day Lewis for a presentation by the British
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Broadcasting Corporation Mr. Simpson.
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What do we mean by a pert technique. First his word of using
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rhyme meter stanza forms image patterns.
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Second his use of language. The two are interdependent of
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course but the letter the use of language is the more
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fundamental. It governs to a considerable extent the formal structure
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of a perts verse. It's metres and rhyme schemes and
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it embodies his own identity of the quality by which one pert can be distinguished from
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another. A pert style in fact is equivalent to the
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personality by which we recognise a human being. And this is
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even when it is an extremely impersonal style. But when we
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speak of a style we defer to the general poetic idiom of a given period as well as
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to the individual poets variation of it. And this lens be in trouble straight
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away. For if we look at the metaphysical the or Gaston's
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or the Victorian minor perts we get an impression of a poetic language held
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in common. We are struck by the resemblance as in style between individual poets of
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each period whereas with contemporary verse we are struck more
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by the differences. It seems a sort of babble that is
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apparently no norm to which contemporary poets approximate no
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composition poetic language being built up on their individual styles.
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No doubt this is partly a delusion the result of our being too close to those living
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perverts and unable to see the wood for the trees. But it is not
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entirely so I think. During the last 30 years there has
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been an unusual amount of technical exploration in many different
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directions and contemporary verse has been subjected to a
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diversity of influences both literary and social which have
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prevented it from settling into one mode the way we write is
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affected not only by our personal interests and characteristics
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but by our subject matter which includes the climate of our times
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and this climate has produced some unusually change for and unpredictable weather for
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us. So our verse has been unsettled Retic on the
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whole revolutionary in technique. But one should not carry this line too
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far. It would be wrong to say that the ruthless neurotic
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modern sensibility here must be expressed in a desire or dead
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hysterical kind of poetry or that a disintegrating civilization
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where the center cannot hurled requires a centrifugal verse.
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It would be wrong because there are the perch and respond to the outer world. It
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is also his task to impose order within his own world. The world of the
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poem. One cannot even claim their preoccupation with the
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morrow and social problems of our time must inevitably produce and
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innovating modernistic poetic language. Spencer and
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Tennyson for example were greatly exercised by such problems.
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Tennyson style was never a revolutionary one. While Spencer's was conservative
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and to some degree even our kick. No I
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think the basic reason for the eccentricities of modern verse is a simpler one
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I wrote against the poetic language of our predecessors but more
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self-conscious less spontaneous perhaps. Then such revotes have
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generally been certain factors of our time have tended to
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degrade and exhaust the language with unusual rapidity.
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The popular press for example modern publicity methods the
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dumb ox dialogue of plays and films the spreading miasma
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of Cheap Jack fiction. This being said the purge becomes so
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much the more aware of the more self-conscious in his task of
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renovating language and the violent efforts he must make to really enlighten it
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will show in his verse. The most obvious effect of this
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and the one which gives readers greatest trouble is the compression of modern verse.
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Poets try to concentrate their meaning in the smallest possible space. There must
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be no diffuse ness no slackness of texture no superfluous
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ornament. A poem should be all per trip. Not an
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archipelago of heightened poetic passages linked together by a sea of verse
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a fied prose. There is nothing very new in the idea.
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Keats told Shelley he ought to know that every rift with her or
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Edgar Allen Poe's demand for her per chair helped to create the
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simplest movement in France. What is new is the general
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acceptance and practice of the idea and the technical methods whose application
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it has lead to. Let us look first at two examples of these methods in
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action. Here is a passage from TS Eliot's The Lovesong of
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J Alfred Prufrock.
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For I have known them or already known them or have known the
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evenings mornings are afternoons. I have measured out my life
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with coffee spoons. I know the voices dying with a dying
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fall beneath the music from a father room. So how should I
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presume. And I have known the eyes already known them
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all. The eyes that fix you in a firm related phrase.
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And when I am firmly elated sprawling on a pin when I am pinned and
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wriggling on the wall then how should I begin to spit out all the
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back tens of my days and ways. And how should I presume.
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And I have known the arms already known them all. Is that a
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bracelet and white and bare. But in the lamp light does
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sound with light brown hair is a perf human from a dress that makes me
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so digress that lie along a table already back to
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shore and should I then presume. And how should I begin.
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Shall I say I have gone to dusk through narrow streets and watch the smoke that
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rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt sleeves leaning out of
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windows.
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I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of
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silent seas.
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The perm from which that is taken presents no difficulty today. But when it first appeared
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many readers felt Befort or outraged by it. The language of this
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particular passage is not for the most part very concentrated. It is
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diffuse or at least discuss it with its lyrical refrain.
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For I have known them all already there and its dramatic repetitions.
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This noose unemphatic texture of language throws into hard relief
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the few metaphors and concentrated phrases so that they leap out at your.
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons a phrase that tells us a
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great deal about Vista Prufrock the monotony in frivolity or
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futility of his social life. At any rate is he in middle age sees it.
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He cannot make up his mind whether to propose marriage. His indecision is at the
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core of the power but it is always expressed openly clear elusively
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and how should I presume so is the appeal for sympathy he hesitates
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to make. He does not say I am ageing and take pity on
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me he says. I have gone a dusk through narrow
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streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in
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shirtsleeves. His fear of rebuff his sense of his
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own insignificance comes out in the last two lines the image
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of a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of
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silent seas. The concentration of this passage
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then lies not so much in a close texture of language as in its
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elusiveness and its omission of logical connecting links.
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We have to jump imaginative there a gap between lonely men in shirtsleeves
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and the crab scuttling over the ocean floor. Readers should have no trouble
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in doing this no. Yes it is a cinematic technique. In a
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film we see a man packing a bag. We then get a brief shot of an engine's coupling
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rod moving and this fades into a shot of a girl waiting for the men at the barrier of a
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railway terminus. The sequence such as this leaving out any
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direct reference to the man's journey seems straightforward enough to us
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but the early film would have found it difficult to follow.
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Now we will try another method of compression where Mr Dylan Thomas begins a perm
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with a line. I agree for Gore. He is compressing a world of experience
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into a nutshell. But it is still a matter for their extremely audacious
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one on the traditional patent for an illustration of his original
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and intense poetic language.
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Here are the last three stanzas of Fern Hill a perm about his
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childhood.
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And then to awake in the fall I'm like I wonder why. With that you
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come back the cock on his shoulder was all shining. It was Adam and
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Megan. The sky gathered again and the sun grew round that very day.
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So it must have been after the birth of the simple light in the first spinning place.
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The spellbound horses walking warm out of the green
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stable onto the fields of praise and honored among foxes
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and pheasants by the gay house under the new made clouds and happy as
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the heart was long in the sun burned over and over. I
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ran my heedless ways. My wishes raced through the house
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high and nothing I cared had my sky blue
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trades that time allows in all his tuneful turning so few
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and such mornings before the children green and golden
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follow him. Out of grace nothing I cared. And the lamb
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white days that time would take me up to the Swallow thronged
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aloft by the shadow of my hand. Moon that is on ways
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arising now that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with a
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high fever and way to the far for ever
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fled from the child less land.
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As I was young again easy in the mercy of his mean time
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held me green and dying though I sang in my
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chains like the sea.
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If you're hearing that for the first time it's language may strike you as rep's article
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loose rather wild raps article it is but
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not loose the Pearl is in an elaborate irregular stanza form.
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The language is intricate closely meshed. The recipe
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their poems are not of course created from recipes it's Association of
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images verbal associations and a turning upside down as it
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were of ordinary conceptions. But this is not arbitrary.
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Not just playing tricks with words and images.
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The farm like a wonder are white with the do come back. The cock on his
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shoulder is giving us like that as a person because it
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is part of the animistic imagination of a child to whom his surroundings seem
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alive. Reborn every morning. The imagery throughout
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derives from a child's vision. My wishes raced through the house high
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head his high as a house to a small child. It overtops him.
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And the feeling of my wishes raced has been led up to by
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happy as the heart was long a phrase which freshens an old cliche
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happy as the day is long and gathers force from its association.
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In the last stanza we returned to the farmhouse. The child does not care that he
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will one day wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
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This is animistic again and it gets its effect from turning an ordinary idea topsy
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turvy. The idea of the child growing up leaving the farm for ever
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becomes instead the farm leaving the child leaving a land that is
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childless. Because this particular child is not there anymore
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there is poetic reason for all the apparent oddities of expression.
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Nothing I cared in the lamb white days the time would take me up to the Swallow
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throng laughed by the shadow of my hair and why I left him
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white days because like the sky
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blue trades which it echoes. It gives us the feel of childish
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innocence and joy. Why that time would take me by
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the shadow of my hand because the child's lamb Y days
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seem endless and bedtime only a distant chatter and perhaps he
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foresees the shadow of his own hand on the stair rail. Going to bed
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thrown by the moon that is always rising. I
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think I've said enough to show you how intricate and concentrated Mr Thomas is poetic language
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is and how this poem has taken shape. One image arising
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naturally from another one phrase begetting another by verbal Association.
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