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HURRAH FOR THE FUN

IS THE PUDDING DONE
HURRAH FOR THE PUMPKIN PIE  

 by Miller Williams

 

 

 

The Hummingbird Hill

Geriatric Center

 

where cars come crunching

over gravel

Sundays

 

filled with faces of children

about to be bored

 

by the superannuated

by the old people

 

whose ragged heads

shake

no no no

at nothing

 

whose hands

in their hollow laps

jerk and settle like

abandoned boats

 

who spit in paper sacks

who drop their teeth

who forget the names of children

 

was called before  the war

 

The Hancock County Home

for Old People

 

Which is the true name

 

No such blurred wings

have been seen

hovering here

 

not even by Catherine Bilderback

who sees all things

 

who sees her husband come early

home from Houston

who sees girls climbing trees

in the broom closet

 

who sees frogs

dropping from the ceiling

buzzing about her like great

green flies

 

who sits for hours by her window

waiting

 

until her husband

disguised

as a dark attendant

 

wakes her saying

did you go to the bathroom

 

 

 

William Carlos Williams

The poem seems to be about spring. Let's leave aside the title for the moment. Spring, traditionally, suggests rebirth, relief after winter, the return of good weather. The opening, however,  sounds chilly and bleak and the "contagious" hospital ominous and threatening. What is goin on?

 

A useful question to ask a class at some point, when considering this poem, might be "Where is the first finite verb?"

 

For those pupils who might need a little reminder, a finite verb is one, which is set in "time" (as opposed to an infinitive or a gerundive) and is therefore conjugated with a subject.  Once this has been spotted – at almost exactly halfway through the poem - one can start making some observations about the structures the poem does set up, as opposed to the structures that the poem doesn't. For the poem seems to have very little form and the punctuation seems deliberately random and defiantly eccentric.

 

On the punctuation, one question might be, "Why is there no full stop at the end? Is this a mistake? Deliberate? What could it suggest?" Also, "Why so many dashes?" (N.B. Emily Dickinson, too, was fond of dashes.) Hesitations? Interruptions? Unfinished business?

 

Let's look, first, at what the poem is about. It seems to be insisting on the messy, painful, dangerous process that is implied by the idea of birth or rebirth. The structure of the poem seems to want to take us away from ideas of happy, harmonious, renewal and revival and to insist instead on the arbitrary, disparate, painful side of nature's rebirth in spring.

 

By looking at all the negative words in the first half of the poem (and the lack of finite verbs!) and by comparing the positive words and the strong, finite verbs in the second half, we will have gained a lot of insight into what the poem may be all about.

 

In terms of form, we will notice the lack of punctuation in the first half. The text, like the nature details it is observing, seems random, hesitant and uncategorical. It is only after the central statement "spring approaches" that we notice a grammatically complete sentence.

 

"They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter."

 

There are still uncertainties, including the pronoun "it", in "it quickens". What "quickens"? The word "quickens" plays on the idea of speed . Things are beginning to move more rapidly. It also refers to life, as in the phrase "the quick and the dead". It means to become alive.

 

The ending becomes grammatically assertive and positive as, finally, nature (as can be seen in the finite verbs) stirs into life and "acts" – verbs are "doing" words.

 

The title then becomes more interesting. "Spring and All" sounds at first very casual and informal. On reconsidering, it takes on a more fundamental and universal aspect as it asks, perhaps, to be read as "Spring and ALL"!

For a similarly startling view of spring, I would suggest comparing this particular poem with "in Just spring" by e.e.cummings (see below).

 

 

 

              in Just-           by e.e. cummings

 

 in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

 

whistles          far          and wee

 

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

 

when the world is puddle-wonderful

 

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

 

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

 

it's

spring

and

 

         the

 

                  goat-footed

 

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

 

 

 

 In this poem, the innocence of the little children (paired together, as they come "running" from "piracies" – just how innocent is that?) is contrasted with the ominous "balloonMan" (why does man end up capitalized here?) who is "goatfooted".

 

Pupils will have fun discovering Dionysus and Satan behind this reference. Experience, as in Blake's "Songs of Experience", veers towards perversion, with hints of pedophilia, as the balloon man seems to attract little children with his whistle. Yet the children, too, the poem seems to suggest, seem ready for pairing. Why is "Just" capitalized? How is this poem patterned? What might the patterning seek to suggest?

To conclude, form and structure in writing (here we have just been looking at some poems) are not areas to notice AS WELL AS everything else (imagery, word choice, etc). Rather, form and structure are part of the poem's very construction – they help reveal what the poem has to tell us.

 

The same is true of prose, in a different way. Prose, too, has its rhythms and patternings. There are repetitions, syntactical distortions, images and word choices which create their own rhythms and patterns (just look back at the passage on Coketown in the section on Metaphors and Comparisons). Sentences and paragraphs become the prose equivalents, more or less, of the lines and stanzas of verse.

 

Here we have been looking at how structures can be found and felt in even the most apparently random-looking poems.

Now we shall consider another poem, which again has a similarly random appearance.  Here again we will discover a structure of sorts, which, like the previous poem, is ultimately fundamental in supporting and reflecting the aims and ideas of the poem. As in the previous poem, capital letters and punctuation are used very sparingly, so they should be attended to closely when they occur.

 

 

SPRING AND ALL    by William Carlos Williams

 

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines -

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined -
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance - Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken 

 

 Spring's ambivalence is hinted at also in Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet "Nothing is so beautiful as spring", which in the sestet, refers to

 

 

"In Eden garden.— Have, get, before it cloy,

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy…."

 

 

Here is the complete sonnet for reference. The form of the sonnet hints at structure and discipline, while the language itself hints at wildness and the almost uncontrollable energies released by spring. There is therefore a tension in the form of the poem, which mirrors the tension between positives and negatives of this season of renewed energy and rebirth.

 

 

 

 

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—

 

  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

 

  Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

 

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

 

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

        5

  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

 

  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

 

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

 

 

 

What is all this juice and all this joy?

 

  A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

        10

In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,

 

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

 

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

 

  Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

 

4   DISCOVERING FORM AND STRUCTURE IN STRANGE PLACES

 

 

Here are two American poems, which make a good start for a discussion on form and structure in poetry and which can be done with ages from 13 upwards.

 

The first, by Miller Williams, has a very strange title and you could, as a teacher, introduce the poem simply by asking, "Just from the title alone, what do you expect this poem is going to be about?"

 

Reading "closely", we will notice first, surely, the jagged nature of the "look" of the poem. There do not appear to be stanzas or the sort of patterning we might expect from poetry. There is also very little punctuation to help us in our reading, and few capital letters. Is it a totally random exercise?

 

When read out loud, however, we might begin to notice that the poem seems to fall into two sentences (or just possibly, three….?) We are told that "The Hummingbird Hill Geriatric Centre….. used to be called The Hancock County Home for Old People".

 

Observant readers will also notice that right in the middle of the poem, given special emphasis not only by its isolation on the page but also by the introduction of a capital letter, is the line: "Which is the true name". Now, this line could be read as a question or it could be read as a relative subordinate clause, dependent on the previous clause above it. It is, however followed by another capital letter, "No such…" which seems to be introducing another sentence, with again, lots of relative subordinate clauses, and this second (or third?) sentence lasts down to the final line.

 

We can, therefore, start to see quite a tight structure emerging, which has the effect of breaking the poem into two parts: one about the name of the place, its purpose and atmosphere, and one about a particular inmate, Catherine Bilderback, whose sad existence in the place is highlighted with terrible irony and black humour. There is, indeed, black humour threaded throughout the poem, as we shall see.

 

Gradually as we reread the poem we will begin to notice how the disparate sections (one can hardly call them stanzas) with their "ragged", somewhat staccato repetitions, reflect the thought processes, perhaps, of the poor, elderly inmates of this establishment. Old people fall back on repetitions and unstructured utterances, particularly as they get vaguer and more disorientated.

 

What the poem concentrates on, rather dispassionately, perhaps, is not sympathy for their plight, so much as calling to our attention the importance of the change of name, which seeks to hide the misery of the old people's lives with a bright and hypocritical appearance. The home is busy "selling" itself as something that it is not. There are no hummingbirds and the authoritative "geriatric" suggests a more clinical, modern, more "medical" approach to old age rather than the old fashioned "home", in spite of the fact that the word "home" actually suggests more of a caring attitude.

 

The poem somewhat cynically concludes with a "dark attendant". This might foreshadow death in some way, but it might also call into question the practice of hiring cheap immigrant labour (this is after all the USA) to staff residential places which are mainly trying to attract customers and save money at the same time.

 

Now we are in a position to consider the title, which seems to highlight the attempts by such places to convince the inmates and perhaps also the visitors that they are doing all they can to give the elderly a good time, perhaps by organising Halloween parties and spreading jollity. The poem seems to be telling us that it is all a fake. The reality, as insisted upon by the poem's structure as much as anything else, is the tediously repetitive and sordid monotony of old age. The incoherent visions of Catherine Bilderback are put at the same level as the capitalistic "vision" of selling the place better by changing the name.

 

The pupils will have fun in gradually uncovering this denunciation of deceit, and this hard exposure of what growing old in the modern world is like.

 

A relatedly ironic vision of old age can be found in Philip Larkin's  "The Old Fools" in his final and wonderful collection, "High Windows". The two poems could well be compared together. For a more prolonged discussion on IRONY, turn to the section which deals with it.

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