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Sterling Brown and the 'vestiges' of the blues: the role of race in English verse structure
MELUS, Spring, 1996 by Michael Tomasek Manson
Although poets continue to discuss the significance of particular poetic forms or verse schemes, literary critics less frequently examine the constitutive nature of such structures.(1) We usually comment on large structures like the sonnet or small ones like metrical variations only in order to drive home a point that originated elsewhere, in some other textual, biographical, historical, or cultural inquiry. Less often do we begin with versification as a way of understanding history or ideology, even though it is frequently the starting place for poets.
This trivialization of prosody in literary criticism has as much to do with the dominance of the field by linguists as with the desire of literary critics to move beyond the formalism of the New Criticism and embrace psychoanalysis, marxism, feminism, new historicism, and other extratextual literary theories. The "scientific" density of linguistic analyses of versification make prosody seem stuffy and pointless, while the New Criticism has made verse structure difficult to imagine as anything but a closed, coherent linguistic universe outside history.
The most successful attempt to break these habits has been Antony Easthope's 1983 study, Poetry As Discourse. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, Easthope first approaches poetry as verse structure and then finds in that structure history, psychology, and materialism. In short, he finds in formalism what others have tried to find beyond it. Looking at the most common structure in English verse, Easthope describes iambic pentameter as "an epochal form, co-terminous with the capitalist mode of production and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class" (24) and explains not only how it differs from the hegemonic poetic discourse of the feudal era, but also how it developed from the Renaissance to the Augustan and Romantic periods to unravel during Modernism.
Easthope's work thus lays a foundation for a truly literary history by arguing that verse scheme--the very materiality of poetry--is a discourse, fully embedded in a dialectical history. With this important step made, we can now examine how the intersection of "poetic" discourse with other discourses, like race, produces poetry. Easthope tells the story of the emergence, consolidation, and disintegration of iambic pentameter as a hegemonic discourse, but of necessity he focuses on the poets who made that history--Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, and Pound--not the poets who resisted that history even while they were constituted by it. I will examine "Challenge," a sonnet from Sterling Brown's 1932 volume Southern Road, because it offers a particularly dramatic example of how Easthope's terms produce a partial reading of the poem that requires the insights of African American literary theory to produce a fuller and more satisfying account. The result will be a union of linguistic and literary theory that begins in an analysis of verse schemes. I hope to show that a better formalism will yield a better material and cultural analysis.
1
I said, in drunken pride of youth and you,
That mischief-making Time would never dare
Play his ill-humored tricks upon us two,
Strange and defiant lovers that we were.
I said that even Death, Highwayman Death, 5
Could never master lovers such as we,
That even when his clutch had throttled breath,
My hymns would float in praise, undauntedly.
I did not think such words were bravado.
Oh, I think honestly we knew no fear, 10
Of Time or Death. We loved each other so.
And thus, with you believing me, I made
My prophecies, rebellious, unafraid....
And that was foolish, wasn't it, my dear?
"Challenge" exhibits many of the features Easthope discerns in William Shakespeare's sonnet 73 (97-109). Sonnet 73 serves Easthope as an example of the "founding moment" of bourgeois poetic discourse, and he contrasts its prosodic effects with those of the feudal ballad. He argues that the ballad (and other accentual schemes) form a "sociolect" by drawing "on a common and intersubjective discourse" (160). Its loose syntax, its use of parataxis, and its nonsense rhymes all celebrate the play of the signifier and ask the reader to think of it as "an act of pleasurable speaking." The result is "a poetic discourse that offers a relative position for the ego, a position produced in acknowledged relationship to a field of forces, social, subjective, linguistic" (93).
The bourgeois discourse created by iambic pentameter, however, "aims first of all to represent an individual speaking" (93). Instead of parataxis, we have a strong syntagmatic structure of subordinated sentences and clauses that lead inexorably to the final line, and, instead of the pleasure of nonsense rhymes, the rhymes are subordinate to the meaning. Whatever pleasure we derive from hearing Brown rhyme "we" with "undauntedly" is subordinated to the rhyme's thematic significance: it is the solidity of the union (of the "we") that makes the undaunted posture possible.
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