Poetry from Where The Crawdads Sing

 

Scattered through the book Where The Crawdads Sing are bits of poetry that has, again, stirred my interest in this form. On the 22nd July 2019 I discussed my attempts to understand the mysteries of poetry from Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook. 

This is part of what I wrote at the time: And I could not have wished for a better introduction to the mechanics of a poem. Here we have meter and rhyme and how the poets of past wrote in a strict metrical pattern. She describes iambic pentameter as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day". A chapter on Sound takes us to Alliteration (repeating consonants as in "live and learn")  and Assonance (repeating vowel sounds), Diphthong (a sound formed by a combination of two vowels in a single syllable in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another as in "coin" or "loud" and Onomatopoeia ("bees buzz" or "the big bellied gun that belched").

Before I get onto the poetry in the book, I will start with what I remember as a child, and that was my father and his many recitations for us boys. See blog posting 8th February 2012. Starting with Ann Jupp (Marion St John Webb), Albert and the Lion and  Up'ards (by Marriott Edgar)  and Disobedience (A A Milne). I'm not sure if  those comic monologues  by Stanley Holloway  may not be classed as poems. But The Battle of Trafalgar always went down well.

On to Where The Crawdads Sing. In the book, (Page 48) it is Scupper who tells his young son Tate "Don't go thinking poetry's just for sissies" and recites a short part from The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Finding the full poem, I liked:

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,

With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;

Soon after Tate finds a poem by Thomas Moore that makes him think of Kya:

They made her a grave, too cold and damp

For a soul so warm and true;

And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,

Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,

She paddles her white canoe.

Older now, on Page 114, Tate recites part of Edward Lear's The Daddy Long Legs And The Fly. I think my father preferred Lear's The Owl And The Pussycat where I remember:

They dined on mince, and slices of Quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon.

Later, Kya recites poetry on her own, John Masefield's Sea Fever that starts with that so familiar verse:

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, 

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

SO FAR SO STRAIGHTFORWARD

But on the same page 153 Kya recalls a poem by Amanda Hamilton. We are on to free verse. Well, it's only six lines, and in the context of the book, yes, I get it. Another by Amanda Hamilton is next, but we have to wait to Page 249. It starts Sunsets are never simple". Longer and again in context, but this is where I duck out. I would have much preferred some good prose.

More Amanda Hamilton on Page 276/7: The Broken Gull of Brandon Beach. Simple, but not great. And another on Page 312. Short, free and not bad. Finally, at the end of the book, again by the elusive Amanda Hamilton, the big reveal in free verse that this time seemed the  perfect place. But I wont spoil the ending by including the poem. You can find it at the link below.

So what I have I learnt about poetry that I didn't know before. Unfortunately, nothing. The familiar  rhyming poems were all part of my early life. But free verse I will still have to seek elsewhere.

Where the Crawdads Sing: Questions and Answers (Spoilers, Ending, Etc.) - The Bibliofile (the-bibliofile.com)