Thoughts on Shaped Poetry: Interfering Forms

I was thinking that there is a distinction between saying that “physical form coincides with a poem’s meaning” and “physical form shapes a poem’s meaning.” Does the form of the poem merely support a poem’s meaning, or does it shape the meaning of the poem?

In Herb’s “Mother and Child,” it’s not clear which mechanism is at work. On one hand, the strategic placement of “child” inside the “O” in “mother” seems to be shaping our perception of the categories “mother” and “child”. The mother is on the outside, giving life to the child, who is on the inside. We are aware of the biological category that “mother and child” is, because the “child” nestled within “O” resembles the fetus in a womb. We get the sense that the “child” is becoming subsumed within the mother—suggesting that the meaning of “child” is intertwined with that of mother. They are a collective entity and one cannot understand the meaning of “mother” without establishing her relationship to a child. The absence of “father” suggests that “mother” can be defined without association to “father.” Yet on writing all this, I come to the realization that all these formulations are socially conditioned, and one can just as easily understand this by thinking a little bit about what “mother” and “child” mean.

Perhaps one must come to the conclusion that form guides the meaning of a poem, while the meaning of a poem guides our perception of the form. “Form” and “content” are a bit like the categories “mother” and “child”—we need the category “mother” for us to come to the definition of “child”, as we need the category “child” for us to come to the definition of “mother”. As with the relation between "form" and "content."

I think that when you read a poem in print without shapes, metrical or rhyming patterns, there is an isolation of the senses—tactile, visual, olfactory sensations are glimpsed purely through the filter of the printed word. “Seeing” becomes a process that takes place, purely mediated through the written word. A poem that is read out loud is also a “mediated” poem. There is something about how the human voice is able to accommodate the metrical patterns, yet there is something about how the human voice is also able to defy it. The form of a poem shouldn’t be seen as just “guiding”, “reinforcing” the content—it can interrupt, alter. I’m not sure if you agree about this reading of Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” There seems that tension between how the poem seems to be a prayer to glorify God’s redeeming powers, while we are aware that the sense of redemption seems to be something the narrator himself is executing. The form of the poem shows the speaker enacting a certain reality, mapping despair (with short lines that denote spiritual impoverishment) quickly followed by hope (with longer lines denoting spiritual enrichment, a broadening of one’s spiritual vision). The form shows the control of the speaker, rather than the power of God. Here we get how form interrupts the content.