6. Inbound Tourism Trends in South Korea
6.1. The Korean Wave Tourism
born 19.6.32––deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time. 3
As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries. 7
(I have made an elegy for myself it
is true) 10
September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. 13 This is plenty. This is more than enough. 14 Hill’s complex poem is intrinsically controversial because of its appos-ition with the Sho’ah (or ‘Holocaust’, pp. 228–9). The philosopher Adorno, a refugee from Nazism who lived in the US from 1934 to 1960, summarily judged that “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric)52 : I disagree, and think it ethically necessary to disagree, but understand the impulse Adorno voiced ; so to approach ‘September Song’ aesthetically, through form, is not where I would wish to begin. Yet simply to look at the poem is to face a major formal question : whether its careful disposition into 14 lines can mean what it breathtakingly might.
The poem must be said to be in free verse, but iambics are persistently audible and Hill’s lines are from the first haunted by heroic measure :
52 T. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), X. 30.
Adorno qualified himself to exclude work by survivors in Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 362 ; for a summary bibliography of the problem see Young, Writing and Rewriting.
“Undesirable you may have been [. . .]” need only stop short to achieve it. Heroic measure is arguably the metre of ll. 3 and 14 (however tro-chaic the latter’s scansion), and is twice prevented only by line-breaks––‘an elegy for myself it [/] is true’, ‘The smoke [/] of harmless fires drifts to my eyes’ : the sense of frustration caught by Hill’s curtness in ending is partly mediated through such refusals visually to privilege pentameters despite their aural presence. Similarly, while stanzas are highly irregular, all but the last are tercets or a quatrain, and persistent half-rhymes (forgotten/time, marched/patented, end/made, cries/
roses) penultimately reach a full-rhyme, cries/eyes.
With 14 lines in quatrain or tercet form and heroic measure in the offing, a ghost of sonnethood emerges. The internal structure, 3.4.(3)3.1, is clearly a possible sonnet-variant, and the full-rhyme of ll. 7 + 13, with the shift of tense from past to present in l. 8 (acting as a turn) and the absence of a full-stop in l. 10, suggest it be read as 3.4 + (3)3.1––two septet-halves providing balance while the need for the curtness of the one-line termination shortens the stanzas after the turn ; shift that isolated verse back to join the first tercet, and you would have a surprisingly clear Petrarchan 4–4–3–3. There is also a theme of love, not only in its negations (undesirable, untouchable), but in Hill’s writing an elegy ; his love must be frustrated, and frustrating, its object only being loved as a nameless representative of child-victims all long past love or elegising.
As a sonnet the form is terribly damaged, 114 beats in place of 140, which seems appropriate to the reduced moral circumstances and dif-ficulty in meaning at all that characterise attempts to grapple with the Sho’ah (p. 100). And sonnet-identity does not stand alone : avowed as elegy, there are also the title’s invocations, underlyingly (given Hill’s Anglican faith) of the songs of thankfulness entering the church-round at Harvest, specifically of two poems Hill certainly knew, Yeats’s ‘Sep-tember 1913’ and Auden’s ‘Sep‘Sep-tember 1, 1939’ (N1474).53 Standing on the brink of world wars, both are deeply disillusioned ; Yeats speaks of adding “prayer to shivering prayer”, Auden of a “low dishonest decade”
ending as “The unmentionable odour of death [/] Offends the Septem-ber night”. There is also a famous ‘SeptemSeptem-ber Song’ covered by Crosby, Sinatra, and others, a crooning lament for the mutual passing of time : Maxwell Anderson’s lyrics were written in 1940 in collaboration with
53 Excluded by Auden from his Collected Poems, but in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939 (London: Faber, 1977).
composer Kurt Weill, another refugee from Nazism, and helpless lament is not far from frustrated elegy.
Formal identification as a sonnet cannot be forced, but Hill is a very great sonneteer, and the poem is unquestionably able to mean more (and not simply otherwise) if a sonnet’s cohesion and baggage are figured in than if it is supposed a nameless and freestanding invention gesturing roughly at nothing beyond itself.
4. ‘Nearing Forty’. (pp. 22–3)
We already know ‘Nearing Forty’ is (mostly) heroic. It cannot be blank verse because it rhymes, but is printed as a continuous sequence of 32 lines. The first thing therefore is to work out the rhyme-scheme :
abacb cddee ffggh hiijj kbklc mjmcb cj
5 10 15 20 25 30
Some are less than full-rhymes––for example the half-rhyming sequence gap/deep/seed, jjk, ll. 19–21––but it is sensible at first to be ruthless to see if any underlying structural pattern emerges. For that reason I call the gap/deep rhyme (19–20) a couplet, jj, and consider the next half-rhyme, “seed” (21), a new rhyme, k, picked up by “we’d” (23).
These complicated rhymes could be variously analysed ; of most use would be a principle repeating throughout, and the prime candidate, outside the central sequence of couplets, is overlapping single-rhymed quatrains. This can be seen if the rhyme-scheme is written with each completed structure on a new line but progressing across the page, so rhyme-letters repeated in vertical column denote the same line :
5 10 15 20 25 30
abac acb c
cb cd
ddee ffggh hiijj j kbk
kbkl c mjm
mjmc mcb c
cb cj
5 10 15 20 25 30
The quatrains abutting the central sequence of couplets, cbcd and jkbk, are weak because the d- and j-rhymes tend to be subsumed by their
couplets, but worth insisting on because there is then only one place, the break at l. 24 between kbkl and cmjm, where successive structures fail to overlap. Numerically l. 24 is exactly three-quarters of the way through (24/32) ; the only unrhymed line (though with a strong internal rhyme, conventional/convectional), it is heavily end-stopped by the second semi-colon (the first is in l. 14, the second g-rhyme, mid-way through the couplets). Syntactically two-thirds of the mid-way through, it is followed by a strong tonal resolution, l. 25 beginning “or you will rise . . .”, which marks the last eight lines.
Such analysis clarifies. After initially edging forward, the poem takes a deep breath and drives through the central sequence of couplets, all open (except the first, dd, ll. 7–8, and the sixth, ii, ll. 17–18) and pro-gressing rapidly until finally spilling out through half-rhymes into the jjkbkl sequence (ll. 19–24), which is marked by the return of the b-rhyme (rain) and overlapping single-b-rhymed quatrains, and ended by the unrhymed l. 24. The last eight lines return to the structure of the opening, tying themselves in by using the b-, c-, and j-rhymes (rain, work, sleep) as well as a positive new m-rhyme (elation/imagination).
The overlapping quatrains and late return to the b- and c-rhymes help explain the poem’s cohesion and unity, the open couplets its central momentum ; that the quatrains are single-rhymed, two lines in each rhyming with lines elsewhere, explains the internal fluidity, a quality of searching progression or inability to find easy rest or conclusion (cf.
the heavy certainty of Eliot’s cross-rhymed heroic quatrains in The Waste Land, p. 43). This in turn suggests why Walcott gave his last line only seven beats, to mark the ending without betraying his character-istic structure and dominant tone with a cross- or arch-rhymed quat-rain (other possible termini).
This nameless form is Walcott’s invention in this poem, created from named elements whose combined properties create its properties.
Knowledge of the forms, their natures and histories, is something writers, readers, and practical critics cannot afford to be without.
1. As with metre, the best way to gain real understanding of stanza-forms is to write, read, and speak them. Common metre or long fives (tetrametric pentains, ababb10) offer an easy beginning : pick a small incident, summarise it as baldly as possible in prose, and try to narrate it straightforwardly in a few end-stopped stanzas. Then try again, permitting (or forcing) stanza-enjambment, and read both versions aloud trying to display both the form and any enjambments vocally. Finally, recast the poem in a longer stanza-form, melting two common-metre stanzas into (say) one isometric Sicilian stanza (abababab), or two long-fives into one Spenserian stanza, and then read the three versions against one another : what has each form brought to (or subtracted from) the story you set out to tell ?
2. Write a Petrarchan sonnet-octave (abbaabba), then, retaining the lines as exactly as possible, recast it successively as abbaabab, abababba, abababab, aab-baabb, aababbab, abbabbaa, and abaababb : what happens to your content as the internal structures revolve ? Then try successively reducing the intensity of rhyme, with (say) abcdabcd, abcdcdab, and abcddcba, changing as little as pos-sible beyond the rhyme-word. If you are careful with the initial lines (and clever with punctuation) it is possible to change very few words as you reorder lines, and the sequent results offer an informative tour of a prosodic gearbox.
3. To investigate the relationship between internal and external baggages try to write some bitter or mournful limericks. You will feel an immediate pressure to abandon both triple rhythm and full-rhyme, but the anapæstic skip and trip-coup-let structure must remain, however disguised. By way of example, here is one about Walter Ralegh, who famously laid his cloak over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I and popularised coffee and tobacco in Britain (ll. 1–2+ 5 are cata-lectic ; ll. 3–4 have unstressed hyperbeats) : “Sir Walter was handy with cloaks, / And caffeine, and packets of smokes : / Such a mighty romancer / Of insomniac cancer––/ I thank him: and hope that he chokes.” It is also interesting to experiment with limericks as a narrative stanza, not least in considering the uses of enjambment within and between stanzas. This fragment from The Toriad : An Epic in Trimeters (1989) concerns the IRA bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in 1984 ; ‘Her’ is Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister : “So we entered the middle-decade / disencumbered, ‘renewed’, ‘unafraid’ : / then a Brighton hotel / was blown into a shell / and Her brazenness visibly greyed // to a harsher and stonier hue––/ what you might call a gunmetal-blue. / The cost of that bomb / was far more than a tomb / for the unlucky bystanding few.” (The use of dactylic words laid over foot-divisions points the sombre way.)
4. To extend formal analysis into critical use, first practise using the termin-ology efficiently. Flipping through the Norton Anthtermin-ology (or equivalent) at ran-dom, try to describe each poem as fully as possible in as few words as you can manage : “Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is an urban-pastoral ode in bobbed heroic stanzas rhyming ab4abcdecde” ; “Donne’s ‘A Valedicition forbidding mourning’ is an ironic reverse-complaint, promising erotic fidelity in nine
cross-rhymed tetrametric quatrains.” As you gain confidence try longer or less regular poems : “Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is a mock-epic in five cantos of 74, 71, 89, 88, and 75 heroic couplets” ; “Eliot’s The Waste Land is . . .”
5. To train your eyes in reading, take a poem (or excerpt) in stanzas, display the structure and its qualifications, then read aloud as you look. In my exemplary Spenserian stanza, for example, one could use colour () or shading to articulate the 4–4–1 rhyme-structure and faces for the 5–4 split :
Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay,
Her shattered ribs in thousand peeces riues, And spoyling all her geares and goodly ray, Does make her selfe misfortunes piteous pray.
So downe the cliffe the wretched Gyant tumbled;
His battred ballances in peeces lay,
His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled, So was the high aspyring with huge ruine humbled.
Did you, for example, notice before that the new sentence in l. 6 introduces the c-rhyme? Quod erat demonstrandum ; visuals help.
alexandrine : in English, an iambic hexameter ; in French a line of 12 beats, however metrically constituted, and the staple form (as iambic pentameter is in English).
arch-rhyme : a rhyme scheme with mirror symmetry, as abba; also called chias-mic rhyme.
ballad : a narrative poem, commonly of traditional origin, often in quatrains with refrain ; literary and folk ballads are now distinguished.
blank : of a poem, stanza or other unit, unrhymed.
blank verse : unrhymed iambic pentameter.
burden : or refrain ; a line or lines that are repeated.
canto : a numbered section into which longer poems are commonly divided ; cf.
book, chapter.
closed : of a couplet, with the second line end-stopped ; of form, prescribed.
common metre : also ballad metre or ballad-stanza, an iambic quatrain of the form a8b6c8b6.
complaint : (or female complaint) a poem of protest and lament, typically at amorous disappointment, betrayal, or desertion ; in the decades around 1600 deeply caught up with the epyllion and sonnet-sequence, not least in Shakespeare.
country-house poem : primarily, a substantial group of seventeenth-century poems describing and usually lauding a landowning patron’s house and grounds, but extending to later poems centrally featuring such houses and grounds.
couplet : a stanza or unit of two lines, usually rhyming, often used terminally to summarize or moralize ; a very popular form in the eighteenth century.
cross-rhyme : alternating double-rhymes, as abab.
dramatic monologue : a poem cast as a speech by a particular (historical or imaginary) person, usually to a specific auditor. The form is particularly associ-ated with Browning and Tennyson, but remained popular throughout the twentieth century.
elegy : a poem (or other composition) mourning a death or other loss.
end-stopped : of a line or stanza, having a terminal mark of punctuation.
enjamb, enjambment : of lines, couplets, or stanzas, not end-stopped, with sense and/or syntax continuing into the next line, couplet, or stanza.
envoi : a shorter terminal stanza, such as the tercet in villanelles or pentain in canzoni.
epic : a classical mode, epics are long narrative poems usually dealing with the heroic or martial exploits of a person, tribe, or race, and are associated with nation-founding scale. Several classical epic devices, including the epic
simile, epic catalogue, and beginning in medias res, commonly serve as touch-stones in modern epics. There are diminutive forms, notably the mock-epic and
‘chamber-epic’, and a quite distinct Brechtian use of epic to designate a drama-turgical approach and theatrical mode of production.
fourteeners : couplets in iambic heptameter.
genre : in literary use, a late-nineteenth-century coinage now covering all (sup-posed) methods of distinguishing and grouping (literary) forms, from classical modes to modern thematic anthologising ; more practically, a collective noun for the various sets of conventional or typical expectations readers (or other consumers of art) learn to have ; cf. ‘twist’. Coherent theories of poetic genre must partly discount the functions of expectation in prosody.
heroic : of a form, in iambic pentameter.
heterometric : of stanzas, with lines of varying length.
isometric : of stanzas, with lines of constant length.
lyric : a classical mode, lyrics were at first musically accompanied ; the term now covers most short, non-narrative, non-dramatic verse.
mock-epic : a poem comically or satirically dressed in epic conventions for which its subject and/or manner are inappropriate.
octave : the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet.
ode : a formal poem of some dignity or length ; Alcaic, Sapphic, Pindaric, and Horatian odes are formally distinguished.
open : of form, variable ; of couplets, with the second line enjambed to the first line of the next couplet (or other component unit of form).
ottava rima : a stanza of eight lines, in iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc.
pantun, pantoum : a highly repetitive Malay form, cross-rhymed quatrains successively reusing two lines from each in the next ; once in French vogue, but never in English.
pastoral : a mode or genre, classically and until the Renaissance featuring the leisure-time rusticity of the high-born, on the model of Athenian resort to Arcadia ; once very highly stylised, with designated roles and role-names for amorous play and witty debate, but latterly used as a means of considering class-issues and post-industrial geography ; cf. urban pastoral.
pentain : a stanza of five lines.
Petrarchan : of sonnets, having an octave rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet rhyming cdecde (or a variant thereof).
quatrain : a stanza of four lines ; often used for narrative.
rhyme royal : a stanza of seven lines, in iambic pentameter, rhyming ababbcc.
rhyme-scheme : a method of notating the pattern of rhymes in a stanza or poem using the alphabet. The first line, and all subsequent lines that rhyme with it, are a ; the next line that does not rhyme, and all subsequent lines that rhyme with it are b, and so on. Line-lengths may also be indicated, by placing the number of beats after the letter denoting the line.
satire, satiric : a classical mode, initially meaning a mixed sequence or form,
potentially the primary sense as late as the Renaissance ; latterly a loose collect-ive term for all art that mocks or otherwise ridicules (purportedly) to urge correc-tion and reform.
sestet : a stanza or unit of six lines, including ll. 9–14 of Petrarchan sonnets.
Shakespearian : of sonnets, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg.
single-rhyme : a rhyme-scheme with only one pair of rhyming lines, as abcb or abac.
sonnet : until the early seventeenth century, any short lyric poem ; thereafter supposedly and conventionally a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter, but variants ranging from 10½–20 lines are recognised. Its traditional use, especially in sequences, is for poems of (frustrated) love and courtship, but since the seven-teenth century occasional sonnets on almost every topic imaginable have been written, and there are now long-standing connections with many poetic modes, including the elegiac, satirical, and confessional.
Spenserian : of sonnets, rhyming ababbcbccdcdee ; of stanzas, heroic and rhym-ing ababbcbccl2.
stanza : a group of lines displayed on the page by blank lines above and below, typically with a constant structure or rhyme-scheme.
tercet : a stanza or unit of three lines in which one or more does not rhyme with the others.
terza rima : successive tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc ded etc.
turn : (or volta) a moment of disjunction and/or renewal, creating a shift or development in the sense at a specified point in a form ; in relation to the Pindaric ode, a name for the strophe.
triplet : a stanza or unit of three lines which all rhyme together.
verse : (1) a single line or equivalent stichic unit (as in ‘chapter and verse’) ; (2) a poet’s prosodic and formal craft, or, collectively, versified work (as in ‘Shake-speare’s verse’), and with reference to drama, metrical lines as distinguished from prose and/or song (as in ‘blank verse’) ; (3) especially with reference to any nationality, period, or theme before Modernism, a synonym for poetry (as in
‘Renaissance verse’) ; (4) in post-Romantic apposition with ‘poetry’, sometimes a mildly stigmatic term for ‘supposedly dull craftwork nuts-and-bolts’.
3 Layout
The poems commanded themselves to shape up.
John Hollander, Types of Shape, p. xvi.