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GRAVE_INTERRUPTIONS
February 15, 2023
March 02, 2023
Or is it interrupted graves?
On reading the Robert Graves poem "Interruption",
which I found in an anthology of Modern Verse,
aka the greatest hits of the 20th. "A Pocket Book of
Modern Verse", originally
from 1954, but revised
The meaning is clear, I can in 1960. "A Washington
state it simply-- but in the Square Press Book"
original, it was not stated
simply, it is something you (I guess that makes it
can tease out from the flow of the greatest hits of
words, the unusual phrases the *early* 20th.)
resolve into clarity only in
retrospect, after experiencing
the musical refrains that fuse
the odd notes into the whole.
I can just tell you what it
means, but I think that
deserves a spoiler warning.
The code needs to be
decoded, and the decoding
may be the point.
Look at the text yourself first if you like
(if you've never done so before):
INTERRUPTION_EXHUMED
This piece here is about how *I* approached
reading it, and my attempt at capturing my
non-linear skimming and re-reading might
have no relevance to your own.
A quick read through the first section
gave me a sense of the flow, then I At first, I was
backed-up to try to get the meaning convinced the title was
down. plural: "Interruptions".
There are many long chains of phrases,
clauses that aren't clearly related at
first, they've got a nice sound to them,
but they don't resolve easily into any
concrete meaning.
I began hunting for subject and verb:
it was an open question as to whether I also counted the length of lines:
there were complete sentences there. They're typically near the Shakesperian
ten syllables, but sometimes a little
longer or shorter.
One issue: in English we think of
the period mark as the basic hard
stop, but a period isn't really
just a dot. It's more like a dot
with some whitespace preceeding a
capitalized letter.
This poem begins every line with a
capitalized letter, giving the unwary
reader more familiar with prose the Despite being all Modern and
vauge feeling that each line must be willing to do away with rhyme and
an individual sentence, but that's not meter, it's still important to have
at all the case. an imposing poetic look: those
leading caps help quite a bit.
I was taught to use two spaces after a
period and one after a comma, but
that's not a universally observed rule.
And in this poem, most (though not all)
periods are at the end of the visual
lines, which means commas and periods
both typically have large amounts of
whitespace after them: I have to read
carefully to distinguish between them
to find the breaks between full The online version I could find
sentences (certainly with the present of this poem was clearly an
state of my vision, while reading the automatically scanned one, and I
small font of an old paperback note it's punctuation was
edition). mangled in many places and the
separation between sections was
At first, I thought sentence endings missing. It's not just *my*
were always placed at the ends of vision that has problems with
visual lines, but that's not always thing like the period/comma
so. One of the visual lines begins: distinction.
"Widen and heighten."
The third sentence is very short,
and begins right after that "Widen" phrase:
"The blue and silver
Fogs at the border of this all-grass."
At first I could've sworn that was the proof
positive (the fogging gun?) that Graves was
working with sentence fragments, but
that was an illusion borne of that unusual verb
"Fogs" and the peculiar object "this all-grass".
Backing up from there, looking at the second sentence:
This is also fairly short, and as a side-effect it is
relatively easy to follow (much more so than the long
run-on of the first sentence):
"Watch how the field will broaden, the feet nearing
Sprout with great dandelions and buttercups,
Widen and heighten."
This is clearly an injunction, he's telling you to "Watch"
what's going to happen, making a prediction, and in effect
proposing a general rule.
This immediately clarified for me what was going
on with the first full sentence (and a very full
sentence it is); it's 12 visual lines, which is
nearly half of the poem's total of 30 lines:
"If ever against this easy blue and silver
Hazed-over countryside of thoughtfulness
Far behind in the mind and above,
Boots from before and below approach tramping,
Watch how their premonition will display
A forward countryside, low in the distance,
A picture-postcard square of June grass,
Will warm a summer season, trim the hedges,
Cast the river about on either flank,
Start the late cuckoo emptily calling,
Invent a rambling tale of moles and voles, "The Hobbit"
Furnish a path with stiles." was a creature
of World War II.
Jill Payton Walsh
mentions "The Hobbit"
was read over radio
broadcasts as a morale
builder during the war.
Now in addition to the issues I had (and in WALSHED_OUT
fact, often have) with these Poetic line-breaks
there was the use of vertical whitespace to BROKEN_LINES
puzzle over: in my edition, the poem is clearly
separated into two chunks on the first page,
then there's a page break with a third trailing
chunk. Is one intended to read this as two
sections or three? The page break might be
ignorable, or it might be another section break.
*But* the page break is preceeded by a line ending
with a comma: I conclude the page break is an Note that if it ended
accident of book formatting, and the poem is with a period, it
intended to be presented in two sections. would be ambiguous how
many major sections
there are-- there's
It could be the main purpose of the quite a lot riding on
this vertical whitespace isn't so that comma in this case.
much to create a second section but
to emphasise the short visual line
right before it: "Is gone." Those
two dangling words are a sudden
change from the preceeding visual
lines of eight or so words, the
suddeness is underlined by the
vertical whitespace. Without it (as
you can see in the online versions),
those two dangling words just look
like an continuation of and
awkwardly long phrase that didn't
fit on one visual line.
Myself, I took the section break
seriously enough to hold-up reading There was a risk that
there: I tried to understand the first after "Is gone." I
section better before proceeding. might've got gone, but
I did continue with
the second section--
the closing sentence
with the various
punches set-up by the
opening skirmishes.
Here's the fourth sentence in it's
entirely, showing the function of
that truncated line:
"Interruption looms gigantified,
Lurches against, treads thundering through,
Blots the landscape, scatters all,
Roars and rumbles like a dark tunnel,
Is gone."
So much for the quirks of Poetic formatting in
ye olde traditional Modern style.
Now, on the flow of the language,
the musical style... Obviously, even in the
absence of a clearly defined
Meaning, even in the absence
of consistent use of what we
like to think of as "full
sentences", there's still a
feel to the phrases, the
author might be painting a
scene, hinting at moods.
And even if there's something
unsettlingly vague about the
language-- deploying a hazy
cloud of meanings that don't
quite resolve-- that sense of
disquiet might be the point.
When the title of the piece is
"Interruption", perhaps one
should expect some choppy
disjointed language...
(A nice get-out-of-jail-free
card, really: I should try
writing a series like
"Incoherent", "Insane",
"Inane", "In the Soup"...)
There are a few places where to my ear the phrases
strike a odd note-- they often may seem a little
strange in context, though in one case, the phrase
seems a little too normal:
"A picture-postcard square of June grass"
This allusion to a very clear, familiar popular
phrase ("Picture postcard perfect") seems strangely
unlike the surrounding high-brow poesy-- it feels
like an inelegant mistake that perhaps shouldn't have
made it out of the first draft. Sloppy, if not quite
imprecise.
But in the second section there are references back
to this phrase-- he expands on it, riffs off of it,
and in the process makes it clear using the phrase
was a conscious decision. A familiar technique
in jazz improvisation:
This is not the only back-reference in the mistakes must be
piece, in fact this seems like the main poetic repeated. One off-note
device it employs-- the recurrence of elements is wrong, two or more
is what ties it all together into one thing, it makes it an on-note.
has a tightly interwoven character to a much
greater extent than you'd expect from prose. The things that looked
like they might of been
incidental quirks are
The most obvious recurrence: shown to be not just
accidents... they loom
The title of the piece, "Interruption" larger in retrospect.
is interjected suddenly into the text
of the poem, it's the opening word of
the fourth sentence, near the end of
the first section (and well past the
midpoint of the poem).
Another recurrence:
In the fourth visual line, this was a peculiar phrase:
"Boots from before and below"
From below? What was he getting at? From hell?
An oddity noted to return to later.
The close of the poem refers back to this, the last line:
"Before, behind, above."
Then there's the phrase "blue and silver"
deployed in the first line: it seems
unremarkable at first, perhaps a bit of
empty pastorals-- but Graves comes back to The final section only has one
it *three* times, twice at the close. sentence, so here "the close"
means the final sentence, and
the final section.
And so The Meaning (like, SPOILERS):
The poem opens with a conditional injunction,
which is what made it difficult for me to
parse it into sentences: "If ever *this*
happens then *watch* how *that* happens."
The "Interruption" of the title is the outbreak
of war, and what Graves is saying here is that
as war approaches, people perceive the time
before it differently, it becomes an idealized
idyllic time-- and they change in perception So the thing you're
begins even before war really breaks out. supposed to "Watch"
for is not an external
Graves does not go as far as to say that event but a shift in
this change in perception is the *purpose* view point, a change
of war, but it could be that this sort of in attitudes.
thing is one of main functions of war-- the
evidently useless/counter-productive
Interruption to the business-as-usual that
creates historical periods, a reset to
break out of a corner, a way to change
direction and start over...
People must like *something* about
war, or they wouldn't be so enthusiastic
about diving back into that "hell".
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