The force behind the course of
time that you see
Is not just nature or the powers that
be;
Neither a deity, devil or
destiny.
While the round thing on its rod
turns away,
People may blame other forces for
their dismay
Forgetting the bad parts they
themselves play.
Success with a smile or failure
with a sigh?
Either is the outcome of your serious
try
To leave a lasting good thing before
you die.
People often have plenty to keep
and enjoy,
And that lot for evil purposes to
employ.
Life enables all to build, maintain
and destroy.
You feel you do not grow
anymore as you grew,
Lost strength in spite of what
you still have to do.
Mind you, one day time is up for
your body too.
|
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THE FORM OF IN THE COURSE OF TIME
The form of this poem was inspired by Thomas Hardy's The
Convergence of the Twain — Lines on the Loss of the Titanic,
written in 1912 ChrE (the form of which, in turn, may have been
inspired by
Alfred Tennyson's poem
The Eagle, published in 1851 ChrE).
Hardy's poem consists of eleven numbered stanzas of three lines each.
The three lines have the same end rime (or 'rhyme'), but every stanza
uses a rime different from the previous and the next ones.
The end rimes of the stanzas are in the phonemic
transcription of my
Vocabulary of Alliteration:
|EE| (1), |AI(R)Z| (2), |ENT| (3), |AIND| (4), |EE(R)| (5), |ING| (6),
|EIT| (7), |OO| (8), |EE| (9), |ENT| (10) and |EE(R)Z| (11).
Only stanzas 1 and 9, and stanzas 3 and 10, in The Convergence of
the Twain have the same rime.
(Within these stanzas vanity is supposed to rime with
sea and history with see, which is, strictly
speaking, not correct for those speakers who normally
pronounce the y here not as |ee|, an unstressed long vowel,
but as the |i| in feeling, an unstressed short vowel.
However, like in some other cases, the vowel quality may be
considered affected by the intended stress pattern
of a line, because a short vowel does not appear at the end of a
stressed syllable.)
Note that Hardy uses a, what seems to be, arbitrary mixture of
line-final ('open') syllables which end in a vowel, such as
|EE| and |OO|, and line-final ('closed') syllables which end in one or
more consonants, such as |EIT| and |ENT|.
(Tennyson wrote a poem of one nine-line stanza with nothing but the
phoneme |OH| of ago at the end of each line.)
Of course, Hardy's poem is impressive in the first place on the grounds
of its content, and because of the relationship between
content and form.
And yet,
i
found the use of nothing but, and no fewer than eleven, riming
triplets intriguing as well; in spite of my
conviction that poems need not rime at all, and in spite of
my experience that their (end) rime often turns me off.
(As far as form is concerned i usually abhor poems consisting of
riming couplets only, but my own poem
The Two That Will Always Be New
is itself such a poem, albeit one in which the connection
with its content should be obvious to every reader.)
What especially intrigued me was the
significance attached to a vowel when it is repeated
three times at the end of a line (let alone nine times as in Tennyson).
The question then arises whether a particular
vowel should ever be stressed in such a way.
If so, it could be on the basis of some inherent quality of the sound;
not only a quality which may bear on conceptual meaning
or denotation, but also one which may bear on emotional
meaning or connotation.
A back vowel such as (the sound which is used to express the phoneme)
|OH|, for instance, may evoke feelings in people (very) different
from those evoked by a front vowel such as |EE|.
While we may agree or disagree whether, and to what extent, this
is the case, one fact, however, is indisputable: unlike
consonants in their totality, vowels can be arranged
in a certain order on the basis of their backness and
their height.
(For consonants there are only partial orders such as those
of the |P|-|B| couple, the |T|-|D| couple and the |K|-|G| couple.)
From the point of view of their backness there are front, central and
back vowels; from the point of view of their height there are low,
mid and high vowels.
Together they all fit into a two-dimensional diagram or
'chart' which may be roughly represented by a
one-dimensional continuum from the high front vowel (to
express the phoneme) |EE| via |EI| to the vowel |AH| in the middle
and up again via |OH| to the high back vowel |U|.
It is precisely this one-dimensional representation
of vowels, and indirectly phonemes, which leads us
to another one-dimensional representation: the
spectrum of visible colors.
In this spectrum colors are arranged from the lowest frequency or
longest wavelength to the highest frequency or shortest
wavelength; from red, orange and yellow via green to blue, indigo
and violet; or cyan, blue and violet.
When it is the continuous spectrum of light hitting water droplets in
the sky we call the emerging half-circular arc "a rainbow".
(Read my
Rainbow Straightened Out.)
Clearly, it is quite possible to draw an analogy
between vowel sounds and visible colors in which the central
|AH| sound corresponds with the color green, |EE| with red
and |OO| with blue or violet, or the other way around.
With this analogy we have no choice but to use a line-final
vowel close to the |AH| sound in the middle stanza of the poem, one or
more back vowels in the preceding stanza(s) and one or
more front vowels in the succeeding one(s) or, again, the other way
around.
In the Course of Time has five riming triplets and their
line-final vowels express the phonemes |EE|, |EI|, |AI| (close enough
to |AH| and |A| to represent the center), |OI| (close enough to |OH|)
and |OO|.
The corresponding background red-green-blue (RGB) colors are red,
yellow, green, cyan and blue.
This should explain sufficiently why my poem is indeed a poem in
rainbow rime.
M. Vincent van Mechelen
78.MSW
