Rewriting Poetry II

So last post we read the original poem and got a sense translation sorted out. Now we’ve got to make it sound like poetry again. Which means finding a verse form for it, which means taking a step away from it to see what we want the thing to look like as a whole, that is, what we want the overall effect to be.

The four line version of the poem is the short version. The long version is forty-two lines long — seven stanzas of six lines each. It kind of takes the theme of the poem and develops it in more detail, being a bit more didactic with the moral and illustrating what it means. As a poem in and of itself, that’s fine, but forty-two lines is way too long for my book, at least for where I want this poem to be. Looking at the long poem in detail (I’m not going to post it here since it’s too long for even a blog, you’ll have to just take my word for what I say about it), there are three main meaning of the word ‘earth’ that it plays with. 1) Meaning mortal man, 2) meaning treasure (ie gold, diamonds, etc. 3) meaning workable land that gives food (food also meaning earth). The absolute maximum I think people would tolerate is three stanzas, if they weren’t too long. If I could get these three senses into three stanzas, then that would work great.

But there’s a fourth stanza I want to stick at the end to twist the theme of the poem around. I’ve already decided that it would be best for the story to stick this last stanza in another character’s mouth at a later point in the book. But that’s a problem too — by subverting the meaning of the original verses it may sound like a different poem altogether, and therefore a kind of cheat. There needs to be some way to tie it together with the rest of it — something like a recurring motif. I remember one of my favorite poems by e e cummings called “Jehova buried, Satan dead” which uses the same line at the end of each stanza, but in the last stanza those same words take on a completely different meaning. It would be great to borrow that trick. So now the last line has become the most important, so we should write that one first.

All that the poem is saying — long version or short — is that all that we are is earth, all that we value comes from the earth, and everything that we have and everything that we are will one day return to the earth. So to put the meaning in meter:

And so all that is earth to the earth will return.

Which is nice and neat. In technical terms this is ternary verse (three syllable groupings) in anapaest form (two unstressed followed by a stressed). If we kept to this meter, things would turn out fine. But it’s a little florid for my tastes, and kind of runs counter to the bareness of the poem’s subject. Could we maybe boil it down into iambic verse (two syllable groupings, one unstressed followed by a stressed)?

And all that’s earth to earth returns.

Yes, we can! We had to use a contraction, which isn’t great, but this is a much more forceful pace. It will work provided we can hang the rest of the poem around this structure. Let’s go back to the beginning and work it through. After about an hour, this is what I got:

The Earth takes earth from out of earth,

That’s earth that’s took with woe.

The earth will bring that earth to earth,

And to that earth will show.

And earth will lay earth in the ground

In earth will earth earth stow.

So what is earth to earth returns;

All earth to earth must go.

That’s a pretty solid and faithful reworking and I’ve kept strictly to my meter, but I can see a lot of problems with it anyway. For a start, it’s longer than the original, which I’m not overly happy with. The problem is that Middle English is not as efficient as Modern English, specifically with regards to articles and so we need to add more indicators to like ‘from’, ‘out of’, ‘that’, etc. I managed to make every other line only six syllables long instead of eight, but then had to reiterate the last line to round that out — which again isn’t great. I’ve also used the word ‘earth’ seventeen times in one stanza, and I’m asking myself serious if that’s too many times. And finally, I’ve chosen to rhyme one sound only — the ‘O’ every other line. If I want to keep this as it is, I’m going to need to stick to picking four words that rhyme together in the next two stanzas (if I’m to have three).

Which is the problem I’ll be facing tomorrow.