On Trying To Be Too Clever

Now and then, a poem does something you think truly brilliant - until you realise that hardly any bugger has noticed or understood it. (It's particularly irritating if you happen to have written the poem in question.) Though actually, the one that has always had me tearing my hair about the obtuseness of the gentle reader is by Robert Frost, a sweet little epigram called "The Iota Subscript".

Saving the presence of those who already know, the iota subscript is a sort of ancient Greek equivalent of the silent E in English; you append it to a vowel (either eta, alpha or omega, but not to iota itself or upsilon), in the shape of a little squiggle underneath, and possibly it changes the sound somehow, though nobody knows for sure, not having been there at the time. The poem goes:

Seek not in me the big I capital,
Nor yet the little dotted in me seek.
If I have in me any I at all,
'Tis the iota subscript of the Greek.

So small am I, as an attention beggar,
The letter you will find me subscript to
Is neither alpha, eta nor omega,
But upsilon, which is the Greek for you.

Now, obviously, no one who has never done a bit of ancient Greek at school is going to "get" this, one can't expect it (I may say I only did Greek to get out of geography). But what really disappoints me is that every time I have ever quoted this to a speaker of ancient Greek, they wag their heads wisely and say "Ah, he got that wrong, you see; you can't put an iota subscript on upsilon, so it doesn't work". Whereupon I tend to bean them with something while screaming "He KNOWS that, you obtuse article, it's the whole point of the poem!"

This seems so obvious to me that I can't fathom how others can't see it. Yet... I have been on the other side too. The winner of the 2013 Forward Prize for best single poem was Nick Mackinnon's wry "The Metric System", and I helped to judge it. As you'll see, it has the lines "graduated in the metric system
that had taken us to the moon" and when we were talking about it in the meeting, Sam West, who do be rather scientifically minded for an artistic type, pointed out that this wasn't so - NASA uses imperial measurements, not metric. I regret to say that none of the other four of us had noticed, and while I can't speak for the rest, I would never have known what NASA used if he hadn't said.

What none of the five of us realised, at the time, was that the "mistake" was deliberate; as I now know, Mackinnon had been told this in error at school and was being ironic about it. This interpretation of the line didn't occur to any of us at the time; we all assumed it was meant to be read straight, though fortunately we also didn't think it really mattered what NASA used. And I still, actually, don't see any indication by which we could have known the poet's intent. But then, he wouldn't have wanted to signal it too obviously (or he'd presumably have put that particular statement in a teacher's voice).

It's one of the hardest balancing acts in writing (not just poetry), saying neither too much nor too little. Over-explain and you ruin the effect, while very possibly annoying the reader. Explain too little and the effect fails altogether. Put background information in a footnote and some readers (especially reviewers) will complain; leave it out and others (ordinary non-reviewing readers, mostly) will email you saying they wish you'd put footnotes in. Me, I would still contend that Frost's poem did enough, while I'm not sure Mackinnon's did. But I'm not sure either what I'd have done: put it in a voice, left it out altogether? Any views? I tend to think, still, that one should err on the side of too little and accept that quite a few won't "get" it.