As a belated coda to your comments on the contracted form of 'he'd' in the
habitual past, Michael, I've just come across an example from only a few
years after your earliest, The Ruined Cottage. In Crabbe's Peter Grimes,
much concerned with repeated, haunted, hopeless activities, we find:
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race...
Which includes a sly bit of self-portraiture. I leave it to you to draw any
further inferences!
Jamie
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Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2016 3:29 PM
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Subject: Re: names
Sorry for the delayed response - I feel like an owl in daylight. I left the
discussion at Tim's interesting and honest response to my questioning of his
suggestion that UK mainstream poetry was in some way an anomaly.
...
My overall view is that the feeling of distaste and hostility reported by
Tim and to an extent experienced by myself is a proximity effect. Readers
are thin-skinned at home, where they’re acutely sensitive to unexpressed
meanings, but thick-skinned abroad, blithely unaware of possible causes of
offence.
[Why did Adorno loathe Strauss’ Alpine Symphony so much? He’s unable to
explain, and when we listen to the magnificent music now we can’t see it.
But I don’t doubt that the offence was there for Adorno, he heard it as
clearly as anyone who hears a tone and knows they’ve been insulted by it.
(And sometimes, we get this wrong.) You can appreciate that, for Adorno,
there was a lot at stake. ]
As Tim rightly said (if I understood him right), the thing that offends is
mostly not something said or meant personally by the poet in question, but
something as it were encoded in his medium of expression. In fact the
knee-jerk reaction may, if I can speak autobiographically, be more about an
unconscious stylistic, a manner, than anything that the poet consciously put
into the poem. That’s why it only takes three or four lines to identify. I’m
thinking of identifying markers such as the particular use of the present
tense.
(http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2006/02/first-person-present-tense.html)
Though I am calling it a proximity effect I don’t mean that the reaction is
not a real insight. I don’t think the mainstream poetry of today is really
an anomaly (or if it is, that’s rather a compliment – I’m all for anomalous
poetry) ; but it certainly is unique.
For example in its extraordinarily heavy usage of the word “He’d”. (Also” I’d”,
“She’d”. But I did my Google searches on “He’d”.)
Anyhow, the elided past continuous (short for “he would” or “he had”, both
are equally characteristic).
A word that’s vanishingly rare in linguistically-innovative, exploratory,
experimental etc… (Prove me wrong!) . It’s obvious that there’s some
quasi-sociolinguistic lining-up here.
A word with a great deal encoded in it. As briefly as possible, you might
say it means being persuaded that poetry can be made by rehearsing
narratives of the habitual past in an informal manner. Of course that’s a
reductive and prejudicial way of putting it. But a prejudice is what we are
talking about. I frankly admit that it gets in the way of comprehending the
specificity of the poems in front of me.
I’m not sure if this particular usage would be one of the things Tim
dislikes, probably not, but I instance it as demonstration that what is
reacted to is not merely imaginary, there is some demonstrable objectivity
in the recognition of difference.
Manny Blacksher:
When he hastened
back from lunch at one each day, his heart
brim-full of blameless industry, he'd stop
to buy cigars and chew the toothsome fat
with Mister Stein, who'd bought the lobby shop
with money found inside a fresh latrine
in a dun field outside Dachau where he'd sat
and seen a shadow snake like pain in sunshine.
Michael Donaghy:
He needed a perfect cathedral in his head,
he’d whisper, so that by careful scrutiny
the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind
could find the secret order of the world
and remember every drop on every face
in every summer thunderstorm.
David Wheatley (translating SEÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN)
You could see that he understood, and his fellow-feeling
for the pain in the horse’s eyes;
and that dwelling on it so long he’d finally stolen
into the innermost space
Simon Armitage (“Hitcher”)
We were the same age, give or take a week.
He'd said he liked the breeze
to run its fingers
through his hair. It was twelve noon.
The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.
Carol Ann Duffy (“Eurydice”)
He’d been told that he mustn’t look back
or turn round,
but walk steadily upwards,
myself right behind him,
out of the Underworld
into the upper air that for me was the past.
He’d been warned
that one look would lose me
for ever and ever.
[The lineage:
Thomas Hardy (“The Man He Killed”)
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
Wordsworth (The Ruined Cottage)
Five tedious years
She lingered in unquiet widowhood,
A wife and widow. Needs must it have been
A sore heart-wasting. I have heard, my friend,
That in that broken arbour she would sit
The idle length of half a sabbath day—
There, where you see the toadstool’s lazy head—
And when a dog passed by she still would quit
The shade and look abroad.
]
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