For class on September 22nd, I wrote a response to the concrete poem “The Grey Line” by Donald Urquhart. I really enjoyed reading this poem, and so I thought that I would use it as one of the works that I compare today. I am comparing “The Grey Line” to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poem “Some Things”.
The first thing that immediately strikes me about both of these poems is their reliance on a very linear layout. In “The Grey Line,” the poem literally has the word grey written down the center of the poem, creating a dividing line between two sides. In “Some Things,” the words on the page also have a very linear layout. The difference between this layout, however, is that the first letter of each word on each line creates another word going down on the page vertically.
One difference that these poems have is their themes. In “The Grey Line,” the central thought is, quite obviously, the word grey and the feelings and thoughts associated with it. In “Some Things,” the poem follows the title, but the words of the poem are much less unified… while the words might have some connections, they are not blatantly connected with one simple unifying word like in “Gray”. For example, in “Some Things”
D reaming
O f
O pen-plan
R ooms
seems very connected to itself, but does not necessarily immediately relate to later parts of the poem:
B estrides
A h!
L angorous
S ummer
A irs
The only connection I could make between the words in “Some Things” was that the vertical words of the poem (door, hoe, twine, balsa, flora) can all be connected to plants or trees of some kind. I had to really work very hard to try to make a connection between the words in this poem, and I am not even quite sure if this was Finlay’s point. I am more inclined to believe that when Finlay wrote this poem, he wanted to convey exactly what the title suggests: “Some Things.” These “Things” are simply that… things. They might have a connection to the world around them, but on their own they might not mean a whole lot. They are average, ordinary, plain old words that could have different meanings for different people. The thought of twine might spark memories in one person, while the word flora may cause thoughts that are completely unrelated. In this poem, the reader first sees individual words before they see the phrases in the poem.
I think this differs greatly from “The Grey Line.” In this poem, I believe that Urquhart paints more of a direct picture for the reader of the poem by providing phrases that might spark something in their mind. For example, “Blue in the face, grey-haired” paints a vivid picture for the reader, because they see the entire phrase before focusing on individual words.
Both of these poems require a context of memory and thought. In “Some Things,” the reader must be able to create a mental image of (most of) the words in the poem in order to create meaning. Similarly, in “The Grey Line,” the reader must also create a mental image, but it is not quite as much work for the reader because they are given more phrasing in the content of the work.
This context of memory and thought work well with the writers’ use of non-traditional poetry. If the authors, Urquhart and Finaly, had decided to put the exact same words of their poetry in a more paragraph-style fashion or a more traditional poetical fashion, the effect of the words and phrases would definitely be lost. For example, “grey as yet thin wisps of grey grey of broke iron” does not read the same, nor seems to have the same effect and meaning as
grey as yet
thin whisps of grey
Likewise, “frequent local occasional rare abundant flora” does not read the same as
F requent
L ocal
O ccasional
R are
A bundant.
After reading these two poems, I have realized that layout is very important to the meaning and feeling behind the words on a page. In my own work, I will strive to be conscious of this and realize that sometimes if words are spread out on a page more or placed in a different corner of the screen, the effect it can have on the reader and the meaning of the work is significant.
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