How Form Reflects Meaning

Close Study: “Japanese Maple” by Clive James

Retrieved from clivejames.com.

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

First of all, thanks for hanging with a poem about mortality. This is one of my all-time favorite poems, and I feel it’s overall uplifting, so I hope you enjoyed it.

This poem is a miracle of form. I feel it perfectly encapsulates formal poetry’s unique strengths. The potential drawbacks show through in places, too, but overall I feel James is so skilled here that the rewards far outweigh.

As a first reflection, notice how the poem’s grammatical person shifts from the second person “You”—used, especially in the first stanza, to convey distance, irony, a sense of banality—to the first person “I,” as the poem intensifies in feeling, warmth, and immediacy. This shift occurs exactly at the poem’s halfway point, the midpoint of the third of five stanzas, and it is so seamless that one might not initially notice it, except as a general sense that the poem grows more intense and intimate throughout.

Then, notice how this same symmetry, of five elements balanced around an inflection point, is shared within each of the five stanzas. Each stanza is four lines of flowing, lyrical iambic pentameter, bisected by my single favorite formal element of this poem: the abrupt four-syllable third line. This third line brings a large jolt of energy into each stanza, used to varying effects: jarring interruption (like death itself) with “Breath growing short,” a shift of focus with “Of that small tree,” a spiritual quality with “It never ends,” determination with “What I must do,” and the strangely sweet and intimate tragedy of “As my mind dies.”

The ABABB rhyme scheme is a mixture of lyrical (in the BBB rhymes) and jagged (in the metrically disrupted second A rhyme). Beyond the raw pleasure of the meter and rhyme itself, notice how beautifully this scheme supports the poem’s meaning. Each stanza flows calmly, evenly, until it is interrupted, right in the middle, by “Breath growing short”—which is literally a short, four-syllable breath, and which perfectly captures the central contrast between the smoothness of James’s “slow fading out” and the abruptness and discontinuity of death itself. As the poem evolves, this abruptness manifests differently in each stanza (as described above), each time deepening the juxtaposition between quietude and intensity that produces so much of the poem’s emotional power. The metric structure is not merely pleasing to the ear: It lets us feel what James is experiencing, directly. It tunes our nervous system to his.

And most wondrous, to me, is the marriage of the poem’s overall structure with its meaning. As we’ve discussed, each stanza is five lines, with an inflection point in the middle; and the full poem is five stanzas, with an inflection point in the middle, marked by the transition from “You” to “I” at exactly the midpoint. The effect, which I feel is also the poem’s most powerful gift, is to repeatedly set up two symmetrical worlds, with an inflection point between them, and then to bring us from one world, across the inflection point, and to the other.

The first sweep across worlds is to bring a camera from outside and into a human being’s mind. The poem opens upon a dying old man (objectified, “You”) in his garden, then pans to the Japanese maple tree he beholds—and then tracks into the man himself, crossing a crucial threshold into “I” and continuing inward, until in the last stanza we are seeing the fire as it dances in his mind, not dimmed by age or illness, but burning brighter than ever.

And the second, most profound sweep across worlds is to peer at the movement beyond life and through death. If this vivid life is one world, and death is the abrupt inflection point in the middle, then is there another mirrored world? Is there anything on the other side? The final stanza conveys finality—”as my mind dies,” “and then was gone”—but also feels oddly like life if it is supposed to be describing a final extinction. “A final flood of colours will live on”: meaning what, just the straightforward fact that there will still be trees “beyond my time”?

Here, in my opinion, the poem’s form itself pushes us beyond what James might have literally meant to say. The words on the page communicate, “The world is so beautiful right before it is gone,” but the form shows us something else: a human being, physically old but burning ever brighter inside, peering at the threshold of death—uncertain. Does death break the symmetries, or do they continue? How could something beget nothing? What of all this color?

Craft Exercise: Form and Meaning

I imagine James started “Japanese Maple” with the first stanza. The metric disruption of “Breath growing short” is too perfect not to have been the seed from which the rest of the poem sprouted.

Like “Japanese Maple,” our formal poetry can be formal within forms we invent ourselves, and this gives us the opportunity to find form that will resonate with meaning right from the outset.

Below is a poem I wrote some years ago, which has a “roll-forward” rhyme scheme: ABC BCD CDE… This rhythm of rolling, progressive development fits the poem’s content, which is a single long camera sweep down a valley, into clouds, and back to the top. Once I realized how these two elements supported one another, my job was to write the rest of the poem, using the formal bounds I had set for myself as both inspiration and challenge.

Gangtok

Inside a small dull room, a monk
with a mundane air sets to light
a sea of butter candles.

Out in the courtyard young monks fight
laughing, launching kicks in sandals,
nimble in their robes.

Below, a groaning taxi handles
a steep path through the concrete cubes
that pixellate the valley,

near whose foot the cool mist throbs
with house band covers, Mustang Sally
and E blues from the bar,

the blues bar, Little Italy.
Crawling past the wild guitar, a car
joins the winding string

twining into brewing civil war,
a place of strikes and stabbings: Darjeeling,
Heart of Gorkhaland!

In flight from which the ceiling parts, revealing
a blank expanse too vast to understand
and boundless worlds beneath it:

Worlds that surround an unconcerned hand,
atop a valley and the clouds that wreathe it,
tending flames of butter.

To try this marriage of form and meaning in your poetry, here are some steps to follow:

1. Get a feel for what you hope to communicate in a poem you have brewing.
2. Inquire whether there’s any formal element—a meter, a rhyme scheme, or anything else (should lines organize around a particular consonant?)—that seems to support that feel.
3. Begin writing from that formal element.

As an example, at the moment I’m feeling interest in the topic of “rest,” which to me is an aaah sound. I might start the poem from that aaah sound:

On an off-day

Then I want something more sudden and percussive-sounding that matches the feel of work:

Work shirts.

So we have

On an off-day, [rest, aah-sounds]
Work shirts. [percussive]

My next step would be: Can I really have a rhyming poem with lots of two-syllable lines? Or does the second line need lengthened?

On an off-day,
Iron work shirts.

Then, does anything non-silly come after this?

Plan a long play;
Nurse work hurts.

So we have:

On my off-day,
Iron work shirts.

Plan a long play;
Nurse work hurts.

This poem is quite trivial so far, of course, but it is starting to match the awkward clip-clop rhythm I experience of rest and work. Now: Could the poem have two lyrical lines matching the weekend, and five clipped lines matching the work week? Or would that be weird? And so on.

If I stayed with it for ten or twenty hours, I’d probably have something I thought was pretty good—especially as I broke through to the emotional core of “What is rest, to me? Why do I feel I need it?” From there, I could begin to revise the lines above from doggerel into something with real power; and hopefully, the formal choices I made could be both support and scaffolding for that process, as well as an intimate part of the power of the final poem.

The point is, you can set your own formal guidelines to match the meaning you want to explore, and write from there. Give it a try!