Short, Mick. "Style Variations in Texts." Chap. 3 in
Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose.
London: Longman, 1996. 80-105 [98-101, 104, 381] (
.pdf).
Excerpt from section
3.7 An extended example of style variation
We have already dealt with language variation according to
domain inside a text without noting it explicitly, when we
examined 'Adlestrop' in 3.5. The reason that lexical items to
do with trains and the countryside respectively occur in the
two stanzas is because Thomas has chosen to write about the
subject matters with which those items are associated. The
grouping of lexical items into associated areas of vocabulary
are referred to by linguists as lexical or associative fields. In
'Naming of Parts', Henry Reed, a World War II poet,
produces a systematic series of contrasts between the lexical
fields associated with war and the natural world. In so doing
he also exploits our intuitive knowledge of military language
and the language of instruction:
If we look at the first four verses of this poem we can see that
there is a systematic division which takes place in the middle of
the fourth line of each stanza. Up to that point in each verse
the speaker is a weapons instructor in the army, probably a
sergeant or a corporal, giving instructions on the use of a rifle
to some assembled recruits. However, the remaining part of
each stanza appears to be the unspoken thoughts of one of
those recruits. Alternatively, the recruit could be directly
addressing us, the readers. Often, when the poem is performed
it is read by two people, the first with a working-class
'sergeant major' voice, and the other with voice properties
like those I have already suggested for the second half of
'Adlestrop'.
The most obvious features of the language of instruction
are the use of commands. And please do not let me/See anyone
using his finger (14/15) is an imperative command and and to-morrow
morning,/We shall have what to do after firing (2/3) can be
interpreted as a combined statement and command. Other, less
obvious features of the language of instruction, are sentences
where the speaker tells the hearers what they must already
know (e.g. And this is the piling swivel, /Which in your case you
have not got (9/10) or where he tells them what they are
capable of doing (e.g. You can do it quite easy/if you have any
strength in your thumb (15/16)).
These instructions assume an audience which has the rifles
referred to in their possession. We know this for a variety of
reasons. Firstly, there are a number of words or phrases which
refer to items present in the immediate situational context and
code those items in terms of distance from the speaker. Such
expressions are usually called deictic.3 Examples are this
(indicating that the item is close to the speaker; cf. 'that') in
stanzas 2, 3 and 4 and the close time deictics to-day, yesterday
and to-morrow in stanza 1 (compare 'that day', 'the day before'
and 'the day after'). In this case, of course, there is no real
situational context; instead we, the readers, have to imagine an
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appropriate situation. The use of deixis is thus one of the
ways in which writers persuade readers to imagine a fictional
world when they read poems, novels and plays.
The second reason that we know that the instructor is
addressing a set of people present with him is his use of
pronouns (I/me; you and we) referring to himself and his
listeners. There is also some verbal indication that he is
monitoring the reactions of his hearers as he speaks to them
(cf. as you see in line 20).4
The fact that it is military weapon training that the men are
being instructed in is made clear by use of the relevant
technical terminology, and the status of the instructor as a
non-commissioned officer is indicated by the use of the
adjective easy as an adverb in line 15. This is a grammatical
feature associated with various working-class dialects of
English, and in World War II the commissioned officers
would have been from the middle-classes and above and the
'lower ranks' would have comprised working-class soldiers.
The poetic description of the natural world in the gardens
surrounding the soldiers will not need such detailed
examination as we have already covered similar ground in our
examination of 'Adlestrop'. In the last two and a half lines of
each stanza, starting with the new sentence in the fourth line
in each case, the rifle terminology, short sentences and
instructional language are replaced by words and phrases
referring to the natural world, longer sentences and poetic
tropes like simile and metaphor (e.g. japonica/Glistens like coral
and The branches/Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures).
The result of all of this is a comparison between war and its
accompanying death and destruction on the one hand and
on the other, the peace of the gardens and the generative
qualities of the natural world (e.g. The early bees are assaulting
and fumbling the flowers:/They call it easing the Spring.) This
contrast is made more ironic and direct by a complex pattern
of lexical repetition. The last line of each of the stanzas which
is thus in the 'natural world' part of the poem in each case
constitutes a repetition of phraseology found in the 'weapon
training' section of that stanza. The war world thus appears at
first sight to invade the natural world.
I have made a point so far of talking only about the first
four stanzas of the poem. This is because the last stanza
constitutes a significant and interesting internal deviation from
the pattern so far described. At first sight its juncture in line 4
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also reflects the war/nature division seen in the rest of the
poem. But this time the line 4 syntactic division is not a
sentence division. Indeed, despite a number of major syntactic
junctures, the last stanza is one complete sentence. Moreover,
this time the whole stanza is made up of an amalgam of
repetitive echoes from earlier stanzas. Most of the echoes in
the first three and a half lines of the stanza come from the war
sections of previous stanzas, but not all of them do. In
particular, the first clause They call it easing the Spring is a
repetition from the last line of the previous stanza. We know
this must be a nature reference, not a military one because the
word Spring is capitalised, as it was in the nature section of
stanza 4, but not in the war section of the stanza where it first
appears.
Once we have noticed the point about Spring it is easier to
see that Which in our case we have not got in line 28 is a more
exact repetition of the natural world version of line 12 than
the war world version in line 10. The 'garden' section of the
last stanza, on the other hand, repeats items exclusively from
the natural world sections of previous verses, except for the
very last line of the poem, which repeats the clause in the first
stanza which occurred in both the war and nature parts of the
stanza.
What are we to make of these internally deviant features of
the last stanza of 'Naming of Parts'? In the first four stanzas it
seemed that the pattern of repetition represented the invasion
of the natural world by the world of war. But in the last stanza
it is the opposite which happens, suggesting a triumph of life
over death or at least a hopeful resolution in the 'double'
repetition of the poem's last line. Henry Reed thus
manipulates style variation in a particularly sophisticated way
in order to guide us in interpreting his poem.
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Notes
3. See 9.3.5, and Lyons (1981: 228-42).
4. See Leech, Deuchar and Hoogenraad (1982: 139-40).
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References
Leech, G. N., M. Deuchar and R. Hoogenraad (1982) English Grammar for Today. London: Macmillan.
Lyons, J. (1981) Language, Meaning and Context. London: Fontana.
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