How I Wrote the Poetic Lament In The Silence
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
As of late, I have taken an interest in the architecture of prose, especially in poetic verse. When I began dabbling with poetry, I started out writing purely from imagination. Pouring words onto the page like a dam bursting could not survive the scrutiny of my mathematical mind. I wasn't satisfied with a loosely formed, unstructured stream of consciousness without some measurement of precision.
Also, I didn't want it to be one of those obscure poems force-assigned in English class that have required a century of teenage analysis to try and interpret what the author may not have intended to write.
And to be frank, hailing cryptic poetry as groundbreaking for the sole purpose of it being difficult to understand does not make the lords of literature rumble the skies with thunder.
Writing cryptically for the sake of sounding elite does not score literary points—perhaps in a flower-scented room of students wide-eyed and drooling as a depressed teacher monologues the excitement of parallelism like a remade scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but not to my mind. It only exacerbates a headache that makes me think about conspiring an impossible scheme to travel back in time with Marty and Doc to 1986 and play sick.
I prefer clear, articulate writing whether it be thematic or narrative poetry. In other words, I am not writing to confuse readers on purpose, unless there is a compelling reason to do so within the larger framework of the story I am telling. While I have no gripes with profundity, as I do lend myself to deeper thoughts, I think that some writers may have a false sense of grandeur with vain complexity.
However, classic literature is a haven of methodologies and conventions that light the way to avoid the pitfalls ensnaring many of us modern writers.
That said, I attempted something different in this poem than typical modern free verse. I used specific numerical symbolism through syllablemetry.
Let's define syllablemetry as a self-defined symmetrical system of syllable counts.
When I wrote the first draft of In The Silence, it mirrored my raw thoughts and creative instincts, but aside from the praise of a loving family member, I wasn't satisfied. Meter was inconsistent. Syllablemetry was nonexistent. There was no precise method behind the madness. That would not do.
I sought to delve deeper into the themes of silence, nostalgia, regret, and peace within the mental battlefront of the human soul. Some areas required sharper word choice. Others, expansion. Accomplishing that required very deliberate thought on clarity and organization. So, the left side of my brain was given the order to invade the chaos of my right, fighting for structure, order, and design.
The search for structure led me down a road of discovery—particularly the methods of Dante Alighieri. There are many others in the past who put a lot of emphasis on structure, stress, syllables, and meaning, but Dante infused his Divine Comedy with superior mathematical depth. I was naturally drawn to his application as his work is saturated with it. Every detail of The Divine Comedy was planned beyond what you would think at first glance. His genius was not an accident (the details of which could make for its own article). But suffice it to say, his deliberate theological mathematization of prose is quite extraordinary.
I have researched numerical meaning before (especially Hebrew) but never thought about applying it through poetry. For anyone familiar with biblical numerality, this should read as somewhat familiar. As I revised my poem, I compiled this table of numbers to tie my syllable counts directly to the theme of that line or stanza (it varied depending on the length of each theme discussed):
Number | Meaning |
1 | Oneness, unity, beginning |
2 | Duality, tension, conflict |
3 | Trinitarian, harmony, resolution |
4 | Foundation, creation, order |
5 | Humanity, frailty, sensuality |
6 | Imperfection, incompleteness |
7 | Divine, perfection, rest |
8 | Resurrection, renewal, new genesis |
9 | Judgement, crisis, tribulation |
10 | Fullness, wholeness, completion |
You can go further than this chart here, but it provides a good foundational example of how to integrate numerical meanings into your writing with ingenuity and discipline.
Once I started implementing these meanings into the structure of my poem, I found the mental task to be relieving since free, unbridled blobs of gestative thought were falling under the direction of an orderly force.
While there are no hard and fast ‘rules’ to modern poetry, there is something to be said of the greats who have walked before us with such pinpointed precision. As said many times, we stand on the shoulders of giants. As I learn more about such works, whether it be from Poe, Dante, Homer, Eliot, or Tennyson, it is stimulating to incorporate some of their flavor and methods into my own so that their leaps and strides carry on in us wayward writers.
If you'd like to read In The Silence, the poem shaped by these methods, you can do so at:
Comments