Editing, Punctuation and Imagery
The text is now going through a final set of grammar, spelling and sentence structure errors. According to my editor, I have picked up a poor habit of using too many semicolons; I seem to recall Ayn Rand having the same “problem” – perhaps this is where I actually picked it up, considering the large amount of her writing I’ve absorbed – and I’m not sure I agree that it is, in fact, a problem. In his short article The Power of Punctuation, Martin Solomon discusses how “punctuation marks have tonal value, just as letter forms do; they also have mass and energy”. I find the semicolon to have a sort of academic ease or fluidness to it, and the pause it generates is more subtle, lasting and resonate than a simple comma or a period.
When reading a poem, it is interesting to consider where the imagery comes from. The words on the page are rather plain, and save for the authors’ potential use of kitschy typography, the print itself is rather nondescript. Words themselves frequently fail to trigger vivid and robust thoughts, as the brain seems to desire to think in two dimensions. That is, even when trying passionately to picture a “tree in the rain”, few readers will get beyond the prototypical form of a tree – the form that, perhaps, a child will scrawl when asked to draw said object. This lack of ability to visualize an object in full detail in the mind may be what holds many back from claiming artistic capabilities. “I can’t draw” usually means “I can’t draw accurately”, and it may be more appropriate to claim “I can’t think” (or at least “I can’t think accurately”).
But compare the imagery conjured by a “tree in the rain”, to this short excerpt:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
T. S. Eliot has managed to use the same basic constructs of words, and simple words at that, to stir deep emotional responses in the reader. A “tree in the rain” is finite, obvious, and non-challenging. The lack of complexity and specificity may, in fact, be why it is difficult to picture the tree with any depth or detail. But the fact that the lilac has dead roots, and it isn’t just a rain – it’s a spring rain, creates a matter-of-fact situation that readers can begin to feel, before they even try to see it. It is difficult to picture April, much less to picture the month as cruel, yet Eliot’s four lines have managed to invigorate a deeply-honed sense of feeling that allows readers to picture not just a tree, nor a rain, but an entire scene.