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| The Well-Wrought Urn |
-Brian Mendonca
'The Heresy of Paraphrase' (pgs. 192-214) by Cleanth Brooks is the 11th and last chapter of his book of essays titled The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). It is a short essay of 13 pages and is usually studied along with the first chapter in the volume titled, 'The Language of Paradox.'
In the last chapter Brooks ends his observations on how to read poetry. He states that the meaning of a poem is to be found in itself - its literary devices, its meanderings, and its aporia (contradictions).
The word 'heresy' comes from the Greek word 'heresia' which meant original thought, a way of thinking that was against accepted notions. Brooks invokes the disruptive nature of heresy and says that it is unimaginable that a poem be reduced to a paraphrase, i.e. trying to assemble its meaning in different words which are simpler.
He begins by referring to the ten poems he has discussed earlier. He analyzes one poem of representative poets from Shakespeare (1564-1616) to the time of his writing. In so doing, he places before us a history of poetry from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Some of the poets he refers to are Donne (1571-1631), 'The Canonization'; Herrick (1591-1674), 'Corinna's Going a Maying'; Milton (1608-74); Pope (1688-1744), Rape of the Lock; Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84); Thomas Gray (1716-1771); Wordsworth (1770-1850), 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'; Keats (1795-1821), 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'; Tennyson (1809-1892); and Yeats (1865-1939), 'Among School Children'. The poems he has chosen are 'close to the central stream of tradition.' (Page 192 of e-text above.)
His intention is to see what is common in all these poems from different historical periods. He goes on to say that in Pope's Rape of the Lock it is the structure of the poem that is important, rather than the form of the heroic couplet. Structure is composed of ambiguity, paradox, attitudes, and irony. (195) It also includes imagery and rhythm. (197) Symbol and metrical composition are also important.
In seeking meaning in the poems' self-reflexivity - the ability to interrogate itself - the critic goes against the tide of those who feel meaning resides outside the poem, i.e. in the biography of the poet, or the historical circumstances which produced it.
A good poem resists attempts to paraphrase it. We may use the paraphrase to help arrive at the meaning but 'the paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem.' (197) Whenever we try to reduce the poem to a single meaning - as in Wordsworth's 'Ode' - it escapes and elides us. Thus the Ode is about the child but it is also about the old man; it is natural, as well as supernatural.
Is Belinda in The Rape of the Lock a goddess or a dim-witted person? (197) Are the first four verses of 'Corinna's Going a Maying' to be taken as true? Opposites are reconciled by Herrick. The poem masquerades to be Christian while winks at pagan rites of May day which are 'harmless follie.' (199)
'The "prose-sense" of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung.' (199) says Brooks. 'Formulations' help us to understand parts of the poem. They are the 'scaffoldings' thrown outside the building, not the building itself. (199)
The line from Browning (1812-89), 'So wore the night; the East was gray,' from the poem 'A Serenade at the Villa', could be paraphrased as 'The night was over.' However it would do little justice to the beauty of the verse. Night is personified as trudging along. The gray colour heightening the sombre scene. These connotations will be lost in paraphrase.
'Most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the relation of the poem to its "truth." (201) . . . We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.' (202) We take refuge in the logical structure, because if we don't find one we feel the meaning of the poem is 'up in the air.' (203)
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