Tangled In Style

The last 10 poems (11-20), containing detailed descriptions in their entirety, shifted my attention from meaning towards the recently discussed style. In them, lists of words flowed into the text in an attempt to describe a something with strict perfection. Suddenly the message lost some strength around poem 14, when the meaning was no longer as attractive as the method. Then, when encountering the fifteenth poem, we find the longest and most complete description so far, of which the following is just a glimpse:

“The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp;
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner;
The pilot seizes the king-pin—he heaves down with a strong arm;
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat—lance and harpoon are ready;
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches;
The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar;
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel (poem 15).”

The change here is very clear, for we start reading about the inclusion of women into the poem, coming from stanzas full of meaning and clear messages, and end up in this. In it, I found it hard to extract a meaning as I read, and as I had done in previous poems, for in its description the intentions were not clear. Soon, he hints at what might complement his descriptions by showing his unbiased position towards matters of politics. He tries to appeal to all by mentioning the following: “A southerner soon as a northerner—a planter nonchalant and hospitable, down by the Oconee I live; A Yankee, bound by my own way, ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth, and the sternest joints on earth (poem 16).” By describing what is and not what can be, and by posing himself as one of us, and not a single and different individual, he makes his message much clearer, almost pure.

When I finally made a hypothesis out of the read, I started to notice a trend. It made sense to connect intentions as I did, but I found my intentions tangled up with my pose on style. Maybe, of course, his style made part of this, and in it he added another support or boost to his message, but maybe I was taking his style too far into my interpretation. There must, then, be a thin line between style as a mechanism to support a literal intention, and style as a pointless ambiguity in its artistic form.