Page 78 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 77
its rhyme scheme through an inversion. The stanza does not
fade away into ‘forlorn fairy lands’ but vanishes with more
decisive poignancy ‘in faery lands forlorn’ (line 80). The next
stanza begins in repetition as if to demonstrate the regularly
echoing chimes within which rhyming texts must function:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. (11. 71–4)

Does the use of ‘elf’ introduce connotations which advance the
text’s argument about the relationship between the factual and
the fanciful? Does it instead sound like some desperately feeble
attempt to make the best of a bad job imposed by the need of a
rhyme for ‘self’?
Yet that impotently twee image of the ‘deceiving elf’ could
seem a fortunately unfortunate choice. It may sharpen, rather
than blunt, the text’s point. Those limits within which human
aspirations must strive to express themselves do sound bitterly
narrow. The bell-like rhyme forbids progress of thought and
expansion of topic, confining the text’s voice to discussing
nothing but its own ‘sole self’. The text enacts what it asserts,
sounding as if the most imaginative hopes of escape from its
self-regarding form do indeed prove deceptive. To comment
upon the apparent purpose and actual effect of rhyme-words is
clearly to quote them. So, too, most questions which depend on
terms like ‘style’, ‘language’, ‘diction’, ‘vocabulary’, ‘syntax’,
‘rhythm’ or ‘metre’ will require almost unceasing use of
verbatim examples.
Yet rules like ‘Essays on structure and meaning need fewer
quotations than essays on figures of speech’ are unreliable.
Story, sense and style are often so interdependent that critical
debate about one has to encompass the others. Some questions
may sound as if they are interested in the meaning of life. All
answers must demonstrate curiosity about literature. You may
anyway find, in studying your quotations (particularly those
which tend to be cited often), that the meanings which we read
into life have often originated in our literature.
Prose texts, like poems, are not plate-glass windows
through which we gaze in order to see something else. You can
approach them as toys or games inviting you to play with