Page 81 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

80 How to write critical essays
(b)
but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry. (LIV, ll. 16–20)

The first extract, (a), may raise more questions in the reader’s
mind than you can afford to answer at this stage. There are
possible obscurities. You might need to explain, for instance,
the fact of human physiology which is referred to in the third
stanza’s ‘frame that binds’: at birth the two halves of the skull
are still relatively soft and mobile; only gradually do they
harden and close together around the brain.
The extract’s view of psychology could also confusingly
delay your present argument. The poem suggests here that only
through language do we acquire self-consciousness, and exile
our newly defined selves into loneliness. Yet language is all that
the text itself can offer. So this attempt to stand back from its
own medium and somehow speak of all that we have lost
through learning to speak is obviously problematical. The
subtle ramifications here could be explained by citing many
other paradoxical passages in which this poem seems to be its
own most demanding critic. Yet, if you move on to such
moments and investigate their implications, your reader will
soon lose track of your original, simpler point.
The second extract, (b), with its reiterated insistence on
infancy in a familiar form—the crying baby, afraid of the
dark—seems far more convenient. It is also usefully shorter. All
other things being equal, quotations should, like your own
prose, function with maximal economy.
In fact, you may think that even (b) could be usefully pruned
before being included in your essay. Perhaps later paragraphs
are to provide sustained treatment of the poem’s many, explicit
references to language. If so, to quote ‘no language but a cry’
here could be confusing to a reader who needs to understand
the divisions into which you are structuring your argument.
Your present purpose is adequately served if (b) loses its last
line. To include it might just make it harder for your reader to
find, and focus on, those other words which do support the one
proposition which you are now advancing.