Course:James Schuyler’s “February” in the collection Freely Espousing (1969)
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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This poem stirs me every time I read it. I love to read it aloud because it is so sonic— I hear so much movement in it. Fast/slow, staccato/soft. It’s remarkable that it all springs forth from a narrator looking out a window.
Deconstructing this dynamic, I found that the parts of the poem that move quickly for me are laced with hard consonants and iambs. There’s also a density of echo. Schuyler uses repetition: repeating consonants, repeating words (often with slight alteration), and rhyming (often slant):
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
When the poems slows, it’s jarring. The meter, pace, and repetition soften. In these sections, Schuyler uses more assonance than consonance. His rhymes and repetitions are much more subtle and more often embedded within the line rather than at the end. The soft pause that Schuyler creates in these moments contains reflection and emotion, particularly in instances where the enjambment has an annotating syntax. The end of the line feels like a hover before the fall of the next line.
I can’t get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I write with a similar attention to echo and pace. I’m working on being more conscious of how I move in and out of density, in order to create the kind of builds and shifts that Schuyler achieves.