Hi. How is everyone this fine afternoon?
| @thatpaulmoffett or @doctormoffett | |
| Website | https://www.clockworksacademy.com |
| Pronouns | He/Him |
That Dr. Paul
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Voted funniest poster on a message board in 2006. PhD in Medieval lit.
I am a spooky skeleton wearing a suit made of skin and haunted by a ghost.
You?
I need questions for Ask Good Paul / Bad Paul! Ask me a question about poetry! I'll give you writing advice, reading advice, relationship advice, whatever you need!
In terms of content, the Milne poem isn't saying anything profound. They went to find the pole, they went all together, they didn't know where it was... yay!
But it DOES have a narrative that goes somewhere, a tight focus, and several moments of surprise or reversal.
There is more to be said, but I think that's enough for now. I enjoyed myself a lot, and I hope some of you found this at least a little bit interesting!
And surprise is a key to good poetry that isn't trying to be funny, also. In content, the two things that make a poem good (that make any literature good) are the conflicting pulls of familiarity and surprise.
We get pleasure from reading something that we already know, that we recognize, that reminds us of the shared nature of human experience. But we also get pleasure from reading something we didn't already know. A new insight, or perspective.
And there's the next level of analysis. So far I've entirely focused on formal considerations, which really is the thing a computer should be best at because it's made up of straightforward rules.
But Milne is fun and funny, and the bot is boring.
The key to humour, above all, is surprise. Milne's poem isn't bust-a-gut laughing funny, but it is smile-worthy, because of moments like "Pole/tole" and the repeated refrain, and the "It's a Thing you Discover" and the "Sing Hey!"
And finally, "Pole/tole" is definitely a forced rhyme, but it's a freely and playfully forced rhyme instead of a banal and obvious one. "Tole" for "told" is funny. It doesn't read like Milne couldn't think of a rhyme, it reads like he is playing with vocabulary and sounds as a joke.
Milne uses the inertia of meaning to carry us through the change in the rhyme scheme, and then the inertia of the rhyme scheme to carry us through the next change in meaning.
Next we have Pooh/too/knew:
Eeyore, Christopher Robin and Pooh
And Rabbit’s relations all went too—
And where the Pole was none of them knew. …
This moment is a change in the rhyme scheme, so none of these rhymes feel predictable or expected.
We expect another "Owl and Piglet and Rabbit and all" after "Pooh", but instead Milne changes the rhyme pattern and also ties the line "Eeyore, Christopher Robin and Pooh" and the next one to the refrain line by expanding on its meaning.
Compare actual Milne. His rhyming groups are:
Pole/tole, all/all/all, Pooh/too/knew
All/all/all is a chorus. It's not just a rhyming end, the whole line is almost the same each time. That creates cohesion and playfulness, and makes the whole thing feel like a song.
That playfulness is the opposite of a forced rhyme.