I was thinking about near rhyme and why only Dickinson and Owen truly get away with it, but for different reasons. Owen because of the connection between poetry and war glory - heroic couplets et al. The near rhymes fit the sliding away of expected neatness in blood-mud, but the ones where he's just switching out vowels (forget what his word for that is) do that even better. Maybe because we think of ourselves as vowels, or can - I, you, 'e. You sign up assuming the you that will be shot at is a different you than the signer, perhaps. Bit pronoun shifts are crucial to everything else he's doing too, like getting readers into the scene, into the soldiers' heads, the Germans'. And of course with death a new vowel is needed, a new pronoun, starker than "it." The shift in vowels matches the shift in number he's forcing on you, esp. in Strange Meeting.
Dickinson gets away with it because her moves are so unexpected that it just makes sense that the board would change too.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-11-15 07:21 pm (UTC)I was thinking about near rhyme and why only Dickinson and Owen truly get away with it, but for different reasons. Owen because of the connection between poetry and war glory - heroic couplets et al. The near rhymes fit the sliding away of expected neatness in blood-mud, but the ones where he's just switching out vowels (forget what his word for that is) do that even better. Maybe because we think of ourselves as vowels, or can - I, you, 'e. You sign up assuming the you that will be shot at is a different you than the signer, perhaps. Bit pronoun shifts are crucial to everything else he's doing too, like getting readers into the scene, into the soldiers' heads, the Germans'. And of course with death a new vowel is needed, a new pronoun, starker than "it." The shift in vowels matches the shift in number he's forcing on you, esp. in Strange Meeting.
Dickinson gets away with it because her moves are so unexpected that it just makes sense that the board would change too.