And what makes the poem and its lack of punctuation even more delicious is that it cannot be read aloud with making decisions about what it means.  Since written language doesn’t convey stress and intonation unambiguously, the poem invites, in a way rare among poems, the reader to interpret intentionally, not by accident.

 

There’s a very nice example of what scholars like us do with absence of punctuation in Richard Hogg’s Introduction to Volume I of The Cambridge History of the English language.  Old English, of course, was written with minimal punctuation and certainly without most of the conventions of print text we follow today.  Word spacing, line wrapping, etc. followed different rules as, so what is clearly a poem using Germanic alliterative verse form looks in manuscript like prose to the modern reader.  Hogg provides an excerpt from The Exeter Book first in its original form, changing it only by using a modern font.  Then he provides edited versions of the text from four standard modern editions.  They all differ consistently from the original in what constitutes a line; but they differ from each other in the marking of vowel length, the use of caesura spacing, and the use of quotation marks and italics, representing different views on the voices present in the poem.

 

We tend to assume that the Old English reader, reading aloud, knew how to handle the text, but I’m not sure that’s any safer an assumption than that all readers today would read the poem we’ve been discussing with the same meaning.

 

Herb

 

I think that the lack of punctuation is just one of the writer's decisions about this poem.

I love the way it runs on and

on I love the

enjambment

of each

line

 

To say that we might add punctuation is like saying  'If only these blues in Picasso's blue period weren't quite so blue...."

 

Language is art (among other things)

 

Linda

 

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 4:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: punctuation anyone?

Folks,
     A friend just sent me the following poem by W. S. Merwin:

     Before A Departure in Spring
Once more it is April with the first light sifting
      through the young leaves heavy with dew making the colors
remember who they are the new pink of the cinnamon tree
      the gilded lichens of the bamboo the shadowed bronze
of the kamani and the blue day opening
      as the sunlight descends through it all like the return
of a spirit touching without touch and unable
      to believe it is here and here again and awake
reaching out in silence into the cool breath
      of the garden just risen from darkness and days of rain
it is only a moment the birds fly through it calling
      to each other and are gone with their few notes and the flash
of their flight that had vanished before we ever knew it
      we watch without touching any of it and we
can tell ourselves only that this is April this is the morning
      this never happened before and we both remember it

I love it myself, and had no trouble reading it in spite of its total absence of punctuation.  Thought I'd share it with fellow grammarians and punctuation lovers.
Just one question:  Would the addition of punctuation improve it or spoil it?

Ed Schuster


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