You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [17]
The verb walk is a general term. General terms signify broad classes of persons, things and actions. The verbs listed above following walk are specific terms. They refer to individual types of walking, each more specific than the general walk and each different in style from the others. After trekking for a while through the rugged landscape of the woods, we may end up hobbling out. The swagger of the overly proud changes after a defeat to the shuffle of the humble.
Because English consists of such differing levels of specificity, it allows us to be more or less exact, depending on our needs. In conversation we frequently use general terms, unless we have reason to be more specific. We say we're going to a party. In poetry, however, the sort of party we're going to makes a great deal of difference. Is it a ball, reception, soiree, tea, feast, gala, revel, housewarming or masquerade? The poet selects the word that best serves the poem.
There are levels of general and specific terms, too: Animal is a general term, and mammal is specific compared to it, but mammal is general compared to horse, and horse is general compared to roan, and so it goes down the line until we single out the one roan mare in the east stockade. The difference between the general and the specific is often a matter of degree, from the most general to the most specific, depending on the context. Poetry favors the specific.
Another important distinction between types of words is that between abstract terms and concrete terms. Abstract terms represent ideas or qualities that are conceptual rather than tactile. We understand them intellectually. Love, while it affects us physically, is an abstract term, as are the words naming other emotions. They're concepts without form or body. We cannot grasp them, or see, smell, hear or taste them. Abstract terms are like fistfuls of air: We know the air is there, but we can't grasp it. For each of us, happiness and sadness mean something slightly different, and that slight difference is really quite large. What abstract terms do well is serve poems by evoking intellectual concerns quickly. A poem may speak of pride, shame, honor, beauty, innocence, guilt or passion, and the reader immediately understands the concept.
Concrete terms, on the other hand, describe qualities that are tactile: cold, rough, salty, rock, fern, truck. They appeal to the senses. They evoke images and create the landscape of the poem for the reader to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Concrete terms provide a more immediate understanding of the poem's world by presenting it in descriptive, physical form. Good descriptive writing uses concrete terms so the reader can envision the scene: a dry creek bed, for example, mud-caked and cracked, littered with parched, brown needles fallen from the white pines that overhang it.
By their natures, concrete and specific terms go hand in hand, as do abstract and general terms. While abstract-general terms are useful in some instances, poems written primarily with abstract-general terms are diffuse and dull. They lack sensory appeal. They're as difficult to grasp as the wind. Poems written primarily with concrete-specific terms are more immediate and intimate. They draw the reader in and make a more engaging poem, one that presents details and particulars for the reader to envision. Concrete-specific terms evoke images that capture the reader's attention and imagination. Shakespeare uses concrete-specific terms in Sonnet 73 to evoke autumn, darkness, exhaustion and age:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all