Continuing with some (late) summer reading, I've been poring over one of several excellent articles by Clive James on The Poetry Foundation website. The feature in question, titled A Stretch of Verse, is especially interesting when addressing the question of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. Here's a short quote as a sample:
Being in the right spot can make a phrase powerful even when it might seem frail heard on its own. Consider the placing of Louis MacNeice’s lovely phrase “the falling London rain.” It comes at the very end of his poem “London Rain” and seems to concentrate all the phonetic force of the poem:
My wishes now come homeward,
Their gallopings in vain,
Logic and lust are quiet,
Once more it starts to rain.
Falling asleep I listen
To the falling London rain.
This is the least obvious version of the hit: when ordinary words become extraordinary because they are in the right spot. The most obvious version is when one or more of the words is doing strange work.
You can read the piece in full by following this link.
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