CLA/WLIT 196
Ancient Lyric Poetry

ANCIENT POETICS: TERMS, DEVICES, TECHNIQUES

The following is a list of devices, term, techniques and methodological issues bearing on ancient Near Eastern poetics. It is not exhaustive, but does include everything that has been raised in class.

B. R. Foster provides a useful introduction to poetic devices in Akkadian poetry here. Much of his discussion is relevant to other Near Eastern poetry.

For some examples of how to unravel passages of dense verbal artistry, which incorporate several poetic techniques simultaneously, see here.


Adunaton (or Adynaton)

Greek for "something impossible". The effect can sometimes be simply amusing or riddling (for instance the repertoire of impossible stunts boasted of in "The Jester"). Often it is used rhetorically to emphasise the improbability of something else, as when Wayne says "Yeah, and Monkeys are going to fly out of my butt"; or "Hell will freeze over sooner". See examples.


Anaphora

Repetition of a word or short phrase at the beginning of successive verses or clauses. "This structure enhances the sense of the line even as it foregrounds the larger enumerative sequence". Anaphora may thus be seen as one form of parallelism which uses the repetitions to bring the metrical and syntactic frames into alignment" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.). See example here, here.


Antithesis

"The juxtaposition of contraries: the contrast of ideas, sharpened or pointed up by the use of words of opposite or conspicuously different meaning in contiguous or parallel phrases or clauses" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.).

"Contraries are easily understood and even more so when placed side by side, and also because antithesis resembles a syllogism, for it is by putting opposite conclusions side by side that you refute one of them" (Rhetoric 3.9.8).

Antithesis is often combined with other devices, for instance parallelism, as a form of variation. See examples here and here.


Apostrophe

Direct address of a god, goddess, temple, city, etc.


Chiasmus and Palindrome

The word chiasmus comes from the Greek letter chi (X). It is "a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second" (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, s.v.). This may be schematized as A:B:B:A. It may be applied words, phrases and sounds. A chiastic arrangement is sometimes extended to more than two elements, in which case one might call it a palindrome (from Gk., "running backwards"). However we have seen some truly palindromic figures involving an odd number of elements (A:B:C:D:C:B:A).Examples of chiasmus and palindrome from our poems

"The chiasmus may be manifested on any level of the text and or (often) on multiple levels at once: phonological (sound-patterning), lexical or morphological (word repetition), syntactical (phrase- or clause- construction), or semantic / thematic" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.).


Colon (plural cola)

In relation to Greek meter, M. L. West defines a colon as "a single metrical phrase of not more than about twelve syllables" (Greek Meter, p. 5). In Hebrew and Ugaritic poetry the terms bicolon and tricolon are used, referring to the groups of two or three verses (respectively) within which the technique of parallelism is exercised.


Ecphrasis (or Ekphrasis)

Detailed description of some object—temple, artwork, weapon—which has some remarkable quality which makes it worthy of the description: precious materials, ornate workmanship, etc. A famous example is the description of Achilles' shield and its decoration in the Iliad. The device must have appealed to wealthy patrons who liked to hear their valuables described in loving detail, like a king in his counting house. It recalls the detailed inventories of precious goods that one finds in royal correspondence and archival texts of the Bronze Age. One might extend the term to cover the detailed descriptions of ritual action that one finds in the Tale of Aqhat. See examples from out texts here.


Epithets

"An adjective or adjectival phrase, typically attached to a proper name, used for distinctive purposes in poetry, these purposes most often having to do with allusion, connotation, repetition, and meter". (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.).

Epithets like swift-footed Achilles, or Cloud-gathering Zeus In many cases these can often be considered 'dead', that is, they have become so conventional that their use is knee-jerk, and adds nothing to our understanding of a narrative. Especially in Greek epic poetry (Homer, et al.), the criterion for using one epithet over another was simply to satisfy the requirements of the poetic meter (and was thus a component of composition by formula). There are other cases, however, where an epithet seems 'alive', the poet deploying it deliberately for some specific narrative effect. Examples of 'live' epithet from our poems here.


Eponym / Eponymous Ancestor

In traditional poetry an eponym (eponymous ancestor) is a mythological figure who stands for some historical city or people, "upon which" (Gk. ep-) he or she bestows his or her "name" (Gk. onym-). Ashur for instance was the eponymous god of the city Ashur and the Assyrian kingdom. See for instance Genesis 10 which in enumerating the descendants of Noah, correlates the various peoples of the ancient Near East into a mythological genealogy; in some cases tribal / ethnic connections which are known to be historical are accurately preserved, in others not.


Etiology (or Aetiology)

A mythological explanation of something familiar from real life whose real origins were long forgotten. For example in Atrahasis the mother goddess, when making  the first humans, performs "for the first time" actions which were a familiar part of the rituals of midwifery. The Atrahasis also offers an etiology for the existence of mankind and why society is structured the way it is. Genesis 9 offers an etiology for Hebrew dietary laws (
3: Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 
4: Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 
5: For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man").


Formula

"A group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea . . . The thrift of a system lies in the degree in which it is free of phrases which, having the same metrical value and expressing the same idea, could replace each other" (M. Parry, Making of Homeric Verse [1987 < 1930], 272, 276). This is the famous definition of Milman Parry, who first identified the formula (in his definition) as the essential mechanism which let Greek epic singers (like Homer) improvise their poems, a process often called  'composition in performance'. It is a key feature of the Homeric Kunstsprache.

Parry's definition, based on ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian epic, has been adapted (with various modifications) to the study of other poetic traditions which are either truly oral (hence captured through audio-recording or dictation) or "oral-derived"—composed in writing by a poet more or less steeped in oral tradition and its techniques.

There is evidence of formularity in much of the ancient Near Eastern poetry we have read. S. B. Parker offers the following summary of formularity in Ugaritic narrative poetry (like the Tale of Aqhat): "Poetic formulas include standard epithets for common characters, including gods; standard expressions for the introduction a direct speech, for a character's arrival at or departure from a place, for the passage of time, and so on; and standard pairs of words or phrases used in parallel cola. Many formulas constitute a complete colon and even appear in pairs or larger clusters of cola" (Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, p. 2 f.).

The device of parallelism may be viewed as a type of formularity, since it exhibits a limited number of verse forms (bicolon, tricolon, etc.) within which a small number of common word/idea patterns were deployed (abc, abd, adb etc.).

Sometimes one finds extended passages repeated verbatim (as in the Tale of Aqhat). These may be seen as a kind of formula or formularty at the larger level of theme.

See examples from our texts here.


Henotheism

Greek: "One-God-Ism". Not to be confused with monotheism. Within a polytheistic system, henotheism is the tendency to focus on some one god. In the Sumerian divine hymns it was normal to treat the god being addressed as supreme (i.e. equal to Enlil) in that moment. The word might also be applied to the phenomenon of each Sumerian city having its unique patron god, without disavowing the existence of the rest of the pantheon.


Incubation

The ritual act of sleeping in a temple or other sacred space for the purpose of receiving a dream-communication from a god. The Tale of Aqhat may begin with a ritual of incubation.


Kunstsprache

German for "art-language", typically applied to Homer (K. Meister, Die homerische Kunstsprache, Lepizig 1921). The idea that the vocabulary, phraseology and various verbal techniques used in a given poetic tradition constitute a language in their own right, apart from the culture's spoken language. This can be quite literally true for a traditional poet like Homer, whose poetic language largely an amalgam of different dialects (Ionic, Aeolic and Mycenaean), with many archaic words fossilized alongside linguistic forms that were never spoken, generated by the poets for metrical convenience; at the same time the Homeric singers were perfectly 'fluent' in this art-language, able to compose songs in it spontaneously as though it were a mother-tongue. The term may also be used more generally of the "artificial" aspect of any poetic language.


Metaphor and Simile (Vehicle, Tenor, Ground)

The analysis of metaphorical comparisons in terms tenor, vehicle and ground was established by I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). Tenor is 'the thing meant', that which is to be described by the metaphor; vehicle is the image chosen to describe 'the thing meant'; and ground is what the two have in common, what justifies using the vehicle to describe the tenor. For example, in the ANE metaphor of a destroyed city as a ravaged woman, the tenor is the destroyed city; the vehicle is the woman; the ground is that both may be seen as sacred spaces violated by hostile entry or possession.

For Richards, metaphor was not a simple decorative device. The "transaction" between tenor and vehicle "results in a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction . . . vehicle and tenor in cooperation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either". Metaphor is “the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them. There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-surreptitious method by which a greater variety of elements can be wrought into the fabric of the experience. . . what is needed for the wholeness of an experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an excuse by which what is needed may be smuggled in . . . [those] who make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them a mystery”. Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924), 240 f.
 
"[Metaphor] alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius. For the rght use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances" (Aristotle, Rhetoric).

"Metaphor creates meanings not readily accessible  through literal language . . . metaphor invokes a transaction between words and things, after which the words, things and thoughts are not quite the same. Metaphor, from these perspectives, is not a decorative figure, but a transformed literalism, meaning precisely what it says" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.).

Sumerian poetry is very rich in its use of metaphor. Metaphors are often mixed, and the interaction of tenors and vehicles can be very complex. See examples from our texts here.


Myth

This is a very complicated area!  One much-quoted definition by W. Burkert, one of the leading classical scholars of myth, ritual and religion:

“A complex of traditional tales in which significant human situations are united in fantastic combinations to form a polyvalent semiotic system which is used in multifarious ways to illuminate reality" (W. Burkert, Greek Religion).

A nice concise formulation in relation to Sumerian literature: “A symbiosis of narration, speculation and ritual” (J. Black, Reading Sumerian Poetry)


Parallelism

General: "The repetition of identical or similar syntactic patterns in adjacent phrases, clauses or sentences; the matching patterns are usually doubled, but more extensive iteration is not rare. The core of a parallelism is syntactic; when syntactic frames are set in equivalence by parallelism, the elements filling those frames are brought into alignment as well, especially on the lexical (= verbal / semantic) level . . . two halves of a parallel unit [have] an augmentative relationship: the first element is assertive and the second has the force 'not only that, but also this' . . . Whatever the particular ways that parallelism is disposed in verse discourse, schemes of equivalence, often associated with metaphor, juxtaposition, and near repetition (see variatio), take on distinctive force in parallelistic context. Gestures of signification and logic are represented and carried out in ways that often elude linearly based discourse" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [1993], s.v.)
.

In relation to Akkadian poetry: "Repeated formulation of the same message such that subsequent encodings of it restate, expand, complete, contrast, render more specific, complement, or carry further the first message" (Foster, Before the Muses, 14).

In relation to Ugaritic poetry: "Paralellism, familiar from most biblical poetry, refers to the juxtaposition of phrases or clauses in usually two, sometimes three, and occaisonally more, poetic cola of similar syntactic structure and/or semantic import" (S. B. Parker [ed.], Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, p. 2). A good comparison of Ugaritic and Hebrew poetic paralellism is in W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan).

Parallelism provides a setting for the counterpoint of repetition and variation. We should not underestimate the aesthetic value of the repetition, which can have a hypnotic, incantatory quality, serving to build dramatic tension and providing the crucial 'drone' to the material which does change. See examples of parallelism from our poems


Poetics

The words poet, poetic, poetry and poesy all come from the Greek root poi-, "to make", one of the several metaphors drawn from the world of hand-crafts that the Greeks used to describe verbal artistry (similar metaphors were supplied by weaving and carpentry). Poetics is the English rendering of ta poêtika, "poetic matters", which Aristotle used as a collective term for all the ingredients of poetic composition. Closely related is the Latin term ars poetica ("the poetic art"), which comes from the title of Horace's own treatise on poetics; in modern usage ars poetica can refer to the particular poetic program pursued by a given artist. In classical scholarship one often sees expression like "the poetics of desire", just a flashy way of referring (in this example) to how erotic matters are dealt with by a given poet.


Repetition

Repetition of poetic material is a very common device in ancient poetry, and inititally hard to appreciate for those who are used to the  economical, progressive narrative style of modern literature. Repetition occurs in several registers. Epithets involve one kind of repetition, single words or phrases repeaed as and when a given god or hero is "onstage". Formula more generally also involves repetition.The compositional device of parallelism relies heavily on repetition of words and phrases, but this also serves to highlight the variations of word or idea that are gradually introduced. Repetition is often found in in connection with traditional themes, since these can crystallize into set pieces.


Themes

Ancient narrative poetry, like Greek epic, often draws on a repertoire of traditional themes; these  both delighted the audience as being favorite subject matter, and made the poet's job of composition easier. Typical themes include: arming scenes, journeys, banquets, births, marriages, lamentations, appeal to gods, battles, and descriptions of precious objects (ecphrasis).

Themes sometimes gave rise to miniature set-pieces which could be repeated verbatim to stretch out a story; this may be seen as a type of extended formula. As with the repeated material of parallelism, however, one should not underestimate the dramatic impact of this kind of repetition.


Tricolon

Literally "three members" (see colon). The term is used to describe trinary parallelism in Ugaritc poetry.

It can also describe a tripartite sentence, the three clauses often coordinated by parallel construction (e.g. Caesar's famous "I came, I saw, I conquered"). When the three members are of increasing length and/or importance, it is called a tricolon crescendo; the opposite is a tricolon decrescendo.

We may extend the term to describe any "composition by threes", often in connection with repetition at the level of theme. This is a familiar device in story- and joke-telling. We have seen it, for instance, in Noah's sending out of three birds, which involves a crescendo in that the final bird does not return. In the Tale of Aqhat there are numerous instances, as when Daniel calls upon Baal to break the wings of three different falcons; here too there is crescendo, since he finally finds the remains of Aqhat in the stomach of the last bird.


Variatio: Putting it all together

Ancient poets often strove to avoid the mechanical use of the poetic devices listed below, combining them to create complex verbal textures, and manipulating the conventions to foil our expectations. All of this falls under what the Roman gramarians called variatio ("variation"). For example chiasmus can be varied by using synonyms, equivalent phrases, or even antonyms (instead of the same word twice). The two elements complement or contrast with each other to open up a larger semantic field. Similarly parallelism can be varied through antitheses (negation of the expected element), or by introducing further themes which are "interlocked" with the original material. Examples of densely varied passages from our poems.


Zeugma

Zeugma (Gk. "yoking") is when "two connected substantives are used jointly with the same verb (or adjective), [even] though this is strictly appropirate to only one of them" (H. W. Smyth, Greek Grammar, p. 683. See examples from our texts here.