Traditional story you may not heard before
I hear an allusion to a tradition of folksong or folk story in “Under leaves so green”, a tradition invoked as part of (perhaps) our more innocent myth-making and history-making in pubs and folk-clubs all over. If you feel this is so, the allusion may bring forth to your mind stories like “Who Killed Cock Robin”, and you may feel you are in the realm of folkloric riddle-me-ree with this poem.
The repetition of Merry and Pretty is effective. The first intensifies the merriness (in my view) that we see in the sparrow, as well as signing aurally to us that we are in the realm of nursery rhymes, or children’s chapbook poetry, but the second can so easily suggest sarcasm or contempt, the kind of contempt we encounter in children’s games, the contempt for a victim that the voice of innocence can so cruelly convey.
We could start that process at the very basic question of why people do write poems. Why go to all the trouble? Why not write ideas down always in prose? You may know that (apart from religious texts, legal texts, texts which record histories and economic documents) many of the early texts in our language – literary texts – tend to be poetry, rather than prose. As an example of the use of repetition and contrast within the structure and the language of a poem, is there anything better in the English tongue than this one?
Why would that be, do you think? What advantages are there to getting ideas down in poetic form? These are questions any student of literature may wish to spend some time mulling over.
With those questions placed gently at the back of our minds, we’ll look at some of the key decisions poets make as they write poems.
But in version 1, “Near my Bosom” is far from an accidental phrase, and it’s adjectival: in effect, though not in grammatical function, it can be said to work adverbially too, as it suggests the reason for the swift as arrow seeking, namely, the ardency of a lover. Elements of danger are included in the word “narrow”, and that also helps build up the picture of the sparrow as a mini-Errol Flynn!