COMPRESSION: PART II—ARTICLES [a, an, the]

Articles fulfill a useful function in English. They serve as placeholders, alerting readers that nouns or noun-functioning words, serving as subject matter for utterances, are coming, if not immediately—as in “the book”—then after an intervening adjective or two—“the red book,” “the new red book.” They alert us to pay attention. If we miss the noun, we may miss the meaning as well. Other kinds of words may also announce nouns, usually possessive pronouns—“my new red book,” “your new red book”—or demonstrative pronouns—“this new red book,” “that new red book.”

Unlike possessives, which indicate ownership or belonging, or demonstratives, which act to point to a specific thing, articles carry little direct meaning. Some nuances are possible. “The” indicates a certain one within an undefined group: “the book”; while “a” indicates an undefined one within an undefined group: “a book,” any old book. If the noun begins with a consonant, we use “a”; if it begins with a vowel, we use “an,” to make pronunciation easier: “an apron,” “an uncle,” “an ocean.”

[Curiously, the first two words originally began with “n.” The earlier middle English forms were “napron” and “nuncle” (preserved as an archaism in Shakespeare’s King Lear). But gradually the “n” split from the word, slid across the page, and joined the indefinite article “a” to become “an,” and our pronunciation and spelling of the words altered accordingly. Fascinating.]

Other languages have different ways of identifying nouns in sentences, usually by specific endings that not only identify a word as a noun but also tell how it functions in the sentence. Some function entirely without articles, allowing these endings alone to signal nouns. Originally, English used such endings—declensions—in much the same way as ancient Latin. The Angle-Saxon word for ‘stone’ was, for example, stan. But a thousand years or so ago, if someone was killed “by means of a” stone, that could be signified, not by a long phrase such as we would have to use, but by a single letter: stane.

The point of this for poetry is simply that our ingrained sense that nouns must be preceded by articles can easily spill over into our lines, sometimes creating bulky,  unnecessarily wordy poetry. These lines from an early poem of mine seemed, at the time, clear, concise, precise, and artful.

              Watching
              on the fractured rocky shore,
              immersed in misty coolness
              boiling through the heat
              of day,
              he stared into the fog
              as it moved
              in indiscriminate fluffs
              of ragged white
              upon the surface of the lake.

              Clouds like darkened petals
              swirling in pools of indigo
              glided through the silences
              between the flowing stars and moon
              and his probing eyes.

I would still argue that, even though they were written a quarter of a century ago, they have a flow, a musicality that I appreciate. However, from the perspective of that quarter-century, I would also argue that they waste a good deal of time in creating poetry.

Combining comments made earlier about prepositions with those above, it might be instructive to simply count instances of structure words in the passage. Boldface indicates preposition, boldface italics indicate articles:

               watching
               on the fractured rocky shore,
               immersed in misty coolness
               boiling through the heat
               of day,
               he stared into the fog
               as it moved
               in indiscriminate fluffs
               of ragged white
               upon the surface of the lake.

              Clouds like darkened petals
              swirling in a pool of indigo
              glided through the silences
              between the flowing stars and moon
              and his probing eyes.

A casual glance suggests that there are a lot of boldface words. Now for a little mathematics. The passage has 60 words, a nice even number. Of the sixty, eight are articles: the (7) and a (1)—at least they give the images a slight sense of the specific. Still, 13% of the passage is used primarily to indicate oncoming nouns, most often without intervening adjectives. There are 13 prepositions; 22% of the words primarily indicate relationships between verbs and nouns or between one noun and another.

Added together, these structure words account for 35% of the entire passage—over one-third of the words do not strictly carry identifiable meaning. And if we add the two conjunctions—and—that percentage climbs to 38%. Or conversely, the percentage of words that provide clear action or image amounts to 63%—less than two-thirds.

This is not to argue that every poem should be subjected to a mathematical counting of parts of speech, or even that all of the occurrences in these lines are weak, ineffective, or problematical. But if poetry is art-with-words, and one purpose of that art is to create image and thereby to stimulate powerful responses within readers, knowing how many words within a poem cannot contribute to either of those ends may prove helpful.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that instead of receiving payment for words (a rare enough event), poets must pay to use words. Clearly, the price exacted for the passage we’ve just read would be unnecessarily high. So how could we streamline it—concentrating for the moment on articles.

OPTION: ELIMINATION
English is built on embedded principles of redundancy. For example, we immediately recognize books as plural because of its final letter; yet it is perfectly proper in English to provide a second, sometimes a third plural-signpost when we use such words. We might say, “I bought six books,” or “I bought 300 books”; or more to the point, “The two books fall to the floor.” For this reason, many non-native speakers, whose first languages may not contain articles or allow such redundancy, might feel quite comfortable eliminating some of the plural markers in the last sentence and simply say “two book fall to floor”—non-idiomatic English but a literal translation from the native language.

Articles—part of that redundancy—indicate approaching nouns, and we are programmed by conventional usage to include them as often as possible. As poets, however, we can frequently eliminate them without hindering what we wish to say.

Let’s look at another line: “The shadow of twilight seemed to outline the tree.” Nine words—two articles, one preposition, an infinitive-making to, three nouns, and two verbs or quasi-verbs.

With a bit of focus, we can eliminate several words right off. Twilight implies shadow—we probably don’t need both, and of the two twilight is more evocative, more specific. Seemed as verb is weak; unless there is an underlying sense that what ‘seems’ really isn’t, it wastes syllables. Besides, there is a perfectly useful verb in the sentence already: outline.

In one step, we’ve compressed the line radically. Twilight does not usually take an article, so the drops out, and we have: “Twilight outlined the tree.” Fewer than half the words

OPTION: PLURALS
If we wish, we can remove the remaining article through a simple expedient: English plurals often do not require articles. “Twilight outlined trees.” If that seems too bleak, too blunt, we have the option of filling the now-empty noun-placeholder before trees with a more meaningful word: “Twilight outlined dark trees.” Four words, all of them carrying meaning.

Then, of course, we could work further, replacing admittedly boring words with more image-forming, more specific, more concrete terms: “Twilight limned stark oaks,” or “Twilight brushed weeping willows,” or “Twilight scorched saguaros.” Or whatever the poem required.

OPTION: MORE SUBSTANTIVE WORDS.
By far the most effective way to deal with excess articles (and the prepositions that frequently accompany them) is to substitute substantive words for the weaker ones. Another example, this time a haiku:

               the light of the moon
               falls upon leafless branches—
               it makes me feel old

Idea: acceptable. Imagery: woefully lacking. Compression: laughable. We have the traditional seventeen syllables; but five of them, nearly one-third the total, are taken up with articles and prepositions. Again, a weak verb in makes. And most damning, the poem simple asserts without giving readers an opportunity to enter and imagine.

Now, compression. “The light of the moon” (five words) becomes “moonlight.” “Falls upon” (weak verb + preposition) could be replaced by a single, more vigorous word, possibly “twists.” Now the first line—the first five syllables—might read, “moonlight twists leafless,” and we are almost through the second line of the original version.

“Branches” only takes two syllables. If we wish to keep the 5-7-5 structure, we now have five new syllable spaces into which we can place image-forming words. Since all former prepositions have disappeared, let’s allow one in at this point…purposefully:

               moonlight twists leafless
               branches into icicles—

Acceptable. But what about that flat final line. Yes, the image might make me feel old, but neither “makes” nor “feel” works strongly enough now to balance “twists.” Keeping the meaning but communicating it through an image, we might get: “fingers rake white hair.” And the poem now reads:

               moonlight twists leafless
               branches into icicles—
               fingers rake white hair

Perhaps not a great haiku but certainly far more effective than the original.

PLEASE NOTE—even though this essay purports to focus on articles, it is impossible to ignore the fact that frequently multiple articles in a line accompany multiple prepositions; and they, in turn nearly always trigger weak verbs and flat nouns. It is not just a matter of going through a piece and removing or replacing a, an, or the. In most cases, excess articles—and prepositions—merely act as symptoms.

Now, back to the lines I cited earlier:

                 Watching
                 on the fractured rocky shore,
                 immersed in misty coolness
                 boiling through the heat
                 of day,
                 he stared into the fog
                 as it moved
                 in indiscriminate fluffs
                 of ragged white
                 upon the surface of the lake.

                Clouds like darkened petals
                swirling in pools of indigo
                glided through the silences
                between the flowing stars and moon
                and his probing eyes.

Some possible changes seem obvious: in the lines “glided through the silences/between the flowing stars and moon,” both articles can simply drop out, leaving: ”glided through silence/between flowing stars and moon” (“silence” sounds better and makes more sense than the earlier plural).

“On the fractured rocky shore” is wordy—and the more interesting and visual noun is not the generalized “shore” but “rock,” which has been turned into an adjective. Restore it to its position as a noun, make it plural, and a five-word line (one preposition, one article) becomes a three-word line: “on fractured rocks.” That the rocks rest along the shore becomes obvious later, when we see the “surface of the lake.”

Perhaps the most enjoyable exercise would be revising these lines:

               he stared into the fog
               as it moved
               in indiscriminate fluffs
               of ragged white
               upon the surface of the lake

which now sound repetitious and bulky. “The fog” requires the next three lines as description. Making “fog” plural would remove the article, but the real problem goes deeper. There are simply too many words, too many prepositions, too many articles for the lines to generate interest.

So… “fog” is white, it cannot appear below the surface of a lake, it is by definition indiscriminate in that its edged are blurred and indistinct. Perhaps all we really need is;

              he stared as
              ragged fluffs curled
              upon the lake

or something similar. Then, if desired,

               he watched ragged fluffs curl
               upon the lake


One benefit of compressing this radically is that doing so forces underlying meanings to surface, to be tested for clarity, logic, precision, accuracy. And then, once we’ve penetrated the tangle of words, removed deadwood, and structured the poem’s core, we can build onto that basic structure as needed/desired and expand through image, metaphor, symbol. Not all poems are skeletal; not all poetic styles can adapt to sparse words/phrases dropping like rocks down the left-hand margin.

But even in more leisurely poems, or in metered poetry where articles and prepositions can function usefully in creating rhythms of stress, challenging, eliminating, transforming, or replacing empty syllables will almost always strengthen the final piece.

INVITATION: If you are interested in a kind of lab-practical examination, please feel free to perform needed surgery on my 60 words. Try to reduce the passage in half, horizontally (word count per line) and vertically (line count). Then IM me your results. I would be interested to see what sense you might find in the lines.