Name : Eja Rizki Ansori

Nim : 21019036
Class : NK2-21

Question 4 follow-up

Arrest, delay and enhancement are three important stylistic features which are

situated at the interface between graphology and grammar. Grammatical arrest occurs

when a clause or smaller grammatical constituent is broken up at a line ending so as to

make us search for the remainder of the structure in the subsequent line (a “release”

element). The early appearance of “into” (the first component only of a prepositional

phrase) as a line-final item (“turns into / A breaker”) engenders such an arrest, and the

attendant perceptual recovery procedure tends rather to precipitate us into the following

line in order to complete the sense of this unit. Extension tends to be the reverse of arrest

in that it functions when a seemingly complete grammatical unit makes up a line ending

only for the following line to trigger a revision to its perceived structure. In “The

Comber”, the sequence “without my scent / In her nostrils” is a good example of

extension. Delay occurs when an anticipated element is withheld or suspended, such that

its retrieval requires progression through and beyond intervening elements. The delay of

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the reference to “The otter” is a good case in point: this element is anticipated as a

Complement of the verb “suspend”, yet the intrusion of an Adjunct, with its strengthened

grammatical parallels with the Subject of the same sentence (see above) and its status as a

line ending, tends to suspend and “squeeze out” the reference to the otter. When the

phrase eventually comes, it is accompanied with massive end-focus. That it is suspended

both gives it prominence and, in another sense, suspense: it is held from the reader to the

last possible moment.

Question 5 follow up

This rather more general question can be tackled in different ways, and there are many

features of the poem which could accommodated under this instruction. For example, it is

especially interesting to see how the moodless sequence noted in the commentary on

question 2 achieves further salience through the interplay of sound and vocabulary. Both

noun phrases are consolidated by word-initial consonantal alliteration (sea-spray

/raggedy rainbows) yet this pattern of harmonic combination is offset by other non-

harmonic phonetic features in the second noun phrase. More specifically, this is created

through contrasts both in vowel quality and in consonant length: with short vowels and

short, stop consonants in “raggedy” set against long vowels and diphthongs (/o:/ and /ei/)

and long fricatives and nasals (/z/ and /n/) in “rainbows”. Essentially, both contrast and

harmony are present in one phrase.

We can also narrow down the analysis here by breaking down the word “raggedy”

into its morphological constituents. It is derived from a kind of double morphological

suffixation (see B.2.3): the modifier “ragged” is combined with an additional (and,

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strictly speaking, superfluous) derivational suffix “y”. The quality imparted by “ragged”

is thus shored up further by the adjectival status conferred upon it by the addition of “y”.

The result is a neologism (a new word) which functions as a motif at two conceptual

levels. First of all, the “double” morphology it exhibits is suggestive perhaps of

developmental grammar in its echo of the child’s reduplicative “worser” and “wented” —

constructions so common in early syntax yet never found in adult grammar (see B.2.4).

Second, the word is part of an intertextual motif which, if not exactly retrievable from

the text of “The Comber” on its own, symbolises a patchwork quilt. This symbol

pervades the entire collection in which this poem appears.

Question 6 follow up

It is of course possible to rewrite the poem in many ways, and the amount of alteration

carried out will depend on how much stylistic detail has been uncovered in the original

analysis. Here is a rewrite, produced with the permission of the poet, which subverts

mostly the grammatical features identified in the commentaries above:

Very Much Not “The Comber”

Water and sunlight contain all the colours

And suspend the otter between me and Inishbofin,
A moment before the comber turns
Into a sea-spray, ragged rainbows breaker.
And thus we meet, without my scent in her nostrils,
Without the uproar of my presence
And without my unforgivable shadow on the sand,
Even if this is the only sound I make.

It is worth placing the two texts, the original and the altered, side by side just to to see

how much of the subtlety of the original has been lost in the transfer. Rewrites also draw

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attention to yet further patterns of interest in the original, and this is especially useful

when the real text is not especially “exuberant” stylistically. It is interesting to see how

rearranged structures at one level have a knock on effect with regard to other levels: the

grammatical break-up identified in commentary 2, for example, is entirely nullified once

the poem has been rearranged. And it is of course possible to fine-tune the transposition

even further so that other features identified in the analysis (the alliterative “sea spray”

pattern for instance) can be broken up. As it stands, the rewrite is simply not Longley,

and it hopefully serves as a mechanism for foregrounding the richer stylistic detail of the

original text.

© Paul Simpson