Narative Poetry

I have always been ashamed of my taste in poetry because I have a tendency to prefer narrative to ... whatever the other is. I like to understand it and want to see a good story. This means that I prefer “Beowulf” to “The Hollow Men”, and the poems found in Tolkien’s Trilogy about stories to queer seemingly disconnected fragments of thought that I am somehow supposed to listen to and relate to in some way.
(I have the same taste in art, preferring artists like Parish and Pre-Raphaelites to abstract “masterpieces”) Lewis addresses the concept of epic in A Preface to Paradise Lost. And it has justified my love for this form of poetry:

The Technique of Primary Epic

And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
--Kipping

The most obvious characteristic of an oral technique is its continual use of stock words, phrases, or even whole lines. It is Important to realise at the outset that these are not a second-best on which the poets fall back when inspiration fails them: they are as frequent in the great passages as in the low ones. ...

It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised
too often or too much.

The unexpected tires us... You can not ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up for isolated effects; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, “good” lines is like looking for single “good” stones in a cathedral.
The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected. But in Epic which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or common place. The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors idd not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts which no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. ..this absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside poetry. A parallel, from a different sphere, would be turkey and plum pudding on Christmas Day; no one is surprised by the menu, but everyone recognises that it is not an ordinary fare.

So it is not pretension and lack of wit which makes poems like this, but it is just a different form of art which is not longer commonly understood or used. Of course I will allow that there is good and bad epic. But I am so excited that I am not shallow for enjoying this. In celebration of this here is a good Pome, nya.

..He was silent for some time, and then he began not to speak but to chant softly:

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinuviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her rainment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains cold.
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled
He walked alone and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam;
And forth he hastened, strong and fleet,
And grasped at moonbeams glistening.
Through woven woods in Elvenhome
She lightly fled on dancing feet,
And left him lonely still to roam
In the silent forest listening.

He heard there oft the flying sound
Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Or music welling underground,
In hidden hollows quavering.
Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,
And one by one with sighing sound
Whispering fell the beachen leaves
In wintry woodland wavering.

He sought her ever, wandering far
Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,
By light of moon and ray of star
In frosty heavens shivering.
Her mantle glinted in the moon,
As on a hill-top high and far
She danced, and at her feet was strewn
A mist of silver quivering.

When winter passed, she came again,
And her song released the sudden spring,
Like rising lark, and falling rain,
And melting water bubbling.
He saw the elven-flowers spring
About her feet, and healed again
He longed by her to dance and sing
Upon the grass untroubling.

Again she fled, but swift he came,
Tinuviel! Tinuviel!
He called her by her elvish name;
And there she halted listening.
One moment stood she, and a spell
His voice laid on her: Beren came,
And doom fell on Tinuviel
That in his arms lay glistening.

As Beren looked into her eyes
Within the shadows of her hair,
The trembling starlight of the skies
He saw there mirrored shimmering.
Tinuviel the elven-fair,
Immortal maiden elven-wise,
About him cast her shadowy hair
And arms like silver glimmering.

Long was the way that fate them bore,
O'er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
And woods of nightshade morrowless.
The Sundering Seas between them lay,
And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
In the forest singing sorrowless."

-- J R R Tolkien