This page makes use of an innovation of mine called 'dual-purpose text.' Click anywhere in the text below (not in the white space around the text) to get to the top of the page very quickly and easily - there's no need to find a separate top button or to scroll. Text links are shown as underlined but not in colour.

Linkage by meaning is not a completely new technique but I offer a technique which is new - linking the final word or phrase in different lines of poetry by meaning instead of sound (the use of rhyme), and using 'meaning schemes' to complement rhyme schemes. Hebrew poetry - in the book of Psalms, for example - uses a different method of linking by meaning, parallelism, a well-established term in stylistics. The reference here is to whole lines. In synonymous parallelism, for example, the second line repeats essentially the idea in the first line, as in Psalm 3:1. 'Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me.' (Many thanks to Michael Peverett for communicating to me information about Hebrew poetry.)

These are some of the ways in which the final word or final phrase in one line of a poem may be related to the final word or phrase in another line:
(1) they may be similar in meaning
(2) they may be opposite in meaning
(3) they may be related in an oblique way, the equivalent of off-rhyme
(4) they may be related by some important context. For example, in the poem discussed below, the words ‘danger’ and ‘valley’ are connected by the familiar words of the 23rd Psalm, ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ I refer to this as ‘linkage by context.’
Alternatively,
(5) the line endings may be part of a progression or modulation.

Using meaning patterns rather than sound patterns a wide variety of subtle and resonant (and dramatic) effects are possible. Highly organized meaning schemes can be used, and have the advantages of rhyme schemes, such as the satisfactions of creating and finding pattern. (These processes should not be regarded as completely separate: we may discover the pattern we have created.) There are meaning equivalents of rhymed couplets - the first and the second line, the third and the fourth line, have a meaning linkage - and there are meaning schemes which are the equivalent of the rhyme schemes abba, cddc, and so on.

Most of the poems I have written using this technique are superficially less striking than many of my other poems. In this case, diction is not as revolutionary as the form (unobtrusive though the form is in these poems.) In this poem, written in the new meaning pattern, the meaning scheme is obviously AA BB... (I use upper case letters for the analysis of poems in a meaning scheme, lower case letters for the analysis of poems in a rhyme scheme.) The words ‘danger’ and ‘valley’ exhibit ‘linkage by context.’ The context are the well-known words of the 23rd psalm. The final line is a quotation from Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself.’ The poem is semi-fictional.

I emerged from a winter without much snow
as unrefreshed as from a night without much sleep,
exhausted but wary, too conscious of the danger
of falling. I looked upon summer as the valley
between two mountains: the effort in climbing
and descending, the way so steep.
My mind was often quite blank. Not the inviting blankness
of Walt Whitman’s open road but the dim sense
that I could not even make something of my weakness,
that the capacity to exult despite every setback
was a reflex I had lost -
'These so, these irretrievable.’

(37s) This is the timing I recommend for this poem.

The poem is written in 'meaning-couplets.' So, 'snow' is linked with 'sleep' and 'danger' with 'valley.'

To the right is a poem exhibiting progression or modulation. The progression is dual: the seasons on the left, times of day on the right. The poem is obviously very simple, or deceptively simple. It offers the reader the literary equivalent of psychoanalytic 'free association,' 'a method of exploring a person's unconscious by eliciting...thoughts that are associated with key words provided by a psychoanalyst.' (Collins English Dictionary.) The poem obviously should not be read quickly. There has to be time to summon up images, memories. Timings are given for many of the poems on this site, including the poem above, but it would be difficult to give a timing for this poem. The poem qualifies as pictorial poetry - the black of the last line, in the font Arial Black, represents, of course, the winter night. Other appropriate colours are chosen for the other lines.

There's a progression on both the left and right halves of the poem: from earlier to later times in the year on the left, earlier to later times in the day on the right, but there's also tension between these progressions and the intensity of light, which increases and then decreases: from dawn to the maximum of a summer's day, and then decreases through dusk to the minimum of winter night. The poem, then, uses tensile form.

Basil Lam wrote that ‘Nothing can be more inhibiting to the artist than total liberty, a truth recognized by those twentieth-century composers who from Schoenberg onwards have imposed arbitrary disciplines of one kind or another on themselves to be able to compose at all.’ (‘Beethoven String Quartets.’) Pattern by meaning is a discipline which may well help to bring into being a large body of poetry, but it is not an arbitrary discipline. It is grounded in the nature of language.

Thematic word linkage
The use of end-meanings, the counterpart of end-rhymes, is not the only way in which linkage by meaning can be achieved. In thematic word linkage, words are linked unsystematically and may be widely separated. A careful reader will notice the linkage of these words and will appreciate their ability to consolidate the poem. Often, there is repetition of the same word, which is a characteristic word of the poet.

Use of thematic word linkage can easily be found in the poetry of the past. One instance is the use of ‘sense’ in The Prelude, which has been analyzed by William Empson in ‘The Structure of Complex Words.’ Empson notes of Wordsworth’s use of the word that ‘in the great majority of uses he makes it prominent by putting it at the end of the line...’ Empson counts these uses: ‘Taking Mr. de Selincourt’s edition of the 1805 manuscript, I found 35 uses of sense at the end of a line and 12 elsewhere; the (posthumous) 1850 text has 31 uses at the end of a line and 11 elsewhere.’

In his essay, ‘The Development of Yeats’s Sense of Reality,’ (‘Southern Review’, vol. 7, Winter 1942) Randall Jarrell compares the words which Yeats uses particularly frequently in his early and in his late poetry. The lists which he provides are extensive, but as examples, in the earlier poems of Yeats we find ‘lonely’, ‘gentle’, ‘tender’, ‘quiet’, ‘weary’, ‘desolate’. In the late poems we find ‘lunatic’, ‘mad’, ‘frenzied’, ‘violent’, ‘joy’, ‘hate’. Lists of this kind, containing the characteristic words of a poet, would be important in the analysis of pattern by meaning and thematic word linkage.

The poet, then, has the choice of a formal, regular scheme, or a scheme which is free and irregular: pattern by meaning may be formal or non-formal. I discuss later other cases where the poet has a similar choice, in connection with rhyme, verse paragraphing and line length. It is important that these varied possibilities should remain within the resources of poetry, that none of them should be regarded as unavailable.