Rearranging word order for comprehension

Seamus Cooney

Unfortunately, experience shows that even some college students can benefit from some attention to the simple points I wish to make.

• Very simply, the point is that not all sophisticated writing, especially writing in verse, follows the most common word order or phrase order of spoken English.

  In spoken English we say "Mary hit the ball" or "We saw the movie" or "The novel was about the French Revolution," etc. that is, SUBJECT --> PREDICATE, and in the simplest predicates that means SUBJECT --> VERB --> OBJECT (abbreviated as SVO).

  THE PARTS OF A SENTENCE
  Subject	Predicate
  Noun phrase (noun + modifiers)	Verb	Object
  The boy	hit	the ball.
  The cat	sat on the mat.
  We	enjoyed the movie, despite the sex scenes.
  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame	is lust in action.
  Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes	shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

  We can handle many variations on this order without any trouble in the spoken language. But in the written language, sophisticated writers use more elaborate structures, expecting readers to be able to handle them. Many older writers come from an age when Latin was studied in every school, and consequently young readers were trained to notice what was the subject and what the object of verbs, how verbs agreed in person and number with their subjects, and how case was not (in Latin) altered by position. ("The boy bit the dog" and "The dog bit the boy" are not synonymous in English, but in Latin "Puer mordet canem" and "Canem mordet puer" mean exactly the same thing.)

  Now for some more complicated examples. Shakespeare writes (sonnet 73):

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold
  When ....

  And Gray write:

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene
  The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

  When we understand these sentences we mentally rearrange them like this.

  Subject	Predicate
  Noun phrase (noun + modifiers)	Verb	Object
  thou	mayst in me behold	That time of year.
  The dark unfathomed caves of ocean	bear	Full many a gem of purest ray serene.

  So when it comes to longer and more complex sentences, readers must carry out the same kind of mental rearranging. If you're listening to the way a poem sounds as you read, your voice will often help you grasp the syntactic structure. Pay attention to punctuation and never think a sentence has ended just because there's a line break.

  Th'applause of listening senates to command,
  The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
  To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
  And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes
  
  Their lot forbade ...

  If you are reading this out carefully, you will notice that line after line gives you in parallel structure a series of four noun phrases, and as you go you'll know to expect a verb still to come. (As you read, you can't know whether the noun phrases will turn out to be used as the subject of the coming verb or as its objects.) Thus you will sustain the pitch of your voice as each line ends, while reading slowly enough and with enough of a pauses at each line ending to let the rhyme be heard, and as you come to the end of the stanza you'll know the sentence still awaits its clinching verb. Are the noun phrases the subject or the object of that verb?

  Subject	Predicate
  Noun phrase (noun + modifiers)	Verb	Object
  Their lot	forbade	Th'applause of listening senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes
  But Knowledge	did ne'er unroll	to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time.
  you With your fresh thoughts	can you care for?	Leaves, like the things of man

  (That last example is from G. M. Hopkins's "Spring and Fall.")