PERSONA AND TONE--S. Sreekumar

PERSONA  AND TONE

 

PERSONA

ORIGIN OF THE TERM

 

The term derives from the Latin word persōna, meaning “mask.” It reached Literature from the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (the Swiss psychoanalyst and founder of Analytical Psychology).  Jung uses ‘persona’ in contrast to ‘anima’, which, according to him, represents the real nature of a person.  ‘Persona’ is the mask that hides ‘anima’, real nature. It is a “façade presented to satisfy the demands of a situation or environment” and does not represent the real personality of the individual. Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon defines persona as a “functional complex” that “comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience”.

 

In Literary Studies, ‘persona’ was used in the beginning to mean a mask worn by actors to indicate the role they played. This mask was at once a protective covering and an asset when mixing with other people. In lyric poetry, the narrator is the persona. There is a general tendency to equate the narrator with the poet. Nothing could be further from the truth. The poet may adopt the voice of another gender, race, species, or material object. As the narrator, he/she may assume a perspective entirely different from his/her own. But in the poem, he/she will appear as the implied speaker, the ‘I’.

 

The mutually incompatible relationship that often exists between the narrator and the poet may be well- illustrated by a close analysis of the poem Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning. In this darkly Gothic poem, the I is possibly a psychopath (Terry Eagleton). The narrator describes how coolly he decides to strangle his trusting partner when she has become mine, mine. He nonchalantly declares:        

 

 

                                                  I found

             A thing to do, and all her hair

           In one long yellow string I wound

           Three times her little throat around,

            And strangled her.

 

 

    The ‘off-handedness’ of that thing to do, ‘as though the speaker might equally well have chosen to trim his moustache, is especially chilling’ (Eagleton). The speaker is confident that she felt no pain. He opened her eyelids and saw not a stain in her blue eyes. He untightened the plait of hair and saw that her cheek was blush with his kisses. 

 

 

                I propped her head up as before,

           Only, this time my shoulder bore

           Her head, which droops upon it still:

           ……………………………………………………

           And thus we sit together now,

           And all night long we have not stirred,

               

 

    He sat with the dead woman 'all night long',

 

                And yet God has not said a word!

 

 

    The narrator expected God to punish him for the gruesome deed he committed. He is disappointed that God has not said or done anything. He has deliberately tempted God, but God has remained silent.

 

 

    The poem poses complex challenges for the reader—chief among them being the identity of the narrator. We know that Porphyria is the name of the murdered woman. Hence her lover—I— must be a male speaker. But there is nothing in the poem that suggests so. It is a hypothesis we bring to the piece to make sense of it, says Eagleton. The ‘I’ might as well be a woman, but Browning was a Victorian, and a Victorian poet writing about lesbian love is unthinkable. In a lighter tone, Eagleton concludes that the only thing we can understand from textual evidence is that the ‘I’ of the poem is not a giraffe simply because giraffes do not wind people’s hair three times around their throats and strangle them.

 

 

Eagleton’s attempt here is to draw our attention to the complexities involved in things we take for granted. Identifying the persona of a poem is a task beset with many problems. It is so even for the native speakers of the language. The reader’s failure to detect the identity will result in a misreading or an inadequate reading of the work, as Wilfred L. Guerin points out in A Handbook of Critical Approaches. The gravity of the challenge is felt more in lyric poetry than in any other genre.

 

Guerin cites the example of Andrea del Sarto, another poem by Browning. The reader must realize that “Andrea is addressing a woman and that they are among the paintings at a certain time of day. Consequently, it is even more important to know what Andrea feels about his inadequacy as a painter and as a man….” Andrea is in the twilight of his career and his marriage. His wife, Lucrezia, seems more attached to her ‘cousin’ (probably her lover). She owes him gambling debts. The weary Andrea gives her money and promises to sell his paintings to settle her debts. She goes away with her ‘cousin’ while he sits quietly dreaming of Heaven. “It is a quiet poem, the musings of a defeated man. Both in language and form, it is modest and calm”.

 

This simple comprehension of the poem must pose no challenge to the reader. But poems are complex, and in Browning, we must always expect the unexpected. The ‘modest and calm’ surface of the poem is deceptive. It says many things about Andrea but says a lot more about Browning. Readers cannot afford to overlook the autobiographical elements when discussing the narrative voice in a Work.

 

Andrea seems to represent the insecurities of Browning. Readers must remember that Browning did not enjoy public success till late in his career. Many critics considered his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the far greater poet. It was so at the time of the publication of Men and Women. Though their marriage prospered on mutual respect and support, it is still possible that Browning might have felt, as Andrea does, that domestic life and the presence of his wife weakened his art. The persona is Andrea, whose insecurities stem from his uxoriousness, the sin of Adam. "That Browning’s anxieties found a prototype in Andrea’s may be accidental, yet bearing in mind the analogy will certainly augment the aesthetic charm of the poem."(Guerin)

 

 

Hence, the reader or listener must examine the situation, structure, descriptive details, figurative language, and rhythms to determine the speaker’s identity.

 

TONE

 

 

DEFINITION

 

 

Eagleton defines tone as the sound, pitch, pace, and intensity of a poem expressing a particular emotion and it involves modulation of the voice expressing a particular mood or feeling (How to Read a Poem). Since signs and emotions intersect in tone, it may be “arch, abrupt, dandyish, lugubrious, rakish, obsequious, urbane, exhilarated, imperious* and so on” according to Eagleton. However, students of poetry should be wary of reaching hasty conclusions about the tone of a poem because there is a chance of misinterpreting the tone when randomly assigned to particular words that are toneless in themselves.

 

 [*Arch = naughty, playful. Dandyish= someone excessively concerned about his/her clothes and appearance.  Lugubrious=gloomy, sad. Rakish=corrupt, debased.   Obsequious = fawning, submissive. Urbane= polite or polished in manner].

 

Tone reveals the poet’s attitude towards the subject/audience. 

• The tone in satire is ironic. It may be one of protest or moral indignation in an anti-war poem. In an elegy, the tone may be of regret or melancholy, and in a limerick, * the tone maybe playful or humorous. [Given below is an example. Many such limericks are available online ] 

 

                                    *There's this subject called chemistry
                          how it works is a total mystery
                          it is an atom
                          says my madam
                          but all I see is my misery

 

• The tone in a poem may not be static but dynamic. It may go on changing as the poem progresses—for example, Milton’s Lycidas.

[In the opening lines, the tone is one of bitterness at the untimely demise of Edward King, the Lycidas. The poem assumes a calm air when the poet recalls the pastoral life at Cambridge.  But resentment (at the death of Lycidas and the fruitless profession of serving the Muses) surfaces again. Feelings of anger and aggression against the rampant corruption in the Church follow. Towards the finale, peace and serenity return as the poet comes to terms with the death of Lycidas. The poem ends in a note of acceptance at the thought of eternal happiness for Lycidas in heaven. The tone shifts to one of hope for a new beginning].

 

The tone in a poem is a reliable indicator of the attitudes of the poet/persona towards the subject. It may express the overall mood of the poem. Sometimes it helps to harness the emotional response of the reader to the subject matter. Nothing can exemplify the cynicism of Donne better than the tone in Go and Catch a Falling Star. 

 

At the beginning of the poem, Donne lists a series of impossibilities like catching a falling star, getting a child from mandrake root, telling where all past years are, finding out who cleft the devil’s foot, etc. The suggestion is that all these impossibilities may become possibilities, but finding a faithful woman will always remain impossible. The poet assures the listener that even if he (the latter) rides ten thousand days and nights, he will return to report: Nowhere / Lives a woman true and fair.

 

The last stanza takes us to an ironic climax seldom equalled in its brazen cynicism and misogyny.  

 

           

        If thou find’st one, let me know,

        Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

        Yet do not, I would not go,

        Though at next door we might meet;

        Though she were true, when you met her,

        And last, till you write your letter,

         Yet she

         Will be

        False, ere I come, to two, or three.

 

 

The tone of the poem is light and frivolous. The poem endorses the patriarchal values of Elizabethan society. [Let us not forget the oft-quoted, 'Frailty thy name is woman’ [Hamlet] and Petruchio’s references to his wife as “my goods, my chattels . . . my ox, my ass, my anything” in The Taming of the Shrew]. The poem validates the misogynistic belief that all women (or all beautiful women, anyway) are unfaithful and should not be trusted.

One of the main difficulties that confront us when reading poetry is the ambivalent tone in some poems. The ambivalence arises (perhaps) when the fears and suspicions in the poet’s mind get reflected in the poem. A typical example of ambivalence is Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

 

Almost every well-educated person is familiar with the poem. (In fact, so familiar that the poem has become a cliché). Just the same, it is America’s most widely misread poem, as The Paris Review notes. The poem is highly deceptive, the best example in all of (the) American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as Frank Lentricchia points out. 

 

                Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

           And sorry I could not travel both

           And be one traveller, long I stood

           And looked down one as far as I could

           To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

           Then took the other, as just as fair,

           And having perhaps the better claim,

           Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

           Though as for that the passing there

           Had worn them really about the same,

 

           And both that morning equally lay

           In leaves no step had trodden black.

           Oh, I kept the first for another day!

           Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

           I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

           I shall be telling this with a sigh

           Somewhere ages and ages hence:

           Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

           I took the one less travelled by,

           And that has made all the difference.

 

People experience acute discomfort from their timidity when the situation requires a decision to be made—a proverbial Hamletian dilemma ('To be or not to be, that's the question'). The persona is not sure whether his/her decision was wrong, right, or neither. The confusion in the mind of the persona makes the tone ambiguous. It is hard to say whether it is melancholic/jubilant.

The issue will never be resolved because it is human nature to reflect on past decisions and wonder whether one has taken the right decision or not. As Shelley writes:

            We look before and after,
         And pine for what is not:

This material prepared by Dr S. Sreekumar is for undergraduate students of Indian Universities.

These lectures on poetry contain seven topics:

i.                Metrics,

ii.              Persona and tone,

iii.             Rhythm,

iv.             Sonnet,

v.              Stanza,

vi.            How to read poetry, and

vii.           Appreciation of poetry.