What is a paradox in Poem?

The paradox in poetry means that the tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. It can be interpreted and make sense. The paradox involves opposite or contradictory ideas, but they are reconciled by poetic imagination. For example; ‘’One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die’’ That’s a paradoxical statement because we believe that death is the end of all, but in this form, it is suggested death will die.

He begins the essay by discussing certain wrong concepts associated with paradox. For example, the paradox is often described as the language of sophistry, hard, bright, and witty. As a result, it is not considered a language of the soul or emotion. According to Brooks, the paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry, and he demonstrated it in the rest of the essay. He comments that because of the inferior position given to paradox often used in epigrams and satire, the paradox is often considered intellectual rather than emotionally clever rather than profoundly rational rather than divinely rational. As a result, the true nature of paradox is often not discussed. In this essay, he argues for the centrality of the language of paradox in poetry and says that only scientific use of language requires a language without any trace of paradox. To substantiate his argument, he quotes from William Wordsworth. He comments that Wordsworth doesn’t provide so many instances of paradox, and he also insists on simplicity and distrusts of history. As a result, Wordsworth doesn’t make elaborate use of paradox, but he says that some of the best forms written by Wordsworth are produced also out of paradoxical situations. Brooks quotes from Wordsworth’s poem titled, It’s a Beauteous Evening, in which he described the evening sky as calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun, breathless with adoration. There is a paradox in the use of the adjectives used for example quiet and calm is in contrast to breathless which stands for excitement. In the poem, the poet is looking at the evening sky and it fills him with devotion. On the other hand, a girl who’s walking by him is not at all moved by it. The paradox emerges when the poets say that the girl is more devotional than him, even though she is not moved by the evening sky. He elaborates that his devotion is temporary and sporadic, on the other hand, the girl has deep sympathy for all forms of nature throughout the year. So the girl’s devotion is unconscious, whereas the poet's is deliberate. So the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion is not triggers further discussions, and the paradox is revealed when the girl is more full of worship than the speaker because she is always consumed with the sympathy for nature where the poet’s devotion is temporary and sporadic. Brooks relates this to the comment made by William Wordsworth in his preface to the second edition of lyrical ballads where he says that his general purpose was to choose incidents and situations from common life, but so to treat them that ordinary things should be unusually presented to the mind. So paradoxes help poets to present ordinary things unusually. In short, Wordsworth was attempting to show his audience that the common was uncommon, and the prosaic was poetic. Romantic writers employ paradox to invoke wonder and surprise. In the next section of the essay, Brook scores another poem by Wordsworth titled composed upon Westminster Bridge. In this poem, the paradox comes not from its details but from the situation which the speaker creates. In this poem, the poet records his impression of the city of London in the early morning. The poet can appreciate the morning beauty of the city. This is in contrast to the romantic description of the city as inanimate and mechanical. But looking at the city in the morning the poet can relate the man-made marvel that is the city to organic life because it is a product of human beings, and human beings are part of the organic world. In that way, this poem can connect a city to an organic world. This is a paradoxical situation because it is in romantic literature looked down on as inanimate and mechanical. Brooks then quotes a few lines from Alexander Pope and suggests that neoclassical writers also make use of paradox and by employing paradox they invoke irony. In neoclassical poetry paradox insists on irony on the other hand in romantic literature it invokes surprise and wonder. There is a certain awed wonder in Pope just as there’s a certain trace of irony implicit in Wordsworth’s sonnets. On the other way round these two wonder and irony often merge into one. Wonder and irony merge in many ways in the lyrics of Blake they merge in Colorado’s ancient mariner, in that sense even though romantic writers use paradoxicality to walk wonder and neoclassical writers use it to evoke irony often they happen in a blend. This means both irony and wonder happen in the same context.

Example: The paradoxes form the very nature of the poet’s language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations.

In this section Brooks describes the language of paradox as perpetual, it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled. So by citing examples of Wordsworth, and Alexander Pope, and also taking a look at the poems of William Blake, he says that language of paradox cannot be kept out of poetry. Scientific use of language stabilizes terms and freezes them into strict denotations. So in scientific use, words are not allowed to imply denotative meanings they are fixed and stabilized. But in the poetic usage of poetic language denotations play a very significant role. The poet's work with comparisons and metaphors never fit smoothly with one another they always upset the directness of ideas. There is a continuous change of context and meaning they overlap and contradict. So this is a common feature of poetic language or the language of paradox, that metaphors do not have a smooth line of meaning, but on the other hand, metaphors always mismatch, overlap, and contradict. And through this poetry can produce a very different meaning. To make these arguments clearer Brooks delves into a detailed analysis of the canonization of a poem by Jonathan who is a metaphysical writer. In this part, Brooks analyzes the way paradox functions in canonization. He says that the poet directly treats profane love as if it were divine love. It combines love and religion pairing unlike circumstances and producing complex meaning. Canonization is comparing unlikely things, for example on one part, there is religion on the other part there is love. One is supposed to be spiritual and the other is supposed to be material and physical. But these two opposite contradictory ideas are treated in canonization that's why Brooks says, it is an example of paradox. The conflict between the real world and the lover absorbed in the world of love runs through the poem. It dominates the second stanza in which the torments of love so vivid to the lover does not affect the real world. The lover’s cause is highly paradoxical. They have rejected the practical world and by renouncing the practical world, they have gained the most intense life. This paradox has been hindered earlier, in the phoenix metaphor where a phoenix bird dies to be born, similarly, the lovers have rejected the actual world - the physical/practical world - but they have gained the most intense life. Dense use of the word die also in work paradox, for example in the 16th and 17th centuries, die refers to the consummation of the act of love, which means that go for physical intercourse. At the same time dying also means the end of life. Similarly, there is a conflict between singleness and duality. For example, the lovers are two, but they are one. Brooks argues that these complexities of life can only be narrated in paradox. He quotes Coleridge’s observation on imagination and says that imagination reconciles the opposite such as sameness with different general with concrete ideas with image individual with representation. All these are features of paradox. Brooks concludes by stating that the urn which the ash of the love kept is the poem itself and like the phoenix, it will rise from it. He also persuades his readers to be prepared to accept the paradox of imagination.