Repetition, chaos

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

There are different ways to use repetition as a poetic tool. The repetition in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" doesn't fit any structure I recognize. I mean it doesn't follow, for instance, the verse-chorus form of Western music. I think that the poet might have wanted to capture a feeling of war. War, from the perspective of a soldier, is probably repetitive but unpredictable. A soldier, having no agency of his own, is at the mercy of circumstance, that is, cannon fire, the orders of officers, etc. These things are an expected part of war. You can anticipate that they will occur (and occur again), but you can't anticipate when they will occur. Thus the placement of repeating lines throughout the poem likewise appears haphazard and random. 

Every line starts with a capital letter, which indicates to me the force with which these words would be spoken. The speaker seems to be some abstracted war proponent, singing the virtues of soldiers who died in battle. Of course, there seems to be some intent of irony behind this poem. Despite the speaker's passionate rhetoric, the main impression the reader gets is of absurdity, as in this passage:  "'Forward, the Light Brigade!' / Was there a man dismay'd ? / Not tho' the soldier knew / Some one had blunder'd: / Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do & die,". 

In any case, the irony is fitting with the form. The poem first appears as straight-forward in content (let's celebrate the war effort!) and in form (a simple war song), but it turns out to be skewed and unpredictable. 

After a Death

After a Death
Roo Borson

Seeing that there’s no other way,
I turn his absence into a chair.
I can sit in it,
gaze out through the window.
I can do what I do best
and then go out into the world.
And I can return then with my useless love,
to rest,
because the chair is there.

This poem struck me because of its simplicity.

First, to speculate:

The poem is about emptiness. The speaker captures a moment of emptiness while resisting the urge to turn it into something else, to dress it up in some fashion, really, to interpret it. She doesn't look for a source of hope, or a reason, or someone to blame in response to her loved one's absence. Instead she simply regards her own feeling of love, which has no object because the person she loves is gone.

It's hard to get a handle on death. You want to address it. You want to make sense of it. Maybe the speaker is saying that in terms of dealing with absence, all responses are equal because you're not going to understand it anyway. You can't approach it. Absence is like the concept of nothing. It's too abstract. It doesn't stand up to examination. What you can do is look at something concrete, like a chair---and that feels so unsatisfactory as a response. But I think the speaker is getting at something when she sustains that response for the length of the poem. There is a weird kind of power in that.

In terms of structure, there are a lot of line breaks, commas, and periods, which create silences. The sentences themselves are declarative and direct and so add to the impact of the silences. The repetition of the phrase, "I can" highlights the speaker's feeling of uselessness; when she gets to the last one, you feel that she's exhausted her entire list of "I can"s, like she's run out of options to enumerate.

Coltrane

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father's church
in Hamlet, North Carolina-
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: 
genitals gone or going
seed burned out
you tuck the roots in the earth, 
turn back, and move
by the river through the swamps, 
singing a love supreme, a love supreme; 
what does it all mean? 
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone. 
You plod up into the electric city-
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night: 
a love supreme, a love supreme-
Dawn comes and you cook 
up the thick sin 'tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genital and sweat
that makes you clean-
a love supreme, a love supreme-

Why you so black?
cause I am
Why you so funky? 
cause I am
Why you so black? 
cause I am
Why you so sweet? 
cause I am
Why you so black? 
cause I am

So sick
you couldn't play Naima
so flat we ached
for song you'd concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love

    This poem takes the form of a tribute to John Coltrane. It engages directly with him using the second person and mentioning aspects of his life such as the town in which he was born. The use of second person creates a sense of bond, connection, between the speaker and the subject, Coltrane. This effect is only amplified when the speaker's language becomes more spiritual and metaphorical, as in lines 6-11. These lines contrast calmness with suffering, fallow minds with fertile ones. To paraphrase, suffering brings out creativity when suffering is harnessed properly. 

    The poem is really musical and lyrical. There's some tension and release--which I associate with music--going on with the relationship between the first stanza and the second stanza. The first stanza is dense with images and language and it goes on for quite a long time, breathless. This is the tension. The second stanza offers release in the form of a simple, call-and-response, chant-like passage.