Hum (Style)

Style

Abstract Imagery

Abstract imagery is a literary device favored by the New York School of poets, who, again, were influenced by the visual arts, especially the abstract expressionism of such artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Their poems incorporate fragmentary, or incomplete, images to achieve a "painterly" style. Indeed, with their phrases and disparate words, they emulate the way artists can use color and brushstrokes, rather than representational depictions of objects, to evoke meaning. Abstract images are those that do not overtly appear to make sense or relate to the subject at hand. "Here is the robe / that smells of the night" presents such an image in "Hum." These words have little apparent relation to the poem's topic and represent an invitation for readers to bring their own ideas and interpretations to a work. In such a way, the artist creates a sort of dialogue between the poet and the reader. By using cryptic language and nonlinear frameworks, Lauterbach, like many other poets of the New York School, seeks to actively engage readers in endowing her poems with meaning.

Language Poetry

Language poetry, sometimes written as "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" poetry, in reference to the magazine that bore that name, evolved in the 1970s, when many poets became more concerned with the process of arranging words than with the meanings of the words themselves. As influenced by the modernist prose of Gertrude Stein, the objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who proposed that language was itself a game), the Language poets spread their influence through such journals as This magazine and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine. In "Hum," the stanza "I know what days are. / The other is weather" both follows and precedes lines with the words "days" and "weather." This focus on simple words is reminiscent of Stein's famous line "Rose is a rose is a rose" and serves to break down the reader's expectations based on literal interpretations of the words "days" and "weather."

Repetition

The most notable feature of "Hum" is its repetition. Like a painter who chooses a palette made up of only a few colors, Lauterbach establishes the mood of "Hum" by choosing a palette of words that she arranges in different combinations in order to achieve a particular mood. "Days" appears ten times, "beautiful" nine times, and "here" eight times. Other words repeated multiple times include "tomorrow," "today," "yesterday," "sky," "rain," "weep," "ashes," and "dust." In addition, several lines are repeated in their entirety. "The days are beautiful" appears nine times; "Tomorrow was yesterday" appears twice. This repetition emphasizes words that the author deems important. The repetitions fall mainly into two categories: words representing time and place ("here," "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow") and words evoking imagery of nature and destruction ("weep," "ashes," "dust," "rain," "sky," and "fall"). Collectively, these repeated words create images that are at once ethereal, ominous, and transient, suggesting the narrator's sense of unease and sadness and her shifting perceptions of reality. Ultimately, the line "The days are beautiful" may serve as an example of irony, as if the narrator repeats the phrase in order to reassure herself of something she wishes to be true, despite the evidence of destruction that surrounds her; also, in ending the poem, the line may be meant to evoke the sense of rebirth and renewal that, however distant, might follow any loss.

Anaphora

Anaphora refers to the practice of repeating the same word or phrase at the beginning of several lines of a poem. The repetition of "The days are beautiful" is an example of anaphora, even though the words constitute an entire line. "The sky is a cloud" is echoed two lines later in "The sky is dust," and "The rain is ashes" is followed by "The rain falls down." This repetition serves to alert the reader that the sky and rain in question are of great importance. As a cloud, the sky becomes part of the poem's weather imagery; as dust, it becomes part of the poem's imagery of destruction. The narrator's sense of shifting time is signaled in the repeated lines "Tomorrow was yesterday" and "The weather is yesterday." The poem's third section is notable for its sharp diversion to anaphora that concerns the present place, "here," which is repeated at the beginning of each of the final eight stanzas, rather than "tomorrow" or "yesterday." This anaphora suggests that the narrator is taking stock of her surroundings in order to make sense of what has happened.