Near the beginning of the semester we looked at Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and another version of the poem called "His Father's Dance." These two examples were a great study in what Twain called "the right word" and the "almost right word."
In the two versions of the poem, though, it goes beyond mere words. It is the phrasing itself that is different. Roethke's carefully assembled poem says things far better than the imitation.
The very way things are phrased can increase the clarity of a mental image. For example, a line in Roethke's last stanza is "With a palm caked hard by dirt." In the imitation, this line has become "With his very dirty hand." There are two different realizations of an image here; one is still true, but vague. The other gives us not just visual information, but information about how something feels and even more detail about how it looks.
This is consistently true about the original and the imitation. Lines like, "My right ear scraped a buckle" are far more informative than "He bumped painfully into him." The comparison was a great exercise in seeing how much difference finding the right string of words can make.
The other interesting thing about the Roethke poem is that he doesn't have to use bigger words to convey a clearer meaning. He just uses simple, everyday language. The difference is how specific the language is, not how obscure it is. Also, the concreteness of his phrasing makes a big difference.
These two poems say a lot about three things important to poetry: the right phrasing, specific words, and concrete descriptions.
-Audrey Guire
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