We are going to look at the poem Rising Damp, by U.A. Fanthorpe. We will discuss the creative features used within the poem. Looking closely at the three lenses, defamiliarisation, style, and other creative features.
When the poem ‘Rising Damp’ begins we see in line one and two the opening lines ‘At our feet they lie low, The little fervent underground’ (Fanthorpe, Rising damp, Line one and two). This opening gives us a creative beginning and an instant attraction to want to read on. It is not clear what the poet is describing at this point and gets the reader really think. When looking at the textual lens, the poem encourages a detailed look at the main focus of the story, which is the London underground rivers. Throughout the poem Fanthorpe makes objects unfamiliar and certainly prolongs and increases our perception.
Fanthorpe uses foregrounding within her poem and makes a lot of single things stand out from their surroundings. ‘There are the Magog’s that chewed the clay’ (Fanthorpe, Rising Damp, Line 8) this line instantly stands out and gives the reader a sense of danger. Magog’s are supposedly enemies of God, bad giants, defeated but living on in the landscape of hills (Ruth Paddle, The Independent, 1999). This Line shows that the poem has a sense of danger and fear to it. This also links to foregrounding. Foregrounding is achieved by either linguistic deviation or linguistic parallelism. The notion of linguistic deviation is another concept arising from the Russian formalists, and poetry is the genre that most clearly exemplifies this feature (Mcintyre, 2010). When reading the poem ‘Rising Damp’ the form of the poem prolongs perception, and deviates from the lexical norm. ‘Rising Damp’ is not your usual template of a poem, some of us may think of poetry to be shaped in a way that always rhymes with equal amounts of lines within each stanza, Fanthorpe deviates from this norm. Fanthorpe mixes nursery-rhyme, incantation, wit (starting with the title and epigram) different tonal registers and a central pun: lie low in the first line (returning in the last stanza and last word, lie lower, below) applies (like underground) to criminals and rivers (Paddle, 1999).
Creativity is used within the language of the poem as Fanthorpe has used short clear sentences that engage the reader straight away. She describes in depth how the underground Thames Rivers would once have been seen and used by people, she gives us a sense of being there. Fanthorpe uses words such as ‘That washed the clothes and turned the mills, Where children drank and salmon swam’, this creative language helps the reader picture how the rivers once were. Fanthorpe also uses a lot of creative words throughout the poem that could make the reader see the setting as dark, wet, cold and quite miserable. Words such as ‘disfigured, under, rain, dead, below’ they all give a sense of danger. When looking at the critical lens, using these creative words to help us imagine a setting that comes across as dark, wet and not a pleasant place is good, as Fanthorpe has got across a picture in the readers heads of a setting, and we can connect with the flooding and history of the location.
Looking at other ways in which Fanthorpe has used creativity within her poem we can see that alliteration, assonance, enjambment and repetition have been used in the first four stanzas to increase the flow of the words which match the calm peaceful tone. Alliteration and assonance have been used to help focus the reader’s attention on important words such as ‘lie low’ or ‘frayed’. Enjambment is used to keep the flow effect going rather than using a full stop, and suddenly stopping the flow altogether. Repetition has been used as it creates the same effect as alliteration and assonance does but also because it reminds the reader of something that has already been said therefore making it easier to remember. In the following stanzas Fanthorpe changes the structure of the lines from flowing long sentences to short and sharp sentences. The tense then changes in the sixth stanza to present tense. Within this same stanza the structure turns back to long and flowing sentences, although the tone has now changed and now comes across aggressive, which Fanthorpe uses to communicate the way of movement of the rivers. Fanthorpe builds up her story throughout and then in the last stanza reveals the meaning of her poem. The stanza consists of two long sentences which use alliteration and repetition. The first line reminds us as the reader how the rivers initially moved and repeats the first words of the poem ‘lie low’ but changes the word ‘low’ to ‘lower’. Fanthorpe then mentions four new rivers, ‘Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe and Styx’ these are different to those underground rivers mentioned in the beginning stanzas. These four new rivers are rivers mentioned in Greek mythology all with quite deep dark meaning such as Acheron being the river of sorrow. Fanthorpe has now made the reader think about death and has done this in a very creative way.
Fanthorpe has been very creative with this poem and has built the poem up like a story, with a beginning, middle and end. She has made the poem very visual and understandable.