The matter of opacity as it subtracts from a healthy poetic syntax steeped in the rhythm of everyday speech is important because there is, indeed, a symbiotic relationship between diction, rhythm and syntax, with the last being the framework around which the previous two cohere; all improve or diminish each other. That is of course debatable because it is easy to argue that all items are so inter-meshed that there is a simultaneous chemical reaction taking place at the creative moment. So closely allied to each other are diction, rhythm and syntax that opaque diction, that excludes the reader or hearer’s senses kill the light in the ‘photograph’ of the poem; such that the impact on the emotional and spiritual or subliminal level is absent. There is no resonance but dead words, dead, since language is supposed to be a breathing, living thing. But that kind of language would not speak to us.

If diction is opaque it does not allow for the central engine of modernist rhythm – imagism coupled with a healthy syntax; it does not help in achieving the necessary target of a natural cadence nor does it improve syntax. There is the anecdote of the king who demanded an original and everlasting wise-saying from a passing sage. The king was replied with: “..and this too shall pass away”. The word order makes that sentence, in and of itself, poetic, aided by its anti-climatic rhythm and its sense of finality, of ineluctable decline and ruin; its ironic humanising slap at the regal figure of king and kingdom… “And this too shall pass away”. If we were to change the syntax and write instead ‘and this shall pass away too’ there is an immediate jarring note and a departure from the careful lilting solemnity of rhythm, resulting in the run-of-the mill. ‘And this shall pass away too’ becomes pedestrian without being poetic while ‘and this too shall pass away’ is poetic, while avoiding to seem contrived, irrespective of the use of the slightly formal ‘shall’. Actually, ‘shall’ serves for a poeticising gambit in the sentence. ‘And this too will pass away’, would fall short woefully. Even though that originary sentence is in isolation of any other line and not part of the full body of a poem, it nevertheless sets an emotional wave in motion, which concentric arcs the hearer or reader imaginatively begins to fill out with the absent ‘body’ of a full poem. This is helped along by the image, a sensing of something ‘passing’ away. The hearer or reader is in the grip of a poem that is obviously not written out. This is what effective syntax should do; expand the field of signification to emotionally include the unspoken. That sentence is also brief. Shakespeare contends that “brevity is the soul of wit”, and so it is! We hear brevity, wit, emotional and spiritual resonance in that tiny creative moment. The reader can imagine that the sage continued on lugubriously while the king stared after him in awe and bewilderment, humbled.

And now the idea of tax! In most modern democracies we all pay tax on our yearly earnings towards the smooth running of state and public facilities- such as roads. This is one way to view the idea of taxation as it relates to poetry; that is tax as a giving up of our excess lexicographic earnings within one dictionary-year, consider the dictionary as being equivalent to a constant ‘year’ in the work-life of a poet. Another way of seeing it would be to consider taxation in a symbolic sense and ascribe to it, for our purpose, all situations where the individual has to discipline self, give things or habits-like smoking- up. Such self-deprivations can be equated to fasting for the general well-being of the organism (the organism in this case being poetry); what has become known in chic circles as de- toxication or ‘detox’.

Another similar analogy between tax and poetry can be that of curbing over-indulgence, which, again, would be close to fasting – in the sense of eating only what is necessary; sweets, snacks and other munchies being jettisoned just as the common dessert would be. In other words nothing but a well-balanced, sufficient but non-superfluous repast should be the goal; especially so for the poet, who, like a priest with higher callings, should be a frugal eater and not gluttonous. It is sensible eating in short, prevention being proverbially better than cure. It would be difficult to break a habit of long-winded syntactical constructions, accruing from word-drunkenness. No amount of exercise would ever deflate a mountain of belly with already fixed digestive borders!; same with poetic eating habits, words being the food items in the poetic belly and the sentence or line being the whole meal in combination and a judicious and sparing use of words being a way of assuring a lean healthy poem throughout its life. As such the poet has to eat words sensibly – not over-indulge himself; that is, use words sensibly, not over-use them otherwise the poem becomes fat or obese.

Finally in ‘syntagma’ we will merge all the train of thought so far. The paradigmatic axis of poetic composition is the poem itself and the syntagmatic axis is the words as they occur in the line or syntax. The syntax is enhanced by the diction and the image they resonate together. Should there be faults in the syntagamatic axis the paradigm itself becomes fractured. Diction is important in relation to each other within the poem as their cumulativeness results either in an effective, natural or defective rhythm, which then takes away from the overall impact of the poem, supposedly propelled forward or held back in as much as the images aid in expanding or contracting the field of signification. Choice of words becomes important and the poet’s lexicon has to allow for such a lexical variation as enables the right combination of the right words. A guide is usually that if a word can be replaced in a line with the rhythm and sense remaining much the same then the right word was not chosen in the first place. It should be difficult or impossible to replace a word in a line of verse. As for wit and a uniqueness of expression, brevity, according to Shakespeare, should be a guiding principle. So all those prose poems out there are mostly fat and overweight!; besides certain syntactic constructions are also archaic or trite and tired in modern poetry. One such is the prepositional phrase (i.e the noun + of + noun): the mother of all battles, the river of life etc.,

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