From this window, he views banana leaves, an orange tree with five oranges, houses with shingled roofs, and steps leading to an upstairs apartment; farther off, palm trees, and beyond, a sloping street, ocean, sky; but what line of sight leads to revelation?
“Westbourne Street,” from the poetry collection Sight Lines, by Arthur Sze, National Book Award winner
This sentence has a beautiful vertical lift from the concrete to the abstract. From the orange tree with its five oranges and the shingled roofs to the philosophical question: “but what line of sight leads to revelation?”
Sze builds to this question by listing eight concrete objects in the world. I love that the objects that are closest to the protagonist are modified: an orange tree with five oranges, for instance. The viewer can see these objects more clearly, so more details are included. The modifications also serve to elongate the sentence further, creating more suspense. The objects farther away can’t be seen well, so are not modified: palm trees, a sloping street, ocean, sky.
This is the final sentence of the poem. Everything in the poem, including the list in this sentence, has built to the question posed at the end. The conjunction “but” always creates a turn in a sentence, and in this case, it turns to the question. The very fact of a question imparts an urgency to the narrative, serving to raise the dramatic pitch and heighten the suspense.
But a question or interrogatory does more. If the author doesn’t provide an answer, the question becomes alive in the reader’s mind because a question beckons to an answer. The reader is pulled into the text, unconsciously or otherwise, to fill in the blank and attempt to answer. The unanswered question, then, generates further creation via the reader. It’s like an open door to the text, and the reader steps in to think and create. To engage the reader, this is what poems and stories long to do.
Music plays in this sentence! There is so much assonance:
he/leaves/tree/leading/trees/street/leads
views/roofs
five/sky/line/sight
sloping/ocean
steps/revelation
I love the assonance in the question itself that first plays the long “i” sound in “line of sight,” and then moves to a completely different sound with “revelation.” The change in sound creates a tiny shift in the question.
Your Turn
Open with a parenthetical phrase that establishes where your protagonist is located.
Now add your subject and verb. Use a verb that requires a direct object. A direct object is a person or thing that directly receives the action or effect of the verb. It answers the question "what" or "whom." An indirect object answers the question "for what," "of what," "to what," "for whom," "of whom," or "to whom."
Here Sze has eight direct objects, some of which include modifiers.
Now add a semicolon, the conjunction “but,” and end with a question.
How did it go?
What do you like about this sentence?
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books, www.ninaschuyler.com. You’ll find my book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and my new book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
I’d really love it if you preordered my novel, Afterword, which will be published in May 2023.
Preorder links:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/afterword-nina-schuyler/18618162?ean=9781955904704
https://smile.amazon.com/Afterword-Nina-Schuyler/dp/1955904707/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3TZ5QIYJ90EYM&keywords=afterword+nina&qid=1673155946&sprefix=afterword+nina%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1
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Once her footing is secured beneath glaring sun and within shifting breezy caresses she reopens her eyes to the porous broken beige limestone at her feet dropping in swift vertiginous transit to orange sandstone amphitheaters whose castles adjoin piñon-juniper-prickly-pear gardens swirling over red limestone walls spilling and morphing into ancient black schist sliced neatly in half by the turquoise rapids of the Colorado River; could this be the breaking wave of her plunging soul?
Hi Nina, I love this sentence, and your phrase, “vertical lift.” It feels like a piece of music that starts out nicely and spirals upward into something astral. Lovely, startling.