Think of van Gogh, painting that spatter of crows furling out over the wheat; dragging into the safe stillness of art, one untiring wing after another, a translation of the failed dream we greet every morning as we set out, tired from being trapped in a human form without wings.
“Wheatfield. With Crows,” a poem by Jude Nutter from the collection, Pictures of the Afterlife
When I read this sentence, I felt like I was sitting close to the narrator, thigh to thigh, and she was leaning toward me, speaking right in my ear. That close she was, and then I followed her instructions, and I saw it all, the crows, the wheat, the paintbrush dragging the images onto the canvas, and I heard her interpretation of the act of painting.
All that is done with the opening word, “think.”
We are in the realm of the imperative, with its implied subject “you.” An imperative gives advice, instructions, or makes a request or a command. Because the subject drops out, the verb is accentuated, injecting energy into the sentence.
Without a subject, there is great intimacy with the reader. How can that be? In part because the implied “you” can feel like an address not only to a character in the story but to the reader. And in part because the speaker of the imperative assumes she has someone’s attention.
The Making
Write a sentence that begins with “You.” Now add a verb. To create an imperative, delete the “you.” In Nutter’s sentence, her base clause is “Think of van Gogh.”
To use Nutter’s architecture, we are once again in the realm of the cumulative sentence. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ve repeatedly seen this syntactical structure. Like many writers, I love the cumulative sentence because it’s a vessel for rhythm and sound; because of the way it moves forward through specificity, and simultaneously circles back, adding to our knowledge of what came before.
Now add two present participial phrases (an -ing verb that functions as an adjective) that modify something in your base clause. In Nutter’s sentence she modifies van Gogh:
--painting that spatter of crows furling out over the wheat
--dragging into the safe stillness of art
Add another modifying phrase (called a subordinate phrase) that refers not to the base clause but to the previous phrase. In this case, Nutter refers not to van Gogh but to the crows.
--one untiring wing after another
The final modifying phrase refers to the act of painting, so you return to modifying the base clause. Interestingly, it moves away from the concrete details of the painting and to the narrator’s interpretation of painting.
--a translation of the failed dream we greet every morning as we set out, tired from being trapped in a human form without wings.
Do you hear all the repetitive sounds (invited in by the cumulative structure)?
The assonance: van/spatter/dragging/after/translation/as/trapped; wheat/wing/dream/greet/we
More assonance: painting/safe/failed; Gogh/crows/over
The alliteration: spatter/safe/stillness; without/wings; translation/tired/trapped
And there’s the power of diction, with the unusual use of “spatter,” which means a spray or splash of something. Instead of “unfurling,” Nutter uses “furling,” which means to become rolled up, a curl.
Play around with this sentence!
Let me know what else you see.
Gorgeous sentence. So evocative. I've stayed with a classic theme, and plagiarised just a few phrases from my source. Again, I've added a title, just for clarity, and I've substituted a parenthetical for commas around the subordinate phrase. I felt my sentence needed that. Here it is:
Hamnet
Consider Shakespeare, imagining that lost and doubt-tossed prince haunted by a spectral father; transposing into the gaudy world of theatre—those jeering and adoring crowds—the torment of his private grief, a full-grown projection of the lost child who endured only briefly the slings and arrows outrageous fortune prepares for us all