I recently took a screenwriting class during the Gotham open house. The instructor asked us what is everyone’s major want / motivation? Then he concluded that all people, and thus characters, always want happiness. Thus the conflict of every story is what stands in the way of happiness, and the conclusion is whether or not they achieve happiness. Since happiness is abstract and defined differently for each person, this isn’t untrue.
However, since happiness is always the want of the character, doesn’t that tell us that happiness is lost just as quickly as it is achieved? And wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that our motivation is a fear of losing happiness? Even when we are happy, we know it will end, and we fear that loss: there is so much to lose at every moment.
Example Poem: “To Failure” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)
To Failure
You do not come dramatically, with dragons
That rear up with my life between their paws
And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,
The horses panicking, nor as a clause
Clearly set out to warn what can be lost,
What out-of-pocket charges must be borne,
Expenses met, nor as a draughty ghost
That’s seen, some mornings, running down a lawn
It is these sunless afternoons, I find,
Install you at my elbow like a bore
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I’m
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.
~Philip Larkin
How does the poet use negation to show what failure is? What does the dragon symbolize in this poem?
Prompt: Write a poem about something you are afraid to lose. Something you would protect with the fierceness of a dragon. Use all of your senses to describe it, then use all your senses to describe its space without it.
Possible form: Puente
~
I will not let the rain in and bar the weather with my teeth.
The thing I’d scorch the sky to keep is the first hour,
steam rising off the mug like a tame dragon,
cardamom and leaf turning the air sweet-bitter,
the balcony rail warm as a palm,
ink whispering along the page, a cricket stitching silence,
pigeon wings clapping like a soft applause,
sunlight pooling in the spoon, an oval of molten brass,
the kettle’s small quarrel ending in surrender,
bread blistering, butter bright as a bell,
I keep it in my mouth like a coal.
~I will not let the rain in; I bar the weather with my teeth.~
Without it, the room tastes of battery and rust,
the walls smell of wet stone and resigned towels,
light goes grey and thin, a hospital broth,
the kettle forgets its language and the silence fattens,
paper feels like cold bark under the hand,
dust shows its yellow teeth on every surface,
footsteps echo with an empty-metal ring,
the window glass chills the cheek bone-deep,
my tongue holds a coin’s cold taste,
my tongue holds a coin’s cold taste,
and the air, flat as a shut book, won’t turn the page.
[Some craft notes:
How does Larkin use negation to show what failure is? He defines failure by subtraction: not dragons, nor contractual clauses, nor a theatrical ghost. By ruling out the dramatic, he corners us into the ordinary: “sunless afternoons,” staleness, the slow creep. Negation shrinks the grand myth into a drab fact that failure isn’t a spectacle of life, but it’s sediment.
What does the dragon symbolize?
The dragon is the catastrophe we almost prefer, that is, a visible enemy that justifies panic and heroics. Larkin’s point: real failure rarely roars. It accumulates. We don’t get a boss fight; we get dust and dimness.
And, what's Puente?
A Puente uses a repeated line as a bridge between two stanzas; here, the sensory “have” and the sensory “without” are joined by that ember in the mouth.]
And, what's Puente?
A Puente uses a repeated line as a bridge between two stanzas; here, the sensory “have” and the sensory “without” are joined by that ember in the mouth.]