Seven Haunting Themes Poem by Paul Hartal

This is a modular poem, an architectural allegory assembled from equivalent morphological units, like a building built from standardized modules. This is also a mathematically constructed verse, rendered as a set of identical parts: Its repetitive lines unfold in translational symmetry, carrying the potential of their continuation on an infinite strip, in two dimensional Euclidian space. The symmetrical structure of the verse proceeds as a literary mataphor of the translational symmetry found, for example, in floral patterns in nature, or architectural alignments of rows of columns, like those in the Parthenon.

Another aspect related to the poem involves to the world of mantras, verbal formulae that can be repeated in prayer, meditation or as a magic spell for motivation.

Furthermore, linguistically, the verse concerns the semantic relatinship between its words as signs, or symbols, and what they stand for. It incorporates the integrity of its lines as signifiers and their connotations: the union of structure and message. the identity of pattern and meaning.

A playful, humorous pun in one stanza, the poem wraps up a tongue in cheek figure of speech, in which ambiguity and equivocality play the protagonist's role. Irony flows here from the contrast and tension between deceit and candor that are both inherent in the verse. However, in spite of the playful teasing of the piece, in the technical sense, it delivers its promise.

As a genre, 'Seven Haunting Themes' belongs to a literary category known as pattern verse or concrete poetry.The roots of this sort of poetry date back to antiquity. The Egyptians used pictographs or ideograms as a means of communication. More than two thousand years ago the Greek poet Simmias created a verse in the shape of an egg. Much later, in the early 17th century, the English poet George Herbert experimented with visual poetry, creating poems in the shape of bird wings and of a chalice. In the 19th century Lewis Carroll used pictorial typography in the winding emblematic verse of 'The Mouse's Tale', which is included in the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.