Commentary on Wilfred Noyce’s Poem Breathless 

Wilfred Noyce’s poem, Breathless, recorded the physical difficulty and mental stress that one encountered while climbing up the mountain. Simply by looking at the title, it can be seen that the poem describes about one’s state of being breathless and physically tortured. However, the poem does not only focus on expressing the climbers physical tiredness, but more importantly, the mental struggle happening in his mind. The structure and form of the poem mainly emphasizes on the physical experience of the climber while the psychological conflict is presented through the changing tone of the poem.

The structure of the entire poem provides readers a concrete image of the hiking experience that the climber is going through by having one continuous stanza with irregular shape.The shape of the poem portrayed the steep hiking trail that is being climbed and creates a vivid scene. The lengthen, vertical shape of the poem highlights the steepness and distance of the trail. This visualizing effect allows readers to feel more involved in the experience and can imagine themselves as the climber, climbing up a never-ending slope and emphasizes on the climber’s physical difficulties.

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Other than illustrating the trail, the irregular structure of the poem also provides readers insight to the mental state of the climber, being limited to only a narrow vertical way of thinking, unstable and uncontrolled. It generated the conceptual psychological state into a concrete visual image so to enhance the readers understanding and experience on the climber’s mind.

Other than forming the scene visually infront of the readers, the structure of the poem being continuously long and narrow without separated into stanza represents the non-stop journey of the climber and stress on the continuous torment.

Since there isn’t any breaks between lines, readers have to read the whole poem non-stop and will be able to experience the climber’s never-ending purgatory. Therefore, the shape of the poem is expressive in terms of providing the readers an acquaintance with the physical and psychological state of climbing up the abrupt hiking trail.

On top of the shape of the poem, the auditorial effect created by the form is also significant in creating the climbing experience of being breathless. In the poem, lots of single phrase like “heart aches”, “Must look up” instead of using full sentence. This helps remain sentences short which emphasizes on the climbers difficulties in speaking a whole sentence due to being breathless and mimic the shortness of breath. At the same time, it reminds the readers of the psychological difficulties faced by the climber which leads to failure in forming complete sentence and ideas are presented phrase by phrase. Enjambment is found to be used in the poem for quite a few times, for example in line 11 to 12, “a flat step is holiday”. By splitting the phrase into two lines, the pace of the poem is hastened and relates the readers to the rapid action of exhale and inhale of the breathless climber which prevented him from speaking out a full sentence.

The hastened pace created when readers read quickly also promotes readers’ feelings of anxiety about finishing the poem. Similar effects is also brought up by the rhyme scheme and the rhythm of the poem. The regular rhyme scheme of “ABCB DEFE” and the strong rhythmic beat encourages readers to read the poem faster which provides the readers the auditorial experience of the pace in climbing and being breathless. Also, by rhyming the end word every other line, it creates a regular pace which symbolizes the climber’s steps and breathing sound. Readers being supplied with such sound imitation can have a vivid imagination and hear the sound of inhaling and exhaling regularly as they read the poem. In general, the enjambment used with the regular rhyme scheme and rhythm provide the poem with a repetitive sense of climbing up step by step and intensify the experience of climbing for the readers.

The repetitive endless agony of the climber is not only presented through the regular rhyme scheme and rhythm, but also outstandingly through the usage of repetition. In the poem, there is a repetition of lines which can be found at the beginning and at the end of the poem. The lines “ heart aches, lungs pant dry air sorry, scant.” are repeatedly used for twice so to emphasize the physical affliction of the climber. Not only so, it reinforce how the suffering is a recurring cycle that seems to the climber that it will last for ever and is perpetual. Since the poem is already in one whole stanza and readers have to read the poem continuously, when the poem ends with the repeated lines as written in the first few lines, the readers feel that they have gone through a cycle and will echoes back to line 35, feeling that the “stone” is “no nearer” than before and that the torturing journey is endless.

Other than creating a lucid idea of the scene to the readers, a psychological conflict is seen from the tone of the poem. At first, the tone is rather defeatist as phrase like “why at all?” can be found, expressing the desperation of the climber. However the tone slowly changed to a promising tone as the climber encourage himself. He tell himself “don’t look up till journey's done” and to “count steps done”. Finally, pessimism dominated over optimism as the tone become fatalistic again. He found that the “stone(‘s) no nearer” and he’s just far to tired. This continuous change in tone suggested us about the integral struggle that happened in the climber’s mind as he try to overcome the physical tiredness and reach the stone which is the endpoint. Ultimately, we can see that through the structure and form of the poem and change in tone, the physical and psychological difficulties gone through by the climber is presented visually in front of the readers by creating a solid scene with auditorial experiences.