Narrative Approaches to Non-Narrative Poetry: On Ezra Pound’s Δώρια [Doria]

This article tries to apply narrative approaches to Ezra Pound’s lyric Δώρια [Doria]. It is written in quantitative meter and it is a melancholy of the loss of a specific beloved and the speaker’s celebratory desire for the eternal love. Peter Hühn (2004) in “Transgeneric narratology: Application to Lyrics” suggests the fundamental narratological categories and demonstrates particular ways of applying them to lyrics. Based on this work, the “mental story” of Doria was studied from these three topics: text and norm; story and discourse; and thematic and narrative. In understanding a text, there are implicit or explicit interpretive norms; the poem’s Greek title Δώρια implies Dorian firmness that is in line with the speaker’s desire for an unchanged love. In studying story and discourse of the poem, the dimensions of “sequentiality”, the organization of incidences, and “mediacy”, the representation of the sequence from a particular perspective, were survived and in analyzing the thematic and narrative aspect of the poem, Greimas’ terms were used.