Poetry of the Periodic

If you’ve read any works of English literature, especially fiction, and, perhaps especially old fiction, you know what a periodic sentence is.  You might not know that you know it, which is something delightful about grammar and linguistics that I’ll save to discuss another time. 

A periodic sentence, by definition, is a sentence in which the main clause—the one with the subject and the verb—comes at the end. 

For your pleasure, see these examples:

Having no where else to go and seeing no end to the long, cold, dark of the night around him, Sanjay shuffled into the dirty, dimly-lit place. 

The rain threatening to drown both players and spectators, the football game nevertheless continued.

 Living alone in a house with no one but a dog for company, Mary Margaret watched way too much Netflix.

You’ll notice that I have underlined the subject and bolded its predicate (or the verb and all other words that talk about the subject).  You’ll also notice that there is more to this syntactical construction than its definition.

Take, for instance, the first example sentence.  Think back to the first time you read it.  It was more than half over before you even knew whom you were reading about or what his seemingly dismal position would lead him to do.  Placing the other clause in front built the suspense for you, made you want to finish the sentence, made it so you couldn’t guess the end if you wanted to.  Moreover, once the sentence was over, you probably felt a strange sense of release.  “Ah, yes,” you may have thought to yourself, either consciously or subconsciously, “Sanjay and that dirty, dimly lit place.  Good, good.  It all makes sense now.” 

There’s probably some solid psychology that could be brought in here.  It seems to me that periodic sentences are like a puzzle that the brain longs to solve. Fluent English speakers are trained to look for the subject early and when we don’t find it, our brains just whirr and whirr like little wind up cars with the wheels held off the ground.  Once we find the subject, the sentence makes sense and our brains can slow down again.  But that extra little burst of effort flags that sentence as important, as something to remember, like a little trophy our brains can hang on a wall saying, “I solved that puzzle!”

Now that you know the basics of the periodic sentence, what do you want to do with the little gems?  You already see how they can be used to build suspense and create memorable moments out of otherwise mundane prose, but what other tricks do periodic sentences have at their disposal?

Well, art, for one thing.  Suspense is not something reserved for mystery novels or comedic writing with punch lines.  There is poetry in the periodic sentence.  A famous example of someone who saw a periodic opportunity and took it is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem, “Snowflakes.”

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow,
Descends the snow.

Oooh, do you feel the chill down your spine?  That’s what art feels like.  Certainly, the artistry in this little ditty is not contained solely in the delayed syntactical gratification of the subject and predicate, but surely we can all agree that

The snow descends
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow.

Is a very different—and somehow, inexplicably less spine-chill-inducing—poem.

Can a sentence can be too periodic to be useful?  Of course.  You throw too many clauses in front and they can get confusing to the point where even a puzzle-loving brain can’t keep it all together by the time the subject comes around to clear everything up.   Some critics of the periodic sentence will tell you that its construction in most literature is used primarily as a tool of pretention to make writing seem more intellectually elevated.  Others will say that it has no place in literature because it breaks up reading flow, or is so often written poorly.

One way to ruin a good periodic sentence is to dangle or misplace your modifiers.  People will joke about such things, but I hardly think some of these gaffs are laughable.

Stepping into the room, the light turned on.

Do you see what I’ve done?  Heinously, I’ve given a mere light enough physical control to not only step into a room, but also to turn itself on.  Let us hope that the light is of an age to use such control responsibly.

Walking to and fro, Michelangelo was the topic of conversation between Ke$ha and her mother.

We can set my excessive use of the passive voice aside for now when we see the atrocity I’ve committed at either zombifying a long-dead Michelangelo or sending Ke$ha and her mother back in time as time ambassadors.  These are puzzles no brain can solve.

However, I am of the mind that periodic sentences—when devoid of the atrocious modifier mistakes—can be so overdone, so overtly pretentious, and so useless, that it crosses that invisible barrier, does a U-turn, and returns to the realm of art.  If periodic sentences are puzzles, then, taken on their own, without the need for speed or ease of reading, they can actually be rather stimulating to read and decode. 

This whole post has been a ploy for me to be able to show you my own carefully constructed, prize-winning periodic sentence.  Earlier this year, it was vetted by a classroom full of undergraduate grammarians and their professors, and deemed worthy of the reward of a singing Lady Gaga toothbrush.

For your pleasure, read it below.