I am going to start a poem. It's going to have something to do with bumble bees. Here are several ways I can begin my poem about bumble bees:
1. Bumble bees are...
2. The bumble bees are...
3. A bumble bee is....
4. Some bumble bees are..
5. A few bumble bees are...
6. The bumble bee is...
7. O bumble bee...
8. Bumble bee, you are...
The reason why I'll choose one or other of these is down to what aspect of bumble-bee-ness I'm going to write about, or have been thinking about before I even started to write.
1. Bumble bees are...
This is me thinking that I'm writing about what all the bumble bees I know about are doing or thinking or saying. It's one great big generalised bumble-bee-ness. In fact, whatever I write is almost certainly not going to be true, so there may be an element of irony in it.
2. The bumble bees are...
Much more specific. These are the bumble bees over there or over here or on that hedge over there. This might make for more truth and less irony. Perhaps.
3. A bumble bee is...
This is very specific. It's that bumble bee I've just noticed that I'm trying to draw your attention to.
4. Some bumble bees are...
A bit loose this one...though in this story not much different from 'The bumble bees...'.
5. A few bumble bees are...
A little bit more specific than 'some'. There are just two or three, maybe.
6. The bumble bee is...
Very interesting this one. If it's an opener of a poem, it could either be the very specific bumble bee that I'm going to tell you about, or it could be an emblematic bumble bee...as in 'the bumble bee is full of love but do not anger him...' That makes it sound like an entry in a bestiary, or a Puritan poem drawing our attention to the significance of the bumble bee.
7. O bumble bee
Once could have been a genuine paean, but nowadays mock-heroic. Not a bad gag, actually.
8. Bumble bee, you are
Same grammar, is it the 'vocative' as we used to call it in Latin? But because it hasn't got the 'O', it can be quite friendly, and child-like...or like a hermit or castaway starting to talk to his or her little animal friends...
I said before that it is how I'm thinking about the bumblebee(s) that will determine which of these I might begin my poem with - which flies in the face of two things:
1. The idea that when we write, we choose words in the same time-frame as we think about them. In fact, we often think ahead and that determines the words we use. Some kind of loop or relay goes on where we are ahead of ourselves and relay back to a choice of words.
2. That we think one word at a time. I've used the word 'word' and at first glance this is about the word 'bumble bee' but a close look tells me that most of what I'm writing about here is the grammar of what you put in front of nouns in English in order to convey a meaning and yet the words (with the possible exception of 'few') are really 'grammatical' words ie they do a grammatical job on 'bumble bee'. This leads me to think that I'm not really talking about individual words here at all (even though I might talk loosely about choosing or using words). In fact, I'm talking about phrases or groups. Each of the 8 examples are examples of phrases.
I take from this that when I write I'm thinking ahead in order to find a phrase or group of words - which M.A.K. Halliday also called the 'wording'.
Finally, because this is a poem, I will already be thinking of something else - 'prosody' - that strange word which means the musicality or sounds made by the wording of the poem. This is also going to operate at the level of groups of words because it is only in the grouping that rhythms, cadences, echoes, repetitions are going to be felt.
I'm enjoying thinking about all this.