To make a long story short, a description may be true but trivial. To say "This poem contains 41 lines" may be perfectly true, but fairly trivial. But if we reverse the order of digits saying "This poem contains 14 lines," it may be quite significant. It becomes significant in light of the sonnet model. To make truly significant statements about poems, we need two sets of terms. One set must have much descriptive contents, with which we may make distinctions within or between poems. The other one is an abstract model or theory, which imparts significance to the description. The terms with much descriptive contents need this abstract model or theory to bestow on them significance; and the abstract model or theory needs the descriptive terms in order to refer to the fine texture of the specific poem. In my feature article "Aspects of Cognitive Poetics" elsewhere on this site I give a brief analysis of emotions. One aspect of emotions, according to psychologists, is a sudden deviation from normal energy level. Calm and sadness, for instance, result from a decrease of energy. When I point out in the semantic and thematic elements of two landscape descriptions a decrease of energy, I am accounting, by the same token, for the emotional qualities of the poem--in light of the preceding abstract analysis of emotions. These emotional qualities may be perceived even before an emotional term occurs in the poem, when only inanimate nature, or the physical behaviour of animals is described. When we make such statements as "This poem has an emotional quality," or "This is a loaded description of a poem," one must ask the quesion " How can we know that this is indeed the case in this particular instance?".
One must distinguish "emotional contents" from "emotional quality." Poe's verse "Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee" conveys a very sad event. But many readers report they perceive a playful quality in the verse. This quality emerges from an interplay of the contents with the syntactic, metric and phonetic structure of the verse. Some knowledgeable persons whom I asked said this playful or witty quality had to do wih the repeated sound clusters. But then I pointed out that in the first eight lines of Paradise Lost there is a much greater number of repeated sound clusters, involving a greater number of sounds; yet, readers don't usually perceive in this passage a witty or playful quality. It is not only the repeated sound clusters that matter, but also their diffuse or focussed character. In Paradise Lost the sound clusters are woven into a diffuse texture; in "Annabel Lee" they are focussed. Eventually I have elaborated a dichotomy of convergent/divergent style. This is not an either/or dichotomy, but a dichotomic spectrum, along which poems can be compared in more/less terms. This dichotomy cuts across the prosodic, syntactic and semantic dimensions of poetry: the relative divergence or convergence of a text is determined by the interplay of a wide range of elements in each of these dimensions. The categories convergent/divergent can be related to poetic texts via terms with fairly exact descriptive contents, concerning which one can easily answer the question "How can we know that this is indeed the case in this specific instance."
On the metric level, in "convergent style," a great number of strong positions are occupied by linguistically stressed syllables; a great number of weak positions are occupied by linguistically unstressed syllables. In "divergent style" there is an increasing number of stressed syllables in weak positions, and of unstressed syllables in strong positions (and further distinctions can be made). Convergent style is typically related with good shape realization, divergent style with poor shape realization, both on the prosodic and the semantic level. In convergent style prosodic shapes will tend to be clearly articulated, by end-stopped lines; if there is a run-on line, it will tend to occur just before the closure, enhancing its "requiredness." In divergent style, prosodic shapes tend to be blurred by run-on lines. On the semantic level, in convergent style many nouns denote entities that have stable, characteristic visual shapes; in divergent style many nouns denote Gestalt-free and thing- free qualities. In convergent style, abstract nouns tend to occur against a universal setting, as in Pope's "The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the World"; in divergent style, against a concrete, immediate landscape, as in Wordsworth' s "Oh listen! for the vale profound / I overflowing with the sound"; and so on. Convergent style is typically characterized by a rational or witty quality (in some well-defined marked instances, on the contrary, a "hypnotic" quality); divergent style is typically characterized by an emotional quality. These associations with emotional and non- emotional qualities can be supported by distinctions drawn from Gestalt theory and from the Rorschach ink-blot test. But one all-important thing must be emphasized. These emotional or non-emotional qualities cannot be inferred from these elements. The reader must directly perceive them, and only after the event s/he may point out the elements that, in Frank Sibley's terms, typically count toward or against them.