Learning the Secrets of English Verse: The Keys to the Treasure Chest (Springer Texts in Education) 3030530957, 9783030530952

Citation preview

Springer Texts in Education

David J. Rothman Susan Delaney Spear

Learning the Secrets of English Verse The Keys to the Treasure Chest

Springer Texts in Education

Springer Texts in Education delivers high-quality instructional content for graduates and advanced graduates in all areas of Education and Educational Research. The textbook series is comprised of self-contained books with a broad and comprehensive coverage that are suitable for class as well as for individual self-study. All texts are authored by established experts in their fields and offer a solid methodological background, accompanied by pedagogical materials to serve students such as practical examples, exercises, case studies etc. Textbooks published in the Springer Texts in Education series are addressed to graduate and advanced graduate students, but also to researchers as important resources for their education, knowledge and teaching. Please contact Natalie Rieborn at textbooks. [email protected] or your regular editorial contact person for queries or to submit your book proposal.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13812

David J. Rothman • Susan Delaney Spear

Learning the Secrets of English Verse The Keys to the Treasure Chest

123

David J. Rothman Former Director, Graduate Program in Creative Writing Western Colorado University Gunnison, CO, USA

Susan Delaney Spear Former Associate Professor, Department of English Colorado Christian University Lakewood, CO, USA

ISSN 2366-7672 ISSN 2366-7680 (electronic) Springer Texts in Education ISBN 978-3-030-53095-2 ISBN 978-3-030-53096-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors and publishers for their kind permission to reprint the following material: Robert Frost, “For Once, Then, Something,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Acquainted with the Night,” from The Collected Poems, by Robert Frost © 1969 Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc., published by Vintage Books, extract reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. (UK/Commonwealth print rights); and from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Copyright © 1916, 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Copyright © 1944, 1951 by Robert Frost, Preprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, All Rights Reserved (“For Once, Then, Something” and “The Road Not Taken,” world rights exclusive of UK/Commonwealth print rights); and from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Copyright © 1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Copyright © 1956 by Robert Frost, Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, All Rights Reserved (“Acquainted with the Night,” world rights exclusive of UK/Commonwealth print rights). Dana Gioia: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetic Line.” http://danagioia.com/essays/writingand-reading/thirteen-ways-of-thinking-about-the-poetic-line/. Copyright © by Dana Gioia. ND. Reprinted with permission of the author. Robert Graves: “John Skelton,” from Complete Poems, Vol. I, Ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Copyright © 1995. Reprinted with permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK. James Hall: “Maybe Dat’s Your Pwoblem Too,” from The Mating Reflex, by James Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1980 by James Hall. Reprinted with permission of the author. Robinson Jeffers: “Inscription for a Gravestone,” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume Two: 1928–1938, by Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt. Copyright © 1938 by Robinson Jeffers. Renewed 1966 by Donnan Jeffers and Garth Jeffers. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Rebekah Martindale: Excerpt from “Rhyme Royal in ‘Resolution and Independence,’” unpublished essay. Copyright © 2011 by Rebekah Martindale. Used with permission of the author. W. S. Merwin: “The Long and the Short of It,” from The Shadow of Sirius, by W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 2008 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org, and of The Wylie Agency, LLC. Marianne Moore: “The Fish,” from The New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1918 by Marianne Moore, renewed © 1921, 1924, 1935, 1951, 1967 by Marianne Moore. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; of Faber and Faber Ltd; and of the Literary Estate of Marianne C. Moore, David M. Moore, Esq., Successor Executor. All rights reserved.

v

vi

Acknowledgments

Ogden Nash: “Fahrenheit Gesundheit,” from Verses from 1929 On, by Ogden Nash, Little, Brown and Company, 1959. Copyright © 1941 by Ogden Nash, renewed. Reprinted with permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. David J. Rothman: “The Icicle,” from The Book of Catapults, by David J. Rothman, White Violet Press. Copyright © 2013. Reprinted with permission of the author. Richard Wilbur: “The Lilacs,” from Collected Poems 1943–2004, by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow,” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909–1934, by William Carlos Williams, edited by Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. Copyright © 1935 by Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK. William Butler Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium,” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Caitríona Yeats.

All student poems in the textbook are reprinted with permission of the authors. All other poems and excerpts that appear in this book are either in the public domain or governed by the doctrine of fair use.

Contents

Part I

Metrical Forms

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3

2

The Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters: The Sapphic and the Catullan Hendecasyllable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

Interchapter 2: Classical Meters Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

89

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91

7

Free Verse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

8

Nonce Meters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Interlude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Part II 9

Stanza Forms

Couplets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

10 Terza Rima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 11 Quatrains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 12 Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas . . . . . . . . . . 203 13 Rhyme Royal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 14 Ottava Rima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 15 Spenserian Stanzas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

vii

viii

Contents

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Preface for Teachers

The third requisite on our Poet or Maker is Imitatio, to bee able to convert the substance or Riches of another Poet, to his owne use...Not as a Creature that swallowes what it takes in, crude, raw, or indigested; but that feedes with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment. Not to imitate servilely, as Horace says, and catch at vices for vertue; but to draw forth out of the best and choisest flowers, with the Bee, and turn all into Honey... —Ben Jonson, Discoveries *** I thought, if I could draw my paines Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay. Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For, he tames it, that letters it in verse. —John Donne, “The Triple Foole” *** Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came. —Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” *** Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a song, Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains That would not be forgotten, and are here Recorded: to the open fields I told A prophecy: poetic numbers came Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe

ix

x

Preface for Teachers

A renovated spirit singled out, Such hope was mine, for holy services. My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind’s Internal echo of the imperfect sound; To both I listened, drawing from them both A cheerful confidence in things to come. —William Wordsworth, The Prelude *** I am always pleased when I see someone making motions like this [gesture of conducting a chorus]–like a metronome. Seeing the music measured. Measure always reassures me. Measure in love, in government, measure in selfishness, measure in unselfishness. —Robert Frost, “Observations and Declarations of a Poet-Statesman” *** She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. —Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” *** The crux of the issue is measure. —William Carlos Williams, “Free Verse” *** I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort—I mean I didn’t give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form—all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I’ve always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. —Conrad Aiken, “The Art of Poetry No. 9”, interview by Robert Hunter Wilbur, The Paris Review *** As long as we can believe anything we believe in measure we do it with the first breath we take and the first sound we make

Preface for Teachers

xi

it is in each word we learn and in each of them it means what will come again and when it is there in meal and in moon and in meaning it is the meaning it is the firmament and the furrow turning at the end of the field and the verse turning with its breath it is in memory that keeps telling us some of the old story about us —W. S. Merwin, “The Long and the Short of It,” The Shadow of Sirius *** There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing. —Derek Walcott, Harper’s, February 2010 *** 1. The most obvious difference between prose and verse is lineation. In art, the obvious is always important—although it is usually exactly what experts ignore. Poetic technique consists almost entirely of exploiting the expressive possibilities of lineation as a formal principle to communicate and intensify meaning. 2. The three common principles of organization for the poetic line are metrical, syntactic, and visual. Each system operates by different rules, but all systems share the assumption of the paramount importance of lineation in focusing the expressive energy and meaning of the poem. 3. Every element in a poem—every word, line break, stanza pattern, indentation, even all punctuation—potentially carries expressive meaning. If you do not shape that potential expressivity, each passive detail weakens the overall force of the poem. Those passive elements are dead weight the poem is obliged to carry. 4. There should be a reason why every line ends where it does. Line breaks are not neutral. Lineation is the most basic and essential organizing principle of verse. A reader or auditor need not understand the principle behind each line break intellectually, but he or she must intuitively feel its appropriateness and authority. 5. The purpose of lineation in verse is to establish a rhythm of expectation that heightens the listener’s attention and apprehension. The purpose of poetic technique, especially meter, is to enchant the listener—to create a gentle hypnotic state that lowers the listener’s resistance and heightens attention. Free verse lacks the steady physical beat of metrical poetry, but it seeks the same neural effect by different means. Lineation is the central organizing principle of free verse.

xii

Preface for Teachers

6. The reasons determining line length should be consistent within a poem—unless there is an overwhelming expressive necessity to violate them. It takes time and energy to establish a pattern of expectation. Violate the pattern too easily or too often, and the governing pattern falls apart. A badly executed pattern is worse than no pattern. Without an expressive pattern, there is no poem. 7. Every poem should have a model line. The standard line length should be clear —consciously or unconsciously—to the listener or reader. The standard should be maintained throughout the poem, except for meaningful expressive variation. After each of these disruptive junctures, the poem either returns to the model line or creates a new standard. The expressive value of all disruptions should be greater than the loss of momentum and the breaking of the pattern’s spell. 8. Each poetic line has two complementary obligations—to work well within the total pattern of the poem, and to embody in itself the power of poetic language. The successful poem does not merely balance those differing obligations; it uses them as partners in a seamless dance. Unless they dance, there isn’t poetry, only versified language. 9. Each line should have some independent expressive force. Filling out a pattern is not sufficient justification for a line of verse. It should have some independent vitality in musical, imaginative, or narrative terms. The individual line is the microcosm of the total poem. It should embody the virtues of the whole. That is one reason that poetry can be quoted with such an advantage. 10. The lineation tells the reader how to hear, see, and understand the poem. As the central formal principle of verse, lineation establishes the auditory and semantic patterns of the poem. The overall formal power of the poem cannot be achieved if lineation is done carelessly. 11. Line endings represent one of the most powerful expressive elements in poetic form. Poetic lines turn on the final word in each line. (The original meaning of versus is “to turn a plow making furrows in a field”—hence “the turn” is one of the ancient governing metaphors for poetry and poetic technique.) This verbal turning point, even when it isn’t rhymed, offers enormous potential for meaningful effect. 12. The word at the end of a poetic line should bear the weight of imaginative or musical scrutiny. The end word of a line is highly visible and audible. Never end lines on weak words unless there is a strong expressive necessity. The end words—rhymed or unrhymed—should generate energy for the poem. 13. The line break is nearly always audible (and always visible), even if only as a tiny pause or echo. One doesn’t hear the bar in music, but the trained listener always knows where it is by the shape of the notes around it. Since the line break is so prominent, it must be used for expressive effect. If it doesn’t work for the poem, it will work against it. —Dana Gioia, “Thirteen Ways of Thinking about the Poetic Line” ***

Preface for Teachers

xiii

When students arrive in high school English classrooms, they generally know that poems include metaphors, similes, and images, but their strongest impression tends to be that poems are made out of feelings and concepts rather than out of words. In our view, such an approach, while it may contain a grain of truth, generally creates more confusion than illumination. When it comes to creative writing, some students have no interest in writing about their feelings and resent being required to do so, while others want to write heartfelt poems but have little if any experience with poetic technique. This is a gap that most high school curricula do not even attempt to bridge. What we could call the non-linguistic approach—the approach that emphasizes feeling above all—while it may be well-intentioned, affects students’ ability to learn how to read poetry as well as how to try their own hands at it. English Language Arts teachers face their own challenges when it comes to teaching poetry. Many enjoy poetry and desire to convey that enjoyment and knowledge to students but struggle to make the subject accessible and exciting, often because of the way poetry has been taught before the students reach their classrooms. This pedagogy is a reflection of larger trends in the poetry world that give overwhelming priority to what poems say—what they mean—over what they do as works of art. Further, with the exception of a few well-known forms such as the haiku and the sonnet, many high school teachers have had little specific instruction in the various forms of verse in English and that makes it difficult to teach them to others in a systematic and clear way. If they cast about for solutions, teachers may discover that there are good handbooks of poetic craft in print (Deutsch, Fry, Fussell, Hollander, Skelton, Strand & Boland, Turco, et. al.),1 but in our experience such works are rarely used in the high school classroom, few if any are designed specifically for high school students, and we have friendly quarrels with the approaches used in most of them. The result is that teachers often come to the subject eager to teach it but without the best preparation or tools. One of us, Susan Spear, who has spent almost her entire teaching career in high schools, has a background that might illustrate this. Always in love with poetry, she once asked a professor how she could learn about its structure. He gave her a copy of Lewis Turco’s An Introduction to Poetry Through Writing, sent as an examination copy by the publisher. The book was informative, and she gave many of the exercises a whirl, but without the support of a community of writers, she was only able to persevere so far. She then spent many years seeking out a method to organize and teach poetic craft more compellingly (in addition to finding ways to develop her own creative work in this regard). What she discovered was what many others have discovered: there is precious little in print that gives teachers and students a systematic way to approach the techniques of verse. This book, like a number much older books that have long gone out of fashion and out of print, responds to the need for a well-organized, systematic introduction to poetic technique for today’s creative writing students. Approaching the writing of

1

Teachers can refer to an extensive bibliography of poetry handbooks in the Appendix.

xiv

Preface for Teachers

poetry through the lens of practicing different metrical and stanza forms gives both the ambitious and the reluctant writer exercises to work on, much as a student would approach an assignment in any number of other subjects, from math and physics, to biology, art, or shop. At first this may seem a bit dry, but we have found again and again that the opposite is most often the case. The reluctant student often feels a sense of relief to know that he or she is merely practicing a particular form— learning how to do something—and the eager student gains facility with meter, rhyme and structure, enabling a far more aware and engaged relationship to the work of others, and developing real skill in the composition of both metrical and free verse. In Spear’s case, she found that when she started using this approach, her students immediately showed a growing facility with words and an increased and genuine enjoyment of language. The magic of centering poetry instruction on meter (including free verse as a set of formal strategies), stanzas, and some fixed lyrical forms as we do in this book is that these tools provide students with an understanding that they can then use both to read the work of others more deeply and to write work of their own that has that much more chance of being successful and even original. *** This book is a collaboration that grew out of a shared desire by the authors to pass on the great traditions of poetic craft, specifically the techniques of verse, to our students. We first met when Spear, then an English teacher at Chatfield Senior High School in Littleton, Colorado, signed up for one of Rothman’s classes in poetry focusing on versecraft at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver in 2005. After several years and a number of classes, she then invited Rothman to participate in the Colorado “Writers in the Schools” program at Chatfield in the spring of 2010. Rothman had taught for many years in both secondary and post-secondary education, but this opportunity, funded by Colorado Humanities and Chatfield (a Jefferson County public high school), gave both him and Spear the opportunity to introduce rigorous ideas about teaching versecraft to approximately one hundred of high school students in a new way—or in an old way made new—and they did so, presenting much of the curriculum that is now published here for the first time. The original source for Rothman’s ideas about how to teach verse came from a decisive undergraduate course he took with the poet, critic and translator Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard many years ago titled “Versification.” Fitzgerald’s course set the model for this book, as it focused closely on what poems do rather than on what they say. Fitzgerald modestly claimed only to teach the forms rather than pretending to offer secrets of creativity, although that was slyly what he was doing as well. Fitzgerald, who was then in his final year as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, took his students through the full range of meters and many of the stanza forms and fixed lyrical forms in the same spirit (though with vastly greater knowledge of Greek!) as we hope they are presented here. His approach was not unlike that which one would expect in a musical conservatory, an art school, or a dance academy, where those who wish to learn how to make art always study and return to the models of those

Preface for Teachers

xv

who came before, the better to unleash their own creativity when the opportunity finally comes to do so. Fitzgerald’s course was decisive for Rothman as a poet, as it was for so many of Fitzgerald’s other students, such as Dana Gioia, Elise Paschen, Robert B. Shaw, Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter, Rachel Hadas. In Rothman’s case it led him not only into a new world of composition, but eventually into extensive work as a scholar and teacher of literary prosody. That course in versification led directly to this book. As both authors of this book are not only poets and teachers, but also musicians, we have taken exactly the conservatory approach Fitzgerald’s pedagogy and curriculum suggested, as it sensibly suggests that strong poetry—like every other art—requires not only inspiration but also craft. One cannot possibly teach everyone how to be a strong poet, any more than one can teach everyone how to be a strong painter, dancer, or composer, but one can teach students how to scan and write verse, just as one can teach students how to draw well and to use perspective and understand color, or to count and to execute the steps of ballet and modern dance, or to read music, play instruments, and even to improvise. As Fitzgerald and many of our greatest poets have always understood, it is from these fundamental building blocks, far too often ignored and misunderstood, that all subsequent growth comes. Following Fitzgerald’s model, our goal throughout this book is to do what no other book currently does for creative writing students: to give them the building blocks of verse in a progressive, well-organized and clear way. At the end of this course, students will have a solid grounding in every major meter and repeating stanza form in English, including free verse and nonce forms. These are the fundamental tools that will then enable them to read poems more carefully and richly, to understand them more deeply, to enjoy them more thoroughly, and even to try creating them for themselves. *** The first part of this book presents all the major metrical forms in English, treating them in the order that they entered the language, which helps students to understand not only how the meters work, but also how they developed; the second part proceeds through the rhyming stanza forms from short to long, beginning with the couplet and ending with the sonnet. Every chapter presents a meter or a stanza form, gives scanned examples of it, and then also provides real student examples from our Chatfield students with commentary on the metrics, the scansion, the rhyme scheme and the poetic structure, the better to help students see how others have tried to do what they are being asked to do, with more or less success. As far as we know, the book is unique in this regard in the entire history of such textbooks, showing not only how to make the forms, but examining common errors and successes from other students as well. We have found that many students take to the study of versecraft with enthusiasm. It makes sense to them because it is analogous to everything else they learn to do in life, from music, to sports, to acquiring a foreign language, to learning how to drive a car. We must know what we are doing before we can do it well, and

xvi

Preface for Teachers

poetry is no different. To write good lines of poetry, we therefore have to understand how they work, alone and in combination with other lines. Many students find this to be a great liberation, as they are no longer told what to say, but rather are given guidelines about how to try to say whatever interests them. Students who may enjoy other subjects such as mathematics or the sciences more than English often find this approach appealing, as they begin to appreciate the fascinating and complex patterns of verse language and realize that writing poetry is not just a matter of spilling statements onto the page. While we certainly do think that imagery, diction, syntax, figures of speech and theme—to say nothing of feelings and concepts!—are important in poetry, we do not treat them directly in this book, but rather address them as they come up in the course of discussing particular metrical and stanza forms and poems in those forms by poets and students. We take this approach because our view is that no amount of the study of grammar, imagery, figurative language, plot or themes will teach beginning students how to create lines of blank verse, or, for that matter, free verse. After all, themes, syntax and figures of speech are present in prose just as much as they are in verse, and to teach them without teaching meter is to put the cart before the horse. Therefore, the differentiating factor that we are after in this book is the versecraft itself. Again, this is not to say that we wish to ignore or demote the other crucial devices of poetry, but rather that we organize our pedagogy in a different way. The goal is not to overturn such discussions, but rather to restore balance, giving the craft of verse its equal due as a source of creativity. We hope teachers realize that while our book focuses on meters and stanzas, it is far more than a handbook of metrical and stanza forms. We have organized it as a textbook with a carefully sequenced and scaffolded curriculum. It combines teaching poetry through the lens of the forms with the best current practice in writing instruction. Writing Next, a report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2007, by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, recommends eleven effective elements of writing instruction for adolescents. The chapters in this text rely heavily on three of these elements: collaborative writing; the process-writing approach; and the study of models. Each chapter in our book opens with an explanation of a verse form, followed by a classic example of a poem in this form. We provide scansion marks on this classic poem, indicating feet, stresses, and rhyme scheme along with discussion of the poem. Next, we include another classic poem in the same form for students to analyze and scan. They may do this individually or collaboratively. It is helpful for students to read aloud together; most poems are meant to be spoken and heard as well as read. The final section of the chapter provides student examples and exercises with commentary addressing the strengths and weaknesses of the student work. After reading, analyzing and scanning the models, students write their own exercises and scan them. When students have finished their exercises, the most effective learning activities take place. We recommend that the teacher select a few exercises for the whole class to discuss. In our experience, this works best when the student reads the work, then the teacher points out the strengths of the exercise in the context of the particular form and invites discussion from the class. The innovation here, as far as

Preface for Teachers

xvii

most poetry classrooms go, is that the content of the poem should not be the immediate focus. To fulfill the promise of the pedagogical method we are advocating, the teacher’s comments should first and foremost address how successfully the student executes the form, rather than focusing on judging the merit of the poem’s content. This requires restraint, given our current pedagogical environment, but it works. When the entire class looks at several exercises in this master-class format, each student benefits from understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their classmates’ work. Students can then work in pairs or small groups to help each other repair metrical potholes, rhyme challenges, scansion errors, and other common problems. This approach promotes collaborative work, writing as a process, and the study of models. We hope that the scanned examples of student work from our class at Chatfield, with their typical strengths and weaknesses, will help students and teachers to understand the challenges they face in their own writing that much more clearly. Our book’s focus on exercises has the virtue of making each assignment a relatively low-stakes affair, where playfulness, creativity and even mistakes are strongly encouraged. Students are not being asked to write about major themes, although of course many do, which is fine, but rather to play with language in a structured way, to create lines and stanzas that work. Our assignments resemble those in other disciplines, where the acquisition of skill is based on incremental increases in complexity that are given careful and precise scaffolding. Many students—most, we would argue—find this far more helpful and interesting than simply being told that poetry is a kind of undifferentiated mass of expression and lines of verse depend merely on inspiration, an all too common pedagogical scenario. We would go so far as to suggest should not even be graded on p that p exercises p anything more differential than a þ ; ;  system, to avoid too much valorization of grading too early in the process. The main thing is to get students writing in an open, playful, engaged yet structured way; the grades will come as they need to and as is appropriate in each teacher’s practice. There is one more highly effective strategy in teaching all genres of writing that we encourage. When teachers write exercises alongside the students, the teachers discover first-hand what challenges students face and they can more effectively help students revise. Further, because of the primal quality of poetry, teachers and students are close to facing the same kinds of challenges that students do in writing in the forms, much as an art teacher who draws a still life is engaging exactly the same material as a class. The teacher who participates in the writing process with students is a powerful force in the learning community. *** We owe a great debt of thanks to many who have helped in the creation of this book. In particular, we are grateful to Colorado Humanities and the Jefferson County School District for supporting the Writers in the Schools Program that enabled us to lay crucial pedagogical groundwork.

xviii

Preface for Teachers

Rothman also thanks all of his students not only at Chatfield but also at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, and especially at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, where he served for five years as Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing and also of the Concentration in Poetry with an Emphasis on Versecraft. The courageous first group of students to enroll in this program, in the fall of 2010—Susan Spear, Felicia Chernesky, Malinda Miller, Robert Abbate and Laura Stuckey—have certainly all given as much as they received, if not more. The program at Western, one of the very few to focus so closely on versecraft at such an advanced level, would not have come into existence without the tireless work of its founding Director, Mark Todd, and the support of the WCU administration. Spear and Miller were also part of a group of poets at Lighthouse Writers Workshop who have pursued the study of forms with tremendous passion and grace, also including Andrea Doray, Joslyn Green, Martha Kalin, Tjaden Lotito, Jere Paulmeno, Joy Sawyer, Dale Schellenger, Rich Uhrlaub, and Ken Weaver. If you have not yet seen their poems in print, you soon will. He also thanks the many poets, critics and scholars who still care about versecraft and who have helped him to think through some of the ideas in this book, especially Derek Attridge, Bruce Bennet, the late Terry Brogan, Tom Cable, Garrick Davis, Raphael Falco, Natalie Gerber, Dana Gioia, William Tyson Hausdoerffer, Ernest Hilbert, Joan Houlihan, Simon Jarvis, Julie Kane, Marilyn Krysl, the late Valerie Lester, David Mason, Jan Schreiber, Tim Steele, Marilyn Taylor, Mark Todd, Fred Turner, David Yezzi, and many more affiliated with the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Poetry Symposium at Writing the Rockies. Hausdoerffer, Hilbert, Kane, Todd and Yezzi were also faculty at Western, and working with them on curriculum there was one of the great joys Rothman ever encountered in academia. In addition to this group, Bennet, Cable, Gerber, Jarvis, Krysl, Mason, Schreiber, Taylor and Turner plus many more participated in the program’s summer conference, Writing the Rockies, whose poetry seminars were a hotbed of prosodical discussion. The authors owe a special debt to Tom Cable for a particularly close reading of the manuscript, especially the material on Old and Middle English. Above all, Rothman remains indebted to Robert Fitzgerald for introducing him to this aspect of his life’s work. He owes an especially deep debt of gratitude to Susan Spear, whose idea it was to create this book and who has pursued the project with tenacity since it began. It would never have happened without her. Finally, he is grateful to his late wife Emily, and his sons, Jacob and Noah, who supported the work on this book for many years. Spear thanks her AP Language & Composition students, who cheerfully tackled the study of verse forms in addition to an already packed curriculum. She too thanks Josephine Jones and Colorado Humanities for the opportunity to host Writers in the Schools at Chatfield, Annessa Hart and Patsy Everett, colleagues whose classrooms also participated in the program, Principal Keith Mead, Principal Bernard Hohman and English Department Chair Brock Blume for their unwavering support of rigorous writing instruction. Spear is grateful to Dr. Rothman and Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she finally found a course in the verseforms of poetry, her poetry group Six Poets Short of a Sonnet—Joslyn Green, Malinda Miller, Jere Paulmeno,

Preface for Teachers

xix

Dale Schellenger, John Steele (another Western MFA graduate) and Rich Uhrlaub, and her MFA Poetry cohort—Felicia Chernesky, Malinda Miller, Laura Stuckey, and Rob Abbate. It is our hope that this book will provide a clear, well-organized, welcoming and inspiring approach to the joys of reading and writing poetry, and that both students and teachers will gain from it a life-long appreciation for the art in all of its wonderful, surprising, delightful and diverse forms. Crested Butte, CO, USA Tampa, FL, USA

David J. Rothman Susan Delaney Spear

Introduction: To Make a Poem

We hope that everyone reading this book loves to do something creative, whether it is a sport, a game of some kind such as chess, or music, painting, dance, theater, sculpture, film and video or any other art. Every one of those activities involves not only judgment and creativity, but also rules. In fact, judgment and creativity are only possible because of rules. Consider a baseball play, for example: it is the bottom of the ninth, the team at bat is down by three, there is one out, bases are loaded and the batter’s count is 3 and 2: here comes the pitch, you are the batter and you have a choice to swing or to bunt. But that creative decision—even the scenario that we have just described—only makes sense if you know the rules of the game, rules which govern every detail of the situation. Now imagine a piano sonata: the first movement is in D-flat major, the tempo is marked “Allegretto,” the time signature is 4/4, and every note has its place on the staff, along with an indication of its duration. But how are you going to play it? Is it happy? Is it lonesome? There is more involved than just hitting the right keys, but the creative choices only make sense to a person who already knows how to play the instrument. Or consider a card game, or a game of chess, or for that matter a dinner party, a high school graduation, the way an operating room works or how to put together a car engine, a computer, how to build a bridge. Creative and professional activities are of course not about rules, but it is impossible to succeed without them. Even though they are not sufficient, they are necessary, for it is the rules that make thinking, judgment and creativity possible in the first place. Poetry is just like all the activities mentioned above. Why should it be any different from any other art or organized human activity? It depends in part on a complex and ancient set of rules, developed by billions of people over tens of thousands of years in thousands of languages. As much as in any organized human activity, these rules merge together from all these languages and cultures like a beautiful mosaic, or a garden, in which individual languages, many of them related to each other, touch and frequently mingle. English poetry, for example, would not be what it is without at the very least the influence of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, and many other languages, including even Chinese (where many scholars argue that rhyme originated). Further, these rules are every bit as precise as those that define mathematics, tennis, jet engine design, heart transplants, playing the blues and telling jokes. They are precise even

xxi

xxii

Introduction: To Make a Poem

though, just as in those activities, people do not always agree about them. Further, as with all those activities, following the rules can never insure genius or even creativity—nothing can—but the rules on which poetry depends are the point of departure for everything else, including even intelligent conversation about poems that you read. Reading a poem in which the writer does not understand the rules is about as much fun as playing soccer against a team that insists on erasing all the lines from the field, or eating spaghetti with a butter knife, or trying to move into a house for which the architect neglected to build any doors. It just doesn't work. The simple statement that poetry has rules just like everything else might at first appear to be obvious, but in far too many creative writing and English classes today, the rules of poetry are ignored or, worse, denigrated, as if poetry were a kind of oddly special human activity that depends on pure inspiration, in this case statements, feelings and themes alone. The idea seems to be that if one can learn something about expressive linguistic techniques like metaphor, simile, and condensed imagery and arrange them in lines, suddenly poems will appear on the page. The problem with this approach for aspiring poets is not with what it includes. Of course, poems make statements and address feelings, ideas, stories, and themes. The problem is with what an over-emphasis on those elements excludes, which is the rules that make writing about feelings, ideas, stories and themes more powerful and interesting—that might even make them poetry—in the first place. Assuming that one crucial part of the making of poems begins with rules, the next question to ask is where these rules come from and what they govern. The rules we are talking about are those that help us write lines of poetry, called verses. And they were not developed by teachers who want to torture students. They were developed by the poets themselves to enable them to do what they do, much as the rules of basketball were developed by players, coaches and others who love the game. And the answer for why these rules were developed for poetry is surprisingly simple and the same as the rules for, say, basketball is surprisingly simple, but still surprising: all the basic rules that govern the making of verse lines depend on counting, or, more specifically, measuring, by which we mean the counting of things that are similar to each other. More specifically, all the basic rules that we use to make poetic lines and ultimately poems grow out of mixing language with measuring. Of course, language is important in poetry; at first it would appear logical to say that language is the only thing that poems are made of, another common assumption in the poetry classroom, but that would be untrue. For most poems are made of language, but it is language arranged in separate lines, which is the definition of “verse” in the first place. “Verse” is a word that comes from the Latin term “versus,” which originally meant “a turn,” specifically the turn that a plowman would make at the end of a furrow, the idea being that verses on the page look like a plowed field. It’s a Latin root we still see all around us: re-verse, in-verse, uni-verse, ad-verse, and so on. Verse is strange. It is something that we do or make with language but that does not involve what the words mean. Any words can be arranged quite easily into lines of verse without the slightest change, for better or for worse, to what they say. It’s strange:

Introduction: To Make a Poem

xxiii

Any words can be arranged quite easily into lines of verse without the slightest change, for better or for worse, to what they say. It’s strange. And yet something has happened to the words when we rearrange them like this. In fact, if you were to play around with the lineation of these words a bit more you might discover some surprising patterns in this passage that are completely obscured when it is written as prose, that only emerge when you see it and begin to think of it as lines of verse. They are there on purpose, but we have (we flatter ourselves) cunningly hidden them. Poets are, among other things, a bit obsessed with this way of arranging or composing words, because this ancient technique seems to give them a different and profound power. Just as everything changes when a group of people playing catch draws lines on a field, so everything changes when writers begin to compose verses instead of merely sentences. The idea that verse is something that we do with language that is not part of what the words mean in and of themselves may seem surprising at first, but consider this: Most of the writing you read is what we call “prose,” a word that comes from the prefix “pro-” (“forward”) and the word “versus” contracted into one new word (pro + versus = prose). Prose was originally a verse that only turns forward, never back, like one long furrow. What this suggests is that verse comes first, and that prose writers choose for various reasons to give up something that verse gives to language. And what prose relinquishes is patterns and repetitions—all of them defined by measuring—that only verse, with its repeated, similar lines, can provide. After all, there is no repetition and therefore no counting or clear rules if you cannot compare one line to another, as you can in verse. And prose is one, long line (with the exception of the break into paragraphs). The rules of verse, upon which poetry depends, have to do with the fact that writing in verses, or lines, is a kind of promise to the reader that each line will somehow be equivalent to all the others, meaning that they can be measured against each other. This is where the most basic rules of verse come from, the expectation of equivalence, just as every play in a baseball game begins with a pitch and ends with specific events (the ball on the ground, in a glove, or the runners on bases), every point in a tennis match has the same structure (beginning with a serve, ending with a violation of the line or the ball in the net), every geometry problem has a similar structure (interestingly…in lines), and so on. As we showed above, when we rewrote one of our own sentences as verse, verse does not differ from prose because of what it says. In prose we can tackle any subject, employ any diction, tell any story, use any figure of speech, even establish any rhythm. What we cannot do in prose, however, by definition, is write verse.

xxiv

Introduction: To Make a Poem

And verse is not only a way of saying something; it also is a way of doing something. Poems not only say things, they also do things that prose cannot do. They measure. Here is the beginning of a famous passage from Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1, in which the young prince thinks about committing suicide: To be, or not to be, that is the question: whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, and by opposing end them: to die, to sleep no more; and by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to? Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. The problem is that Shakespeare did not exactly write that. What he wrote looks more like this, keeping in mind that editors often modify Shakespeare’s punctuation. To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. It is reasonable to ask what the difference is. After all, the words are exactly the same, and they appear in the same order. And yet, you will see that this arrangement highlights things that Shakespeare was doing, very intentionally, that we simply do not do when we are writing prose. If you count the syllables in every line, you will quickly see that most have exactly ten syllables; the first four have eleven each, but that is only because each ends with a word (question, suffer, fortune, troubles) that has what we call a strong stress on the first syllable (QUEStion, SUFFer, FORtune, TROUbles). The same is true of the eighth, which ends with “consumMAtion,” and the fifth, which has a special structure called either a “broken-backed line” or an “epic caesura,” meaning a pause in the middle, cunningly placed after the phrase “end them”. Further, as you will learn from this book, Shakespeare has arranged the stresses throughout each line in a way that follows a particular underlying pattern, that we call “blank verse,” which is unrhymed “iambic pentameter” (or, as some

Introduction: To Make a Poem

xxv

prefer to call it, “the heroic line”). Further, he did not do this by writing the passage out as prose and then cutting it up, as we just did. He wrote it as verse to begin with, and the reason he did that was to gain a certain kind of power in the language as he composed it that prose just does not have, even if it is saying the same thing. As for what the differences between the two sections of Hamlet that we have presented above mean, that is a question best left wide open right now. It might not even be the best question to ask at this point, because, despite its power and beauty, verse in and of itself does not necessarily mean anything, at least at first. To return to our earlier example, it is a bit like asking, “What do the rules of baseball mean?” They do not necessarily mean anything by themselves, and yet you cannot play the game without them. They are what make the game possible in the first place. They come to mean something…when you play baseball. In poetry, as in prose, you can write about any topic you choose. As you work on the exercises in this book, however, we hope you do not feel you have to write about a subject you consider “profound.” You do not have to be Shakespeare. A student once came to visit one of the authors of this book, Susan Spear, one morning in her office. His English teacher had explained the form of the English sonnet and had asked each student to write one by Friday. He was not anxious about writing in iambic pentameter or using rhyme. He simply had no idea where to start because for some reason, he believed he must write 14 profound, vulnerable lines about something personal. When she realized the source of his sonnet jitters, Spear said: “What did you eat for breakfast?” His answer was one word: “toast.” She suggested he write a sonnet about toast. That same evening, he wrote a clever, well-crafted sonnet about a piece of toast falling in love with a scrambled egg. That is all it takes to get started. Poems need not always be high-stakes affairs in terms of their apparent content. Reading them and writing them should give delight. They should be enjoyable. So, take it easy. In fact, we encourage you not to take on the biggest issues of life at first, because that makes it hard to learn. It would be like having your first basketball team practice be a championship game, or your first attempt to learn surgery be on a live person. No, take it easy. Write about your socks. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda did this…and he won the Nobel Prize. Because the rules of verse are so important to the study and making of poems, the purpose of this book is to introduce you to the study and practice of major verse forms in English poetry. The reason to learn these forms is not because they are the only way to write poetry. In the end you should read and, if you wish, write poetry in any form that you enjoy. Perhaps ironically, however, that is exactly what leads us to what we are studying here, because these are the forms of verse that many other readers and writers who came before us did enjoy. In studying them, we enable ourselves to join a conversation with them and with other living poets who are already part of that conversation. So, in short: The only real reason to study

xxvi

Introduction: To Make a Poem

these forms is to increase your enjoyment of reading and writing poetry. And that enjoyment—delight—is what it is all about. What you will learn here is some of what every major poet in English, of every background imaginable, has studied, practiced, copied and learned from over the course of more than a thousand years. In fact, it is the poets themselves—obviously!—who created these forms in the first place. In studying these forms, we are only following in their footsteps (a pun that will make more sense to you soon). Each chapter in this book invites you to read examples of, discuss, and then imitate a verse form (stress meters, accentual syllabics, free verse) or a stanza form (couplets, quatrains, ottava rima), the better to understand how some of the strongest poets in many languages have measured their words as part of making their art. You will also look at the way these forms came into English from other languages, focusing on Greek, Latin, Italian, and French. (Don’t worry! You do not need to know these languages to understand what is going on.) In the end, we have faith that you know and feel more than enough to bring artistry to your verse. No one can tell you how to meditate on love, or grief, or anger; that is the creative material you yourself must bring to the project. By way of contrast, this book gives you tools to learn more about the craft of poetry. As a result, the chapters differ from a traditional creative writing guide in that each gives you the opportunity to practice tight verse forms as exercises; you will learn how to identify and analyze the verse forms of your own poems and those of the strongest poets of the past. You will begin to learn not only how to write in a wide range of forms (including several forms of free verse), but also how to analyze the meter of the poetry of others and how to approach questions of the history, theory, and craft of verse language. Every chapter begins with examples and discussion of a particular meter or stanza form. In each case we also give you a sample scansion of each meter, scansion being a system of marking up a poem to show how the meter is working in every line. We also provide real scansions and exercises in the form by other students we have taught, to show you both successful examples and typical stumbling blocks. Finally, we provide poems for you to scan as exercises. In the end, knowing the rules and forms of verse cannot help you write a poem as original as something by Shakespeare, any more than knowing the rules of baseball can make you into a Derek Jeter, knowing the rules of tennis can turn you into a Venus Williams, knowing how to read music can make you into a Mozart or Alma Deutscher, understanding basic math can make you an Einstein, or learning the rules of drawing can make you a Picasso. What learning the basic rules of verse does do, however, is give you the opportunity to follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps. Just as in every other creative activity that we do, understanding the rules of verse gives us the structure that enables us to join in a conversation that existed long before any of us was born, and will continue long after we are gone. As the English

Introduction: To Make a Poem

xxvii

poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) once wrote when talking about how this process works, “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance.” And if you’re still curious: Any words can be Arranged quite easily into lines of verse without the slightest change, for better or for worse, to what they mean. It’s strange.

Part I

Metrical Forms

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Coming to Terms There are a number of key terms that appear throughout this book. The poets themselves, past and present, care deeply about these poetic terms, and still argue fiercely over what they are and how they work; knowing these terms will give you tools to describe poems and to understand discussions about them. Stress is one of the crucial terms for understanding English language and poetry. Linguists still disagree about exactly how it works, but they do agree that it is a way of emphasizing a syllable, either within a word if the word has more than one syllable (“word stress”) and also among words at the phrasal or clausal level (“phrasal stress”). Most agree also that stress is a function of pitch and volume, with a higher pitch and greater volume indicating more stress. There also seems to be greater clarity in the pronunciation of a stressed syllable, and greater length or duration of a stressed syllable with respect to others around it. These things happen at both the word and at the clausal level, creating a dizzying range of effects. One interesting thing about these effects is that they are not always completely clear, and reasonable people can differ about them. This is one reason, right from the start, that studying meter is not about putting on a strait-jacket, but rather more like learning how to hear the many possibilities in a piece of music. It is about learning the steps in a dance. Without worrying too much about the definition of stress, consider the feeling, which everyone with even basic competency in English must have in order to understand and speak the language, beginning with word stress. Every word of more than one syllable in English can have only one strong, or lexical stress. Look at the following words: Combine Contrast Desert Permit Record © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_1

3

4

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

In each case, if we put the stress on the first syllable, the word becomes a noun: / / .” “The contrast between the two of them is huge.” “He doesn’t have a permit However, if we put the stress on the second syllable, the word becomes a verb: / / “She’s going to record a song.” “How do you combine these ingredients?” Most words of more than one syllable do not give you a choice about where to put the strong stress. In the word “yesterday,” for example, the stress must come on the first syllable, in “tomorrow,” on the second, in “encyclopedia,” on the fourth, and so on. We generally mark a primary stress with an accent that starts low and moves up to the right, called an accent “aigu” in French:

/ Yesterday / Tomorrow / Encyclopedia There is also an accent called “secondary stress,” a weaker kind of stress that we will save for a later chapter. Phrasal stress operates in a similar way to word stress but at a higher, or more synthetic level of language, where words are combined, and we have to figure out what they mean in relation to each other. We can see how this works, and how important it is by reading a simple sentence and thinking about what happens to the meaning when we move the stress around. Think of the sentence “He said that?” Consider three different ways of stressing the words in relation to each other and what that does to the sentence: / He said that? I’ve known him for years, and I can’t believe he would be so rude!

/ He said that? It’s one thing to think it, but something else to say it! / He said that? That’s not a very nice thing to say! Changing the relative emphasis on words in even simple sentences can completely transform what they mean and what they suggest. As artists, poets train themselves to be as aware as possible of these effects and try to use them to their advantage to make the strongest poems they can. They do this by organizing stress into patterns, such as Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative meter and the many others we will be discussing in other chapters.

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

5

If Rhyme is the exploration of all kinds of similar sounds among words, then Alliteration is actually a kind of rhyme, and while there are many variations on it, the concept is far simpler than that of stress. Syllables that alliterate begin with the same sound, or group of sounds. “Dog” alliterates with “day” and “down,” but none of those words alliterates with “cat” or “blue.” One common confusion in trying to figure out which words alliterate is that the poet will look only at the first letter of the alliterating syllables and think that is enough. To avoid confusion, poets must often consider more than the first letter of the syllables. For example, someone might think that “boy” alliterates with “blue,” but it does not fully alliterate, as “b” and “bl” are not the same sound (although people disagree about this, and it appears that many Old English poets did allow this kind of alliteration). “Boy” alliterates most purely with “baby” and “bouncing,” and “blue” alliterates most purely with “black” and “bluster,” but those two groups of words do not fully alliterate with each other. Again, however, this is not a matter of right and wrong, for these effects all exist on a rich continuum of sound. Consider the complexity, for example of the alliteration in the increasingly complex consonant combinations of the words “song,” “stand” and “string.” The possibilities are rich. Another thing to remember is that all syllables beginning with vowels alliterate with each other, so that “egg” alliterates with “eat,” “open,” “apple,” “in” and so on. This is because vowel sounds are all made in similar ways, without the tongue, teeth or lips ever touching anything as they do in making consonantal sounds. You can try this for yourselves: it is possible to move through all vowel sounds—a, e, i, o, u and all the variations on them—in one breath, simply by moving your lips and jaw around in circles and never stopping the flow of air. This is why they are considered to alliterate with each other; the boundaries between them are far less clear than the boundaries between consonant sounds. One of the ways that alliteration has stayed alive in English is in the many stock phrases that alliterate. These exist for every consonant and consonantal cluster, and it is a fun exercise to go through the entire range of consonantal sounds, of which there are many more of than mere letters in the alphabet. See how many you can come up with. Here are a few examples: Bouncing baby boy Big and bad Bad to the bone Cash and carry Down and dirty Fast and furious Good as gold Long and lean Flim-flam Spick and span There are thousands of others, and each one of these is a living echo of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Indeed, you’ll notice that many of these phrases are so

6

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

musical that they have stayed alive even though the words in them are now not used in any other context, e.g. “spick and span.” End-stopped lines are lines in which the end of the line coincides with a break in the sense, what is often called a Juncture by linguists. It need not be the end of a sentence, but it should be a significant pause. For example, think of Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare (1564–1616): Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest; So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Every line here is also a unit of sense, whether a phrase or a clause, which is why we call these lines End-stopped. In contrast, at the other end of the extreme, consider “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963): so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens A lot is going on here, but if you simply look at the lines as statements, none of them appears to be self-contained. The sense runs over from one line to the next in every case. These lines are called Enjambed, a word that comes from French and which suggests that lines that flow over like this are a bit like having one leg over a fence (“le jamb” means “the leg” in French). The sense of the lines straddles the fence of the line-breaks.

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

7

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter: The Form Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative meter is the measure of Beowulf and almost all other Old English poems and, in modified form, some Middle English Poems. It was the primary meter that the first English poets used for hundreds of years. From the earliest times of recorded English poetry, beginning in about the 7th century and continuing into the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century, there were strong poems that still used it, such as Piers Plowman and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” even though it was going out of fashion by then. Although very few strong poets use any version of this meter explicitly now, it remains one of the foundations of what we do in all modern practice whether formal or free, and it appears like a ghost in the work of many modern and contemporary poets. With the terms and a bit of history in hand, we can now look at what is happening in Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative meter. The rules governing this meter are: (1) Each line must have exactly four strong stresses. (2) Three of the strong stresses in each line must alliterate with each other; it can be any three, creating multiple possible patterns, though one of the alliterating syllables is almost always in the first position. There is no other kind of rhyme. (3) Most lines should be end-stopped. They do not have to end with a period but should be self-contained units of sense, phrases or clauses. These rules do not capture everything that the Old and Middle English poets actually did, about which many scholars disagree. In fact, it is possible to find many exceptions to these rules, including even the first three lines of Beowulf.1 At the same time, these are the rules, mistaken as they may have been, that were adopted by modern poets as the standard structure when such meters began to be imitated over the last 100 years or so, and they are therefore a good point at which to begin because they capture most of what is going on in modern imitations of the meter. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that poetry and the rules of verse almost always involve a bending, an interpretation, or even a misunderstanding of the past that nonetheless can often create something new and wonderful. We will see this again and again in the ways English poets and those of all other languages adapt what they discover elsewhere to their own purposes. Poems from the Past Here is a passage from near the beginning of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a Middle English poem written about 1400 by an anonymous poet called The Pearl Poet, after the title of another of his poems. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a narrative poem written during what has been called “The Alliterative Revival.” This was a time when a group of strong poets living at the same time as Chaucer, the 1

We are grateful to our colleague, the preeminent Old and Middle English scholar Tom Cable, for pointing this out to us, along with many other important features and nuances of the language and the poetry.

8

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

author of The Canterbury Tales, was writing in a way that Chaucer and others around him in London would have seen as old-fashioned because these alliterative poets were attempting to imitate an older kind of poetry written with rules similar to those described above. Here is the passage in a prose translation by Jesse L. Weston: King Arthur lay at Camelot upon a Christmas-tide, with many a gallant lord and lovely lady, and all the noble brotherhood of the Round Table. There they held rich revels with gay talk and jest; one while they would ride forth to joust and tourney, and again back to the court to make carols; for there was the feast holden fifteen days with all the mirth that men could devise, song and glee, glorious to hear, in the daytime, and dancing at night. Halls and chambers were crowded with noble guests, the bravest of knights and the loveliest of ladies, and Arthur himself was the comeliest king that ever held a court. For all this fair folk were in their youth, the fairest and most fortunate under heaven, and the king himself of such fame that it were hard now to name so valiant a hero. Now the original, with the strong stresses marked in the first several sentences. We have interleaved the translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, who not only created Middle Earth, but taught English, with a focus on Old and Middle English, at both Oxford and Merton College. Finish the scansion on your own.

/ / / / Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse / / / / This king lay at Camelot at Christmas-tide

/ / / / / With mony luflych lorde, ledez of þe best, / / / / / with many a lovely lord, lieges most noble,

/ / / / / Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer, / / / / / indeed of the Table Round all those tried brethren,

/ / / / With rych reuel ory3t and rechles merþes. / / / / amid merriment unmatched and mirth without care.

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

/ / / / Þer tournayed tulkes by tymez ful mony, / / / / / There tourneyed many a time the trusty knights,

/ / / / Justed ful jolilé þise gentyle kni3tes, / / / / and jousted full joyously these gentle lords;

/ / / / Syþen kayred to þe court caroles to make. / / / / then to the court they came at carols to play.

/ / / / For þer þe fest watz ilyche ful fiften dayes, / / / / For there the feast was unfailing full fifteen days,

/ / / / With alle þe mete and þe mirþe þat men couþe avyse; / / / / with all meats and all mirth that men could devise,

/ / / / Such glaum ande gle glorious to here, / / / / such gladness and gaiety as was glorious to hear,

/ / / / Dere dyn vpon day, daunsyng on ny3tes, / / / / / din of voices by day, and dancing by night;

/ / / / Al watz hap vpon he3e in hallez and chambrez / / / / all happiness at the highest in halls and in bowers

9

10

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

/ / / / With lordez and ladies, as leuest him þo3t. had the lords and ladies, such as they loved most dearly.

/ / / / With all þe wele of þe worlde þay woned þer samen, With all the bliss of this world they abode together,

/ / / / Þe most kyd kny3tez vnder Krystes seluen, the knights most renowned after the name of Christ,

/ / / / And þe louelokkest ladies þat euer lif haden, and the ladies most lovely that ever life enjoyed,

/ / / / And he þe comlokest kyng þat þe court haldes; and he, king most courteous, who that court possessed. / / / / For al watz þis fayre folk in her first age, For all that folks so fair did in their first estate

/ on sille, abide,

/ / / Þe hapnest vnder heuen, Under heaven the first in fame,

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

11

/ / / / Kyng hy3est mon of wylle; their king most high in pride;

/ / / / Hit were now gret nye to neuen it would now be hard to name

/ / / So hardy a here on hille. a troop in war so tried.

2

Much is happening in the Middle English, including rhyme in the shorter lines at the end of the stanza (in a pattern called the bob-and-wheel), but the main thing to notice is how the strong stresses work in every line, not too difficult to see even in English this old. On a number of occasions there are more than four stresses, and sometimes the alliteration is not perfect, but the pattern should be clear enough, and the Pearl Poet followed this pattern throughout this poem. See if you can figure out how Tolkien has tried both to imitate the meter and keep the sense. We’ve started a scansion of his lines—you finish it. Poems of the Present After the 14th century, the formal alliterative tradition of English poetry eventually disappeared. But little in poetic history just vanishes, especially if it is tied to a living language. We would argue that the strong-stress alliterative tradition may have waned as an overarching verse technique, but continued very much alive underground, and it is not hard to find flashes and glimpses of it throughout history, including the present. Many poets knew of it, but did not choose to pursue it, associating it with what they saw as the embarrassingly primitive origins of English verse. Yet it survived not only in scattered lines and stanzas, such as the line “Full fathom five thy father lies,” which begins one of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest, or even a title like Love’s Labours Lost, but also, as we suggested above, in phrases in our modern language: “bad to the bone,” “cash and carry,” “down and dirty,” The

2

From J. R. R. Tolkien, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1975, 1980: 24–25.

12

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Fast and the Furious, “good to go,” “hot and heavy,” “jump for joy,” “love ’em” and “leave ’em,” Mad Max, “now or never,” “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” “sad sack,” “the terrible twos,” “vroom vroom,” “Wonder Woman,” “zig-zag,” and thousands more, all of which we might think of as shards of ancient poetry which we can discover like broken pieces of pottery at an archeological dig. It’s a fun exercise simply to go through the language finding these together; there are far many more than most people realize. In place of the older model of English poetry, as we will see below, poets beginning with Chaucer chose more and more to imitate continental models, especially from France and Italy, that tempered what they saw as English poetry’s old-fashioned, rough Germanic edges with more measured grace. Indeed, for close to 500 years, few if any poets practiced any direct imitations of Old English meter in the way that the Pearl Poet, William Langland, or the other strong poets of the Alliterative Revival had done. It appeared to be a lost technique. Then, in 1864, an English critic and scholar named William James Furnivall, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, founded an organization called The Early English Text Society and began to publish many of the older poems that had never appeared in print, including the work of the Pearl Poet, which existed in just one manuscript, as does Beowulf. The publication of these works and others made them available to a new generation who had never seen anything like them, some of whom, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, were searching for innovative ways to think about English poetry and its techniques, and who were eager to restore and embrace what they saw as the native vitality of English verse by reconnecting with its Old English roots. Over the course of the next 75 years, as more and more poets became aware of the earlier tradition, it percolated back into English verse in a more structured way, especially in the work of another student of early northern European poetry who also happened to be a great novelist and gifted poet, J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien wrote a number of original long poems and rendered many translations, including both Beowulf and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” imitating the old meter, along with poets such as C. S. Lewis, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers (although he didn’t use alliteration systematically in his version of it), W. H. Auden, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for The Age of Anxiety, a book-length verse drama in the meter, and many others, including more recently W. S. Merwin in poems such as “Leviathan.” As a result of what we could call the second alliterative revival in the first half of the 20th century, the tradition of alliterative meter is very much alive in contemporary poetry, even if it is not always followed exactly. Here is a poem by a contemporary poet, Richard Wilbur (1921–2018), who does follow it, or the modern version of it, very closely. We have marked the first four lines; see if you can do the rest, and then discuss your choices.

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Lilacs / / / / These laden lilacs at the lawn’s end / / / / Came stark, spindly, and in staggered file, / / / / Like walking wounded from the dead of winter. / / / / We watched them waken in the brusque weather

To rot and rootbreak, to ripped branches, And saw them shiver as the memory swept them

Of night and numbness and the taste of nothing. Out of present pain and from past terror

Their bullet-shaped buds came quick and bursting,

As if they aimed to be open with us!

But the sun suddenly settled about them,

And green and grateful the lilacs grew,

13

14

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Healed in that hush, that hospital quiet.

These lacquered leaves where the light paddles

And the big blooms buzzing among them

Have kept their counsel, conveyed nothing

Of their mortal message, unless one should measure

The depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom

By the pure power of this perfume. Wilbur follows the modern rules for the pattern precisely, though at times his alliterations are not perfect. In the second line, for example, his strong stresses fall on “stark,” the first syllable of “spindly” and “staggered” and then “file,” so he alliterates on “st” twice, but then also with “sp,” which is close but not perfect. Nor does it need to be perfect; the poem always matters more than the rules, and as we mentioned above, Old English poets followed this practice in this way themselves. But here is a principle to consider when writing poems as exercises: get the rules as tight as possible before bending or breaking them. As we suggested above and want to reemphasize here, when practicing poetry in this way, don’t worry about writing a great poem. Remember, this is just practice, so that as you grow and develop as a writer you have the tools you need. Just as sports require practice, and just as playing music requires practice, so also does writing poetry require practice, and that is the way to approach the exercises in this book. What you will be practicing is lines and combinations of lines. The significant thing about verse is that it is written in lines. The line is just as important as the sentence, so try primarily to write strong lines. You already know how to write sentences, so those will come. For now, however, do not worry if they do not make too much sense. In fact, verse of this kind can make sense even if it is not a full sentence. Here is one of our own exercises in alliterative strong-stress meter that does exactly that:

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

15

Beach at Night Down, down, crashing and dark, The waves, the wild waves, the beach, Sand and moonlight and sour salt, Moon and claw-like clapping of clouds. That is not even a sentence, and we are not quite sure what a “claw-like clapping of clouds” is (perhaps a distant thunderstorm?), but it is interesting, and it fulfills the terms of the meter. Here is what it would look like scanned:

/ / / / Down, down, crashing and dark, / / / / The waves, the wild waves, the beach, / / / / Sand and moonlight and sour salt, / / / / Moon and claw-like clapping of clouds. / / / / Sand and moonlight and sour salt, / / / / Moon and claw-like clapping of clouds. The process seems simple, but it is harder than it looks. First, remember the rules for how to make lines like this; second, let go of meaning and syntax enough to play with language as lines. Do not worry: the sense will still be there and will get stronger as you become more experienced with this kind of exercise. We are not encouraging you to write nonsense, but rather to allow into your process of writing another kind of sense: measuring! Poems by Students The following two Anglo-Saxon alliterative strong-stress exercises are by high school students Kira Sniff and Cameron Millar.

16

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Rabbit Season / Kira Sniff / / / / Elmer Fudd found a firearm

1

/ / / / That he had hidden in a corner of his house. / / / / “It’s Wabbit Season!” he whispered wickedly, / / / / As he fantasized fields of furry critters. / / / / Once in the woods, he wondered at a sign

5

/ / / Declaring the day of Duck Season. / / / / Bugs Bunny snickered behind him; / / / / Elmer whipped around and wobbled wildly. / / / / Daffy Duck had displayed another sign– / / / / A poster plastered with a picture of Bugs.

10

/ / / / Stumped, Elmer stomped his foot and stormed home. Kira’s exercise is a funny, clever first draft, but it contains some typical mistakes from which we can learn. The mistakes involve both the versecraft and the scansion.

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

17

Line 2: “he” begins with “h,” but does not take a strong stress. Line 3: Kira cleverly uses “wabbit” instead of “rabbit” to alliterate the consonant “w,” but the word “whisper” might break the pattern with the consonant blend “wh,” though it’s very close in any event and it’s perfectly fine here. Also, “Wabbit” seems to have a stronger stress than “Season” because of the syntactical level of stress, showing how complex this business of sentence-level stress can become. Line 5: Notice how Kira has realized that the words “once,” “woods” and “wondered” all begin with the same sound, even though they are spelled differently. Her ear is clearly hearing the stresses and the actual sounds of the words. Line 6: Technically speaking, line six has three alliterated syllables (again that tricky phrase “duck season”), but the word “declaring” has the accent on the second syllable, “-clar-.” In this form, the strong stresses must fall on the alliterated syllable, so the “d” sound is not the strongly alliterated one, even though it begins the word. Line 7: As in the previous line, some of the words Kira has chosen have similar sounds, but not in the alliterating syllable. In this case, the word “behind” has an accent on the second syllable, “-hind.” This means that it cannot achieve a strong-stress alliteration with “Bugs Bunny,” where the stress is on the “b” sounds. Line 8: “Whipped” may not fully alliterate with “wobbled” and “wildly” for some people, as they pronounce “wh” differently from “w,” so this is an interestingly close case, as in line 3. Also, this line has an extra stress that Kira did not mark: the second syllable of “around.” Line 9: “Displayed” begins with “d” but is stressed on its second syllable, “played.” Line 10: “Poster” and “picture” begin with “p,” but “plastered” begins with “pl.” As with “w” and “wh,” this is not a major problem, but worth attending to, or at least being aware of, given how modern poets have generally approached their imitations of this meter. Line 11: The first syllable of “Elmer” is stressed but not marked, giving the final line five strong stresses. Kira made some mistakes, but most of them are minor, and it is clear that she is beginning to grasp the meter. In the end, this is an excellent first draft in imitation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative strong-stress meter, and it is funny.

18

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

Here is Cameron Millar’s exercise in the same meter:

Untitled / Cameron Millar / / / / Music melodically memorizing the millions

1

/ / / / Sounds sweet yet subtle fly / / / / Man’s marvelous masterpieces are played / / / / On instruments ideally and immaculately crafted / / / / Guitar gladly grinding out riffs

5

/ / / / Horns happily honking to the heavens / / / / And pianos playfully piping to the rhythm / / / / Soothing the hatred of the human heart / / / / Silencing the sadness of someone’s pain / / / / Music manipulates man’s every move

10

The content of Cameron’s exercise differs dramatically from Kira’s, and yet he is using exactly the same verse form. What this suggests is a deep truth: verse forms restrict word choice at many points, but paradoxically they do not hinder expression. Rather, they stimulate our ability to spin forth language by requiring us to think about it in new ways, to form new kinds of connections among words other than those based merely on what they mean. We could refer to this as “lateral thinking,” in which we choose words based at least in part on non-semantic similarities, rather than, or in addition to “linear thinking,” where we choose words based only on their meaning and syntactical placement. Strangely, writing in lines requires and promotes lateral thinking in addition to linear thinking. Why is the bottom margin larger on this page?

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

19

Like Kira, Cameron has understood the verse form well, but he also makes a few mistakes: Line 1: Although we want you to focus on making verses, it is still important to make the best sense you can. In this case, we expect that Cameron meant to use the word “mesmerizing” rather than “memorizing.” Line 2: “Sweet” does not quite fully alliterate with “sounds” and “subtle,” because the “sw” sound is different from the “s” sound. Line 4: “instruments,” “ideally” and “immaculately” all begin with “i,” but “ideally” has its primary stress on “-deal-” and “immaculately” on “-mac-,” so these do not alliterate on the strong stress. Also, remember that any vowel can alliterate with any other, so they do not all have to be “i” sounds, although they could be. Line 5: “Guitar,” “gladly” and “grinding” all begin with “g,” but “g,” “gl,” and “gr” are all slightly different. Line 7: There is a similar problem with “pianos,” “playfully” and “piping,” because “p” is not exactly the same as “pl.” Also, “pianos” takes its primary stress on the second syllable, “-an-,” not the first. Line 10: This line may have one stress too many, and there is one that Cameron has not marked, on the word “every,” which is at best unclear. The Exercise Now it is your turn to try your own exercise. Remember the rules: each line must have exactly four strong stresses; of these four stresses, at least three must alliterate (and one of those is usually the first one), with no other kind of rhyme. Also, try to make each line as strong as possible as a line. They do not all need to be end-stopped, but that might help you in trying out the form at first. There is one other important rule to remember: writing verse can and should be fun, but it is not easy. If it were, everyone would be Shakespeare. Learning the rules of verse is one of the most ancient skills of poetry, right up there with questions of beauty, truth, psychology and storytelling. It is a thorny and complex enterprise. Our advice is: keep trying. Be willing to make mistakes. Do not expect to get this or any other exercise perfect on the first try. The joy comes not only from expressing ideas and feelings in words but also from learning how to play with words in ways that may at first be quite new to you. A Note for Teachers and Students about Responding to Student Exercises In your classroom, you may be responding to each other’s work, and your teacher will certainly be responding to your work. Putting a grade on a poem, or even on a verse exercise, is a tricky thing. Our advice to you as students and teachers, is to encourage all of you not to worry too much at first about imagery, or the subject, or feelings, or ideas or stories. Just focus on getting the versecraft right. Of course, poems need to cohere, to make sense, and so on. But remember the poems you are working on now are best thought of as exercises rather than finished poems. Just as students of music composition study how to harmonize Bach chorales even if they never intend to write them, or painters all take life drawing even if they do not plan to pursue it in their careers, you are going to write Anglo-Saxon alliterative

20

1

Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter

strong-stress meter and other verse forms just to flex that particular muscle. Students and teachers should of course comment on content if they think it is necessary or helpful, but here we encourage the development of skill with verse. In our classes we use a grading system designed by Robert Fitzgerald. His grades were “NAAB,” “NB,” “NTB,” “NTG” and “NG.” We leave it to you to figure out what those initials stand for.

2

The Ballad

The Form The ballad has a distinctive verse form but is also far more than that. It is a powerful and compelling way of telling a story. Ballad-making is an ancient art which appears throughout the history of Europe, in dozens of languages and every recorded period, with ample evidence of even more ancient oral traditions. The ballad, therefore, is unlike most of the other poetic forms in this textbook because it cannot be traced to specific times and places, or even to specific authors and languages. Like epics and hymns, the ballad seems to be a primal, archetypal form of Western poetry, one of its essential expressions. It may well be even more universal than that, corresponding to similar genres in other poetic civilizations. Ballads are characterized by a number of clear features. They tell brief, powerful stories. They often have tragic or supernatural plots or represent heroic historical or political themes. They almost always include dialogue, and they present events directly and concisely. In English, ballad poets have always used a few closely related metrical patterns and stanza structures that have had tremendous importance in the development of English poetry. As a result, in English-speaking countries the ballad has proven particularly resilient and powerful. The English ballad exists in an unbroken, complex tradition from the thirteenth century to the present. The oral tradition began even earlier. Authors have included everyone from anonymous peasants, many of whose traditional oral ballads were transcribed during the late eighteenth century, to famous individual poets. Among the great transcribed collections were Bishop Percy’s three-volume Reliques of English Poetry (1765), and others by, Sir Walter Scott (1830) Francis James Child

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_2

21

22

2 The Ballad

(1882–1898). Strong literary poets who wrote ballads include, Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Dudley Randall, Bob Dylan and others, including many contemporary songwriters. Along with the similarly ancient native lyrical tradition, and the continental and classical forms and genres which burst into England in the Renaissance, it is fair to say that the ballad is one of the three most vital wellsprings of poetry in English. English ballad meter is particularly powerful because it poetically transformed the raw material of the early modern English language in a way which later developments could only modify. As the great scholar of English prosody George Saintsbury (1845–1933) put it when discussing the form, “The ballad quatrain, or common measure, is perhaps the most definitely English—blood and bone, flesh and marrow—of all English metres.” Subsequent scholars, such as Northrop Frye, have gone so far as to argue that the iambic pentameter is actually just a formal extension of the four-beat line used in the ballad (and, in a different way, in Anglo-Saxon alliterative strong-stress meter), made longer to account for the extra syllables which the looser ballad meter allows. In the past there has been a great deal of disagreement about how to describe ballad form, with scholars warring over whether English balladeers counted only stresses, or stresses and syllables. This battle seems to have been won by those who argue in favor of counting only stresses, or beats. In the ballad, a wide range of number of syllables per line is possible, from four to twelve or conceivably even more in a four-beat line. The Rules Crucial to the English ballad is its metrical form. There are a number of forms to the ballad stanza, but the most prevalent is Common Meter, which rhymes xaya (the x and y standing for unrhymed lines) and has a pattern of 4-3-4-3 strong stresses per line with a variable number of syllables. A typical early example of this form is the fifteenth-century poem “Bonny Barbara Allan,” which has been recorded by Bob Dylan:

/ / / / It was in and about the Martinmas time,

x

/ / / When the green leaves were a-fallin’;

a

/ / / / That Sir John Graeme in the West Country / / / Fell in love with Barbara Allan.

y a

2

The Ballad

23

/ / / / He sent his man down through the town / / / To the place where she was dwellin’: / / / / “O haste and come to my master dear, / / / Gin ye be Barbara Allan.” Despite different rhythms and cunning variations, we see almost exactly the same form four hundred years later in W. H. Auden’s “Victor,” which begins

/ / / Victor was a little baby, / / / Into this world he came; / / / / His father took him on his knee and said: / / / “Don’t dishonour the family name.”

x

a

y a

Both poems also tell lurid stories of love and death, and initiate dialogue at exactly the same line of the poem. The difference is that Auden is using a slightly different stress count pattern (only three stresses in the first line instead of four), but with cunning variations to throw us off balance on purpose. There is a wide range of other possibilities in the ballad’s metrical form. Rhyme schemes can be abab. Beat patterns can be 4-4-4-4 (the traditional ballad “Lord Randall”), or 3-3-3-3 (Auden’s “Miss Gee” and Bishop’s “The Burglar of Babylon”). Scholars and poets tend to think of all of these forms as deriving from a 4-4-4-4 beat standard, with 3-beat lines including silent, or unrealized beats at the end of the line. This theory gains some credence when we realize that all the lines of a ballad tend to be end-stopped, but the second and fourth lines are even more strongly marked than the first and the third, suggesting pauses which could include unrealized beats. There are also formal variations that extend or change the standard ballad quatrain, such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which is written in six-line stanzas with an xayaza rhyme scheme and a 4-3-4-3-4-3 stress count. Wilde’s syllable counts are also much more regular than in the older ballads. This is quite common in literary ballads, such as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” because poets who are used to counting syllables as well as stresses generally cannot give up the habit. The ballad form comes through in any event. Other variations include refrains, reminding us that ballads have frequently been set to music. All the traditional ones

24

2 The Ballad

probably were, as the term “ballad” derives from a word that originally meant “to dance.” “Barbara Allen” has a kind of refrain, ending many stanzas with her name. Coleridge and Wordsworth realized that one way to change the traditional poetic culture of their time, which was oriented towards continental European models, was to reinvigorate powerful native forms in the language, which were then unpopular, but which had lengthy histories and could be brought to bear on contemporary life. They even titled the collection in which “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” appeared Lyrical Ballads (1798), to make their strategy clear: to write literary lyrics but to use the popular English ballad as a touchstone. The intentionally anachronistic spelling of “Ancyent” in Coleridge’s title indicates the form’s antiquity, along with Coleridge’s aspiration to draw on that “ancyent” source of creativity. If anything, he is himself like the wedding guest who is captivated by the tale the ancyent mariner sets out to tell. Just as you will do in your own exercises, he was self-consciously imitating works from the distant past. He was not only telling a story but also making a creative statement in the way he told it, using the poem’s form to reinvigorate his own contemporary language. We are in many ways far closer to Coleridge than he was to the anonymous Middle English ballad poets of the fifteenth century and before. The elements which the ballad marshals into poetry still make sense in our lives, and the verseform still draws directly on the structure of spoken English. It is worth noting that many twentieth-century writers have even used the ballad to convey explicit social commentary, such as Dudley Randall in “The Ballad of Birmingham,” which is subtitled “On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963,” a powerfully understated indictment of racism. When the subject has some public importance, strong writers often turn to this primal combination of meter, rhyme, storytelling, and dialogue to give their words memorable force. The ballad remains one of the essential and ancient genres of English poetry. Poems of the Past Read the following excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner” aloud, insert the stress marks, and mark the rhyme scheme. We have done the first five stanzas for you. When you have finished, compare your scansion with that of your classmates. We have not modernized the spelling of Coleridge’s title, as many editions do. This is because Coleridge carefully chose his spelling, along with his old-fashioned syntax in places, which was as anachronistic in his time as it is today. As suggested above, he purposefully misspelled his title for a creative reason: to evoke a more “ancyent” time, to give his poem the aura of a distant past. He wanted to convey “ancyent” truths still alive in the lives and language of common people. The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner (text of 1834) / Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) Argument—How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.

2

The Ballad

25

Part I *The syllables marked with an asterisk below are what, in this case, we follow Derek Attridge in calling “unemphasized,” because Coleridge is actually doing something a bit different from pure ballad meter. In this case you do not need to emphasize them, but it is important to realize that Coleridge is counting them as stressed positions, along with a number of other things, such as “secondary stresses,” to make his meter work. We will discuss this further in Chapter 4, on iambic tetrameter.

/ / / * It is an ancient Mariner, / / / And he stoppeth one of three. / / / / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / / / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

/ / / / The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, / / / And I am next of kin; / / / / The guests are met, the feast is set

x a y a

[Note that in this line, as in some of the other 4-beat lines, there is an internal rhyme: met/set.]

/ / / May’st hear the merry din.’

/ / / * He holds him with his skinny hand / / / ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he. / / / / ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’ / / / Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

[Note the intentional anachronisms in a line like this, as elsewhere. Coleridge would never have said “Eftsoons.”]

26

2 The Ballad

/ / / * He holds him with his glittering eye— / / / The Wedding-Guest stood still, / / / * And listens like a three years’ child: / / / The Mariner hath his will.

/ / / / The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: / / / He cannot choose but hear; / / / / And thus spake on that ancient man, / / * The bright-eyed Mariner.

‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill Below the lighthouse top.

The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea.

2

The Ballad

Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon—’ The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner.

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along.

27

28

2 The Ballad

With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy cliffs Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken — The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

[Note the six-line stanza.]

2

The Ballad

At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’

29

30

2 The Ballad

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—

Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS.

Poems by Students Here are two poems by students, Karina Hill and Kate Lewis, one a sad tale of love and one based on the Brothers Grimm.

Untitled / Karina Hill / / / / From a distance unseen and unknown

x

/ / / with awe he watched her sway

a

/ / / / to the rocking beat he admired her step

y

/ / / as she danced the night away.

a

/ / / / The thought of her with another man / / / seemed to him just tragic. / / / / All he wished, as he sternly stared, / / / was to know the tricks of magic.

2

The Ballad

31

/ / / / But since he knew no works of the wizards, / / / the answer was one he dreaded / / / / But the only way to get his way / / / was to make the man beheaded.

/ / / / So he did and so he died, / / / the girl was left to him. / / / / But she would never look his way / / / for the act of his evil sin. Karina captures the essence of the ballad in this narrative of unrequited love with a twist of violence. Except for the first line, in which the word “From” does not take a strong stress, she scans the stanza perfectly. In lines two and three of stanza one, Karina effectively enjambs “watched her sway / to the rocking beat,” but she should include a period after “beat” and capitalize the “H” of “he” (otherwise it is a run-on sentence). “Sway” / “away” and “tragic” / “magic” constitute strong rhyme in the first two stanzas. In line 12, Karina inverts the normal syntactical order of “to behead the man” to accommodate the rhyme and writes “to make the man beheaded.” The ballad would be stronger had she wrestled with the stanza enough to keep the normal order of syntax and still use the clever rhyme of “dreaded” and “beheaded.” Finally, in line 16, “for the” might communicate more clearly if it were “because,” and to use “evil” to describe sin is redundant. Karina offers a strong first draft of a first ballad, and we can learn from her minor mistakes. Ballad of the Brothers Grimm / Kate Lewis Kate creates an extraordinarily literate and witty ballad using vignettes from the tales of the Brothers Grimm. The syntax is natural and grammatically correct, the rhymes pure. The weaving in of lines from the original stories lends an authentic, sophisticated tone.

32

2 The Ballad

/ / / / In the town of Hanau, two brothers were born

x

/ / / To a family full of vim,

a

/ / / / Jacob and Wilhelm their personal names,

y

/ / / To the world: the Brothers Grimm.

a

/ / / / And grim they seemed to all who read / / / The folktales they collected, / / / / Some were gruesome, some were sad, / / / All were later perfected. / / / / Rumpelstiltskin, the greedy goblin, / / / Has a spinning wheel of gold, / / / But in the end, he’s ripped in two,

/ / / Or so the story is told.

2

The Ballad

/ / / / “You, my queen, are fair; it’s true, / / / A mirror on the wall announces, / / / / “But Snow White is fairer than you,” / / / (A reality the queen renounces.)

/ / / / And so she poisons a red apple, / / / In a stupor, Snow White lies, / / / / But with burning shoes forced on her feet, / / / The vain queen violently dies. / / / / “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” / / / Cries a prince so kind,

33

34

2 The Ballad

/ / / / But a wicked witch pushes him down, / / / Leaving the poor prince blind.

/ / / / Years have come, and years have gone, / / / And though the roots are dim, / / / / The story lines are told and retold, / / / Thanks to the Brothers Grimm. This exercise is sophisticated and the problems with the versecraft are fairly subtle. Kate’s ear is excellent and the problems, where they do occur, just require either a bit of tuning, or a slightly adjusted scansion. In line six, “they” does not take a strong stress. In line nine, Kate accents the syllables “Rum-” and “-skin,” but these syllables are not strong enough to take the primary stress. (Remember, every polysyllabic word takes only one primary stress.) The real accent here is on the third syllable “stil-.” In lines 15 and 18, first both “Snow” and “White” are accented, but then, in the later line, just “Snow.” In fact, if you say the name over and over to yourself, we expect that the word “White” bears a slightly stronger stress than “Snow.” In line 19, the normal pattern of speech would probably not accent “burn,” “shoes,” and “forced,” but rather “burn” and “forced.” This is one of the situations, and they are everywhere in poetry, where word placement and order determine syntactic stress. “Shoes” does have a powerful secondary stress, but it would sound oddly forced to give all three syllables the maximum amount. In line 27, the words “story lines” should only have a primary stress on “stor-,” though again, this is tricky as “lines” bears some weight. All in all, this is an outstanding effort that could easily be brought up to the next level. Why not try? There is nothing wrong with playing around with shared language in a master class setting to see how it might be improved as verse. Not as poetry: as verse. The point isn’t to rewrite someone else’s poem—never—but rather to play with language to see how supple it is as we try to make the words align with the rules of the exercise. How would you solve some of these small problems? Here’s a thought. Consider line 15, “But Snow White is fairer than you,” where it feels awkward, in terms of writing a tight verse that adheres to the rules, to have to try to stress both “Snow” and “White” equally as strong stresses. It seems too

2

The Ballad

35

emphatic. What if, to pull some of that too-forceful push on “Snow” away, we add another syllable elsewhere to be the fourth strong stress, where it sits more easily. How about: “But Snow White is fairer far than you”? The addition of “far” not only resonates with the fanciful rhetoric of such a fairy story, but it lets “Snow” slide out of that awkward “promotion” of its stress, letting it sound a bit more natural (as a secondary stress), as “far” steps in to do the work. “Far” also has the pleasant musical quality of alliterating with “fairer,” but that’s simply an added grace note. It is not “wrong” to do this, as long as everyone understands that what we are doing is absolutely not “correcting” someone’s poem or telling someone how to write poetry. Emphatically not: what we are doing is working together, playing with language, trying things out to see what might work as verse, no different than giving each other advice on how to take a jump shot or bake a loaf of bread. Higher stakes of self-expression in writing can come later and no doubt will for some of you, or even today when you take your new knowledge out of the public space of the classroom. For now, however, think of this part of your writing life as a way to learn how to listen to, see, think about, and feel words in a new way. Each exercise and class has an assignment, but can also perhaps be understood as a passage in a conversation, a conversation about craft. Another way to consider all of this: the point here is not perfection. It is learning. The goal is not so much, or not immediately, to make strong poems, but rather to educate strong poets. Focus patiently on the training that will make you a stronger poet, working together in conversation with others, and the stronger poems will eventually come. The Exercise Let the minor mistakes in the strong student work inform you, as you now accept the challenge of writing your own ballad exercise: four-line stanzas, xaya rhyme scheme, lines one and three have four strong stresses, and lines two and four have three strong stresses. The ballad should include direct dialogue beginning early on and should contain some element of the supernatural or the lurid. Remember: do your best to make each individual line as strong as possible. Try not to end lines with prepositions, articles, or other weak words. Use perfect rhymes, and count stresses carefully.

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters: The Sapphic and the Catullan Hendecasyllable

The Form The modern tradition of English verse was forged in the second half of the 16th and early 17th centuries, during the English Renaissance. During this time, English poets, following the example of continental poets, especially the Italians, sought to create poetry in their own vernaculars that they hoped would be worthy of the ancient Greeks and Romans they had come to admire so deeply. One of the things they believed they needed to do was to create a metrics that would be capable of carrying the burden of the great subjects they sought to address. It is important to try to imagine them, with nothing in English to guide them except Chaucer and some of the Middle English poets. They did not even know about the existence of Beowulf, which had been lost, or “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight.” These artists cast around for ways to make great poetry in English. Of course, they did what people naturally do in such situations: they found models that they admired and tried to imitate them. And what they tried to imitate were the poems they were reading in Greek, Latin, French and Italian, since these were clearly the most prestigious models they had. The problem they faced when it came to meter was that the ancient poems scanned in an utterly different way than poems in English. Most Greek and Latin poetry was based on complicated rules involving the length of syllables rather than their stress, as those languages operate completely differently than English in this regard, and stress, even if it exists in certain cases, is utterly different, especially within words, which we call the lexical level. As a result of this historical and linguistic confusion, many poets in England sought to create a metrical system in their own language based on syllable length in the way they thought the ancient Romans and Greeks did it. In these rules derived from Greek and Latin (and it is worth noting that the differences between those languages are substantial as well, and there is another level of confusion there),

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_3

37

38

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

English syllables were to be counted as “long” or “short” independent of stress, or what the poets at that time generally called “accent.” In English, again, these rules never made sense, as they were largely based on complex spelling rules in imitation of the classical originals. It is important to remember, however, that the English writers at the time had no linguistic theory or history to guide them. Such histories only came into existence several hundred years later, and so they saw no reason not to treat English as if it were more closely related to other languages than it in fact was. And, after all, these rules from other languages were the only rules English poets had, and they had clearly helped the ancients produce great poetry, so some poets worked hard to imitate what had worked, and to explain their choices as best they could. Here is a brief overview by poet and classicist Marc Moskowitz of how the rules worked in Latin: 1. A vowel that is long makes its syllable long. It is called “long by nature.” • This also includes the diphthongs æ, au, ei, eu, oe and ui, but only when none of the vowels in the diphthongs are long or marked by a dieresis (e.g. diêî or âëreus). 2. If a vowel has two or more consonants between itself and the next vowel, it makes its syllable “long by position.” • The letter x and sometimes the letter z count as two consonants for the purposes of scansion. • The digraphs, two-letter combinations such as ch, ph, th, qu and sometimes gu and su, count as single consonants. • A mute (b, c, d, g, p, or t) followed by a liquid (l or r) can count as a single consonant, if they are in the same word. 3. If two words are on the same poetic line, and the first ends with a vowel or m, and the second begins with a vowel or h, the last syllable of the first word and the first syllable of the second word elide, forming a single consonant, which has the value of the longer of the two syllables. This syllable is pronounced either as a combination of the two syllables, or, by individual choice, as the second syllable. If the second word is est, “is,” the syllable is pronounced as the first syllable with “-st” added to the end. (Marc Moskowitz, http://suberic.net/*marc/scansion.html, accessed 12/15/19) If you don’t study Latin and now feel lost, that is understandable. These rules don’t work in English, and even in Latin there is some question of whether or not they could be heard, or were merely conventional, as the Romans themselves were imitating something they thought would work because it presumably could be heard in Greek. Further, over time the rules evolved even in Latin as that language became a more literary language, not actually spoken as the vernacular in any country.

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

39

And yet, because they were so systematically clear and had helped to produce so much strong, memorable poetry, poets tried to write following these rules in English, and surprisingly fierce battles raged over whether it was possible to write in this way. As time went on, however, it became apparent, particularly in the work of Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, Daniel, Shakespeare and other English poets of the time, that a different kind of versification was going to win out, one that took more accurate account of how English actually works, which we will take up more closely beginning in chapter four. The great poets of the English renaissance might not have completely understood these rules of stress-based prosody in an analytical way. In fact, we remain unsure of them today, but they could certainly feel the reality of their own language and they responded to it. In this they might be compared to great baseball pitchers who may not understand physics, but certainly know how to throw a curveball. For the time being, the point is that one crucial stage in the development of English versecraft was the attempt to write English poetry in imitation of classical meters, however odd and wrong-headed that may seem to us now. There was a tremendous amount of this kind of writing, over a long period of time. It even runs into the present in slightly different form, making for some fascinating poetry and spirited debate, and it is important to understand the fundamentals of how it worked because it is an essential part of the history of the art. Don’t worry. We are not going to try to write poetry according to rules of “quantitative,” syllable-length scansion. That would require a tremendous amount of study in Latin and Greek, and besides, it doesn’t work in English although it has produced some fascinating experiments by strong writers over hundreds of years, including Campion, Spenser, and others who dabbled in it such as Tennyson, Swinburne, and C. S. Lewis. Instead, following what became the more mainstream tradition that still exists today, and to get a feel for what all these poets were trying to do, we are going to write stress-based imitations of classical quantitative meters. In this model, which is one precursor of all modern English verse, stressed syllables substitute for long syllables, and unstressed syllables substitute most often for short syllables. In doing this, we are in fact following a technique developed by English poets early on in the process. This exercise is crucial, and the poetry can be wonderful, but it will probably feel like the most unnatural and eccentric metrical form you practice in this sequence, because it is a bad fit with the natural rhythms of English. It is a bit like hearing a strange new kind of music for the first time. Trust us—stay with it. Over time you may come to love it, for its music can be beguiling, and you will definitely come to see how it played a foundational role in the creation of all subsequent poetry in English, including free verse, though that would be to get ahead of ourselves. The trick to the first stage of learning how to write stressed-based imitations of classical meter is to allow as few substitutions as possible. Long positions should have only stressed syllables, and short ones should have only unstressed syllables. Each line must be nearly perfect. Count the syllables accurately and put the stresses

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

40

exactly where they fall in the pattern. It is hard. In fact, as you’ll discover, it’s basically impossible because, among other problems, it eliminates most words three syllables or longer. The trick is to find the best possible balance, aiming for the tightest possible regularity. One form in which poets have transferred quantitative meters into English is the Sapphic, named after the poet who scholars generally believe created it, Sappho, a Greek woman who lived from about 630–570 BC. This is a form that remains popular in our own time. The Sapphic generally takes one of two forms, the classical Sapphic and the Latin modification by Horace. The Romans imitated the Greeks just as we imitate both of them; as someone once quipped, “When in Rome…do as the Greeks.” In both cases, the stanza has four lines. The first three have the same stress pattern across eleven syllables, and the fourth is five syllables with a different pattern. In the scansion below, S = stressed syllable, and U = unstressed syllable. Remember, these stressed and unstressed syllables are substituting for the values of “long” and “short” that Renaissance English poets believed were the organizing principle for ancient poems. The Rules / Poems of the Past Classical Sapphic S u S u S u u S u S u [3 times] SuuSu There are many examples of this form, such as this one from a long poem titled “Sapphics,” by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909):

S u S u S u u S u S u Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing S u S u S u u S u S u Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, S u S u S u u S u Su Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity, S u u S u Hearing, to hear them.

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

41

Horatian Sapphic The other classical imitation, from Latin, is the Horatian Sapphic, so called because it is an adaptation by Horace: S u u S u S u S u S u [3 times] SuuSu All this does, for our practical modern purposes, is move the grouping of two unstressed syllables closer to the beginning of the line. For several reasons, that makes it a bit easier to write. Here is the first stanza of “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion,” by William Cowper (1731–1800):

S u u S u S uSu S u Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, S u u S u S u S uS u Scarce can endure delay of execution,

S u u S u S u S u S u Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my S uu S u Soul in a moment. While Swinburne never uses more than a two-syllable word in the passage above, Cowper does promote some secondary stresses in three- and four-syllable words to make his poem work (eternal, execution, impatient, readiness), and you can do this, too. For example, in the line “Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my,” the word “readiness” is shown as having two strong stresses, one on the first syllable, another on the third. This doesn’t work because the true tonic stress is on the first syllable, with a much weaker one on the third, although the third has more stress than the second. Cowper treats it as a full stress and gets on with it, though it would not be read aloud this way. This kind of thing is necessary in this form, because otherwise one could never use a word longer than two syllables. Remember that each multisyllabic word in English has only one strong stress. Another popular adaptation of a classical quantitative meter into English is the “Phalaecean” hendecasyllable line, an eleven-syllable fixed line. “Hendecasyllable” is simply a fancy way of saying “eleven syllables.” The form is utterly non-English, but again its structure is one of the odd sources of our poetics. To see an example, read “For Once, Then, Something” by Robert Frost (1874– 1963):

42

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

S u S u u S u S u S u Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs, S u S u u S u S u S u Always wrong to the light, so never seeing S u S u u S u S u Su Deeper down in the well than where the water S u S u u S u S u S u Gives me back in a shining surface picture, S u S u u S u S u S u Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike, S u S uu S u S u S u Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. S u S u u S u S u S u Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, S u S uu S u S u S u I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, S u S u u S u S u S u Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, S u S u u S u S u S u Something more of the depths — and then I lost it. Su S u u S u S u Su Water came to rebuke the too clear water. S u S u u S u S u S u One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

43

S u S u u S u S u S u Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

S u S u u S u S u S u Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? S u S u u S u S u S u Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. An earlier example with a similar theme (and a source for Frost’s poem) is Tennyson’s “Hendecasyllabics,” which first appeared in 1863. Notice that both Frost and Tennyson’s poems are about responding to their critics. In this they are imitating the Roman poet Catullus in the poem usually called “Catullus 16,” which is in the same meter in Latin. Catullus’s poem is a scathing and obscene attack on his critics; Tennyson and Frost are far more restrained but echo his theme directly at the same time as they echo and transform his versecraft. Here is Tennyson’s poem. We have scanned the first eight lines—you finish the rest:

S u S u u S u S u S u O you chorus of indolent reviewers, Su Su u S u S u S u Irresponsible, indolent reviewers, S u S u u S uS u S u Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem S u S u u S u S u S u All composed in a metre of Catullus S u S uu S u S u S u All in quantity, careful of my motion,

S u S u u S u S u S u Like a skater on ice that hardly bears him, S u S u u S u S u S u Lest I fall unawares before the people,

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

44

S u S u u Su S u S u Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Through this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers. Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre. Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers. O blatant Magazines, regard me rather — Since I blush to belaud myself a moment — As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost Horticultural art, or half coquette-like Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly. As you can see from the scansion, every line, with some sneaky twists we have not marked (we will discuss them below), follows the strict syllabic pattern: SuSuuSuSuSu Frost’s poem does the same, though it is important to remember, again, that both Tennyson and Frost have turned the quantitative metric of Latin into a stress-based metric. And, as with the Sapphic examples above, Tennyson and Frost adjust the meter to their own ends. Note, for example, that in Tennyson’s line one, the word “indolent” has a strong stress on its first syllable, but cannot then also have one on its last, though Tennyson is also trying to get it to scan quantitatively by using the spelling rules. At the same time, it seems like a bit of a pun that the word which slightly stumbles is “indolent,” which means “lazy.” He does the same thing, again perhaps with a sly pun on the word “irresponsible” at the beginning of line 2, where the strong stress comes on the third syllable, and the first cannot also be a strong

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

45

stress. He does it in several other places as well, creating a beautiful English music that could not have existed in Greek or Latin. At the same time as he strains slightly against the meter, however, Tennyson is careful to place multi-syllabic words in ways that all the syllables in stressed positions do not harshly contradict the structure. This is harder than it looks. One technical way to describe it is to say he is managing relative stress values in both words and phrases to suggest the perfect model even as he breaks it. This observation will make more sense when you return to it after several chapters. Poems by Students Here is a Horatian Sapphic written by student Jenna Ahlborn. The asterisks in the scansion note are spots to which the commentary following the poem refers. Valentine’s Day / Jenna Ahlborn

S u u S u* S u S u S u Cupid has arrived, valentines and roses,

S u u S u S u S u S u Sweet as the kiss of passion given softly, S u u S u S u S u S u Flowers are beautiful and love will blossom, S u u S u Arrows are flying. S u u S u S u S u S u Cards made of pink and red are sent to lovers, S u u S u S u S* u S u Secret and sly admirers are nervous, G u u S u S u S u S u Giving out chocolate and hope and wonder, S u u S u Someone is waiting. Jenna writes two stanzas in the Horatian Sapphic. Hearing and placing the stresses in the proper places in these lines is extremely difficult, especially for beginning students of poetry, as they are quite unnatural in English. Although these lines do not fit perfectly into the Sapphic pattern, they are solid and some are excellent.

46

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

First, notice how each line makes independent grammatical sense at the phrasal level and often at the clausal level. Each line begins and ends with strong, lexical words, that is, words that have substantive meaning, as opposed to words that only fill out grammatical categories. Another way of putting this: no line ends weakly with prepositions, articles, or helping verbs separated from the words they modify. Lines 4 and 8 are strong closing lines of each respective stanza. Jenna writes these two lines in perfect parallel structure: subject, helping verb, principal verb in present continuous tense. These two lines fit the metrical pattern, and Jenna’s use of grammatical parallelism adds prosodical power. Jenna adeptly uses consonance in line 2: “Sweet as the kiss of passion given softly.” Note the beginning “s” sound in “sweet” and “softly” and the “ss”-variations in “kiss of passion.” In line 3, “Flowers are beautiful and love will blossom,” she skillfully uses the “f,” “l,” “b,” “fl,” and “bl” sounds. She repeats the “f,” “b,” and the “l,” and she blends them in “flowers” and “blossom.” The strong syntax and the musical use of consonance and alliteration make an excellent first draft; however, it does contain a few metrical mistakes. In line 1, the word “arrived” does not fit the underlying metrical pattern. The lexical stress is on the second syllable of “ar-rive,” but Jenna places the syllable “ar” in the stressed position in the line. In line 6, she divides the word “admirers” into four syllables instead of three. The dictionary divides this word as follows: “ad-mir’-er.” Jenna marks the word as four syllables, possibly because she hears it pronounced as four syllables in colloquial speech, with what is called a “y-glide” in “-mir-,” as if it were pronounced, perhaps, “my-er.” While this might work in other circumstances, e.g., expanding the word “higher” into two syllables, it won’t quite stretch that far here because the next syllable in the word is the same sound, “-er.” How does a y-glide happen? Consider: He’s a man we all admire. Too bad he perished in that fire. In this case, both “-mire” and “fire” present as one syllable. But: He’s a man we all admire— Though some folks say that he’s a liar. What about now? “Liar” feels much more strongly like two syllables, which pushes “-mire” in that direction, although it’s exactly the same word in each case. Such is the freedom and power of the skillful poet. The reason this kind of thing is possible is that the “y” sound may or may not function as a syllabic boundary, depending on context, which is why you may have heard teachers say that “y” and “w,” which functions similarly, can be either a vowel or a consonant. It’s worth noting that, as far as we know, this phenomenon, like a number of important aspects of literary prosody, may have been first described by a fine poet, Robert Bridges (1844–1930), Poet Laureate of England (1913–1930), in his own critical work on Milton’s versecraft.

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

47

Linguists have their own term to describe the phenomenon of combining adjacent vowel sounds with no consonant between them that might be pronounced as separate syllables, as it occurs in English as a natural language, meaning in everyday speech: “synaerisis.” The contrast is with “diaeresis” or “hiatus,” in which two adjacent vowel sounds with no consonant between them are pronounced as two syllables. Again, the examples above serve, with the caveat that in these words (admire, fire, liar), the cunning poet understands there is a choice and knows how to get the desired pronunciation through creating a metrical and prosodical context. The foregoing examples are part of the larger linguistic category of “elision,” as there are many ways that syllables can be expanded and contracted. A strong poet understands these possibilities intuitively, but that intuition is based on many years of study; it is less nature than it is second nature, a skill developed by practice. Indeed, one could argue that if one doesn’t study linguistic phenomena such as diaeresis one will always be a naïve or ingenuous poet (both words that include a diaeresis). The bottom line is that in verse there are many possible exceptions to rigid syllable definitions, but for the time being it may be best to follow the standard lexical division of syllables, an injunction which we hope inspires you to push back. Here is another Horatian Sapphic exercise, by student Ashley Hubin. Helpless in Love / Ashley Hubin

S u u S u S u S u S u Love feels so lovely, awful, happy, lonely. S u u S u S u S u S u Love feels so strange and weird and good. But what if S u u S u S u S u S u Love felt like lectures, lifeless, limpy noodles. S u u S u Love would be nothing. S u u S u S u S u S u Love feels so pleasant, dreadful, lucky, rotten.

48

3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

S u u S u S u S u S u Love feels so odd and quaint and nice. But what if S u u S u S u S u S Love felt like school, a test, or working out. S u u S u Love would be wasted. S u u S u S u S* u S u Love feels so broken, together, and needed. S u u S u S u u* S u S u Love is so bold, and painful, and sad. But what if S u u S u S S u* S u Love felt like rainy days, sunsets, gold, then S u u S u Love would be wanted. This is a good exercise, and, indeed, close to being a real poem. The first two stanzas of Ashley’s exercise adhere to the rigid Sapphic metrical pattern. Ashley uses parallel structure to her poetic advantage, as Jenna did in the first example exercise. This is an example, as clear as day, of how verseform itself, even when it appears not to have any inherent “meaning,” can nevertheless be “meaningful,” because it organizes meanings. Each stanza consists of four sentences. Ashley uses the word “love” as the first word in each line of the poem. Love is not only the topic of the poem, it is the subject of each sentence in the poem. The main verb of each sentence is the linking verb “feel.” This repeated verb links love to predicate adjectives, all of which fit the metrical pattern. In the third line of each stanza Ashley moves into the subjunctive mood and queries, “but what if love felt…” This shift into the realm of wondering gives her the grammatical opportunity to use delightful, unusual similes in the third sentence of each stanza: “but what if love felt like lectures,” “but what if love felt like school,” and “but what if love felt like rainy days.” Truly delightful writing. Ashley repeats the phrase “love would be” in the third line of each stanza, which sets her up metrically and syntactically to make lists that not only make sense, but just as importantly, feel both driven by, and yet as if they are matching with, the metrical pattern. At the end of each stanza, she shifts from subjunctive wondering into the conditional mood to make a statement: “Love would be nothing,” “Love would be wasted,” “Love would be wanted.” Lines 8 and

3

Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters …

49

12 catch the eye; these lines differ in one letter only—from “wasted” to “wanted”— and yet they have entirely different meanings. There it is, right before your eyes: poetry, tied inextricably to exciting verse-making. It is doubtful that Ashley would have created this powerful parallelism without the structure of the Sapphic—what she is saying here depends at least in part, on what she is doing. This is success. Although Ashley’s exercise is strong, the meter needs some revision in a few places. In line 9, the word “together” cannot be placed in a S-u-S position. The lexical stress is on the second syllable in “to-geth-er,” and that cannot be violated. This is a good example of how tricky it is to use words of more than two syllables in these kinds of metrical patterns, and helps us to see how good Tennyson, Frost and others are at it. Line 10 contains an extra, unnecessary syllable. Ashley adds the word “and” before “sad,” perhaps to be parallel with “and painful,” but this places two unstressed syllables in a row and differs too much from the underlying Sapphic pattern. To do a little of the collective verse-doctoring we described above, only for purposes of showing how lines can be adjusted to scan, we would suggest she could simply omit the second use of the word “and” in that line. Finally, in line 11, there are only 10 syllables instead of the 11 in the Sapphic pattern. Again, this could be easily mended by adding a coordinating conjunction such as “and” or “or” between “rainy days, sunsets.” The line would then follow the pattern. Ashley could also fix the line by changing the word “sunsets” to a different noun that begins with an unstressed syllable. All in all, this is a highly successful effort, both compelling and well-made. The Exercise Write several stanzas of Horatian Sapphics: SuuSuSuSuSu x 3 SuuSu Write about any subject you wish. Although Sappho’s poems were typically about love, the form can accommodate a variety of subjects.

50

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion Learning how to scan poems, to mark them to show patterns of stress along with the specific rhythms of each line, is an important skill both for reading and for writing poems. Scansion is an inexact art and can never substitute for what a poem is— words—but it is the best way to get at some of the fundamental music of the poetry, both its framing devices and its rhythms. Trying to write metrical poetry or, for that matter, free verse, without a good system of scansion is like trying to create great music without knowing the names of any of the notes. So far, in this book we have used a number of marks, often called “diacritical symbols,” meaning that they indicate something beyond the words themselves, to indicate stress and meter in lines of poetry. In this interchapter we are going to combine all these systems in such a way that gives you a tool for scanning any poem in English. The purpose is to summarize and review chapters one through three. Then we can move on, as did the poets themselves, to the complex innovations of the Renaissance that include the well-known, yet much maligned, misunderstood, and dreaded ghost, “iambic pentameter.” Scansion is useful yet difficult, and many linguists, literary scholars, critics and poets still disagree profoundly about how to do it. Many different systems of scansion exist. In experienced and competent hands, all have their virtues, though all also have their flaws. Each can teach us something about language and about verse. The problem is that there is a great deal of confusion about such systems and many ways to go astray in all of them, along with the confusion that comes with facing so many approaches. The Fitzgerald system we favor, and our brief explanation of it, cannot resolve the debates over scansion systems. If you are interested in poetry, the exploration and discussion of scansion is a passion that you can pursue for your entire lives. Certainly the major poets in every language that has metrical verse, and most do, have all cared deeply about it. It is not just a tool for dusty scholarship, but a way to understand and work with the living language. Good scansion helps us as readers and as writers to see what other poets thought they were doing and to describe and analyze what we think they were doing and what we might also do in writing our own poems. After all, it was invented by the poets themselves. It is a crucial part of the conversation going on about our art among the living and the dead. We think the Fitzgerald system is the most useful because it combines classical notation and concepts as they came into English in the sixteenth century, along with developments in our understanding of language in twentieth century linguistics. It is a classical system modified by structural linguistics. Fitzgerald’s brilliant insight was how to combine the two. To review: (1) The standard modern imitation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative strong-stress meter, which is not exactly the same as the original, needs only primary stress markers to indicate scansion, because we do not count the intervening unstressed syllables. It is a prosody of “versicles,” meaning entire lines:

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

51

/ / / / The curious cat caught a mouse. Note that this line has the same number of strong stress marks as this one, although the two have different numbers of syllables:

/ / / / The cute cat caught mice. (2) The traditional ballad uses stress in a similar way. When we write a traditional ballad, we count stresses and use rhyme, but we do not count syllables between stresses, and we do not use alliteration in a systematic way:

/ / / / The mayor lay upon his bed / / / And tried to go to sleep. / / / / “I think I lost the keys to the city,” / / / He sighed. He started to weep. Again, we can adjust the number of unstressed syllables and keep the form the same:

/ / / / The young mayor lay in bed / / / And tried hard to sleep. / / / / “I think I lost the city keys.” / / / Sigh. Sigh. Weep.

(3) In ancient Greek, poets scanned according to syllable length, not stress, and used two symbols to indicate the difference, the micron, “u” for short syllables and the macron, “—” for long ones. This system was picked up and used by Latin poets as well, although that language was different from Greek in several ways and the rules shifted as a result. Again, notice that just as with the

52

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

“translation” of Anglo-Saxon metrics into modern practice, there is a substantial change of the rules to fit them to the new language, which nonetheless works even though it seems to defy logic. It is a conversation across time of a particular kind, sometimes called a “creative misprision,” suggesting the endless vitality of verbal art and criticism. It is a beautiful thing. In any event, although they are fascinating and historically important, the rules the poets of these original languages used do not directly concern us here. The main thing to remember, again, is that the two symbols in Greek and Latin originally indicated short [“u”] and long [“—”]. When the Greek and Latin scansion system came into English in the 16th century, many poets and critics tried to make it fit English poetry as if that poetry were written in another language, arguing that English could be scanned by longs and shorts. The reason poets did this is that they recognized the power of the ancient poetry and wanted to imitate it, so, they figured, why not imitate its metrical forms as well as its genres, subjects, and themes? Over the years, however, poets realized that this system of long and short syllables did not work in English, at least certainly not as originally conceived. Of course, syllables have different lengths in our language and that does matter, but it is not as important as stress, which may include duration, but also, and more importantly, includes pitch and volume. There were huge battles over it, but in the end, the “stressers” triumphed over the “timers.” The great, odd innovation came when English poets began to understand that they could imitate the organizational intelligence of the ancients by arranging stressed and unstressed syllables in the same kinds of patterns that Greek and Latin poets had used when thinking about long and short syllables. This surprising, and, to be blunt, basically absurd discovery was fortunate in the way that the discovery of penicillin, or the invention of the steam engine was. It changed everything, releasing a poetic force in English verse that it had never achieved before and that no one could have imagined beforehand. It is what led to the writing and scansion of lines of English poetry that follow the ancient models, using the Greek and Latin symbols for scansion, but substituting stress for syllable length. This is why, when we scanned Frost’s poem above, we used the symbols “S” for “stressed” and “u” for “unstressed” to indicate what we were doing. Here is the first line of Frost’s poem again, now using the traditional symbols:

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Each “long” syllable is a stressed one, and each “short” syllable is unstressed. The reason for using the different scansion system here is that while Frost is basing his poem on stress patterns, he is also closely imitating the ancient Greek and Latin pattern in each line. Using the old-fashioned scansion system shows this clearly, and this is a crucial part of the way Frost, Tennyson, Swinburne and others would have thought of it because of their classical training. And Frost is astonishingly careful and precise about this. Among other things, as we discuss above, is how all

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

53

these poets address the use of three- or more syllable words in their imitations of classical scansion systems, because of the problem of secondary stress. Frost was particularly aware of this, as he wanted his poem, as colloquial as it may sound, to be as close to perfect as possible. And if you look at Frost’s poem, you will see that in 15 lines of 11-syllables—165 syllables, 127 words—he uses exactly two three-syllable words, “uncertain” and “whatever,” both carefully chosen to have their lexical stress on the second syllable, which means that the first and the third syllable are distinctly unstressed, and both placed appropriately to avoid any possible conflict with the meter. Now that is splendid verse-making. To do it differently, as many other strong poets have, would not have been “wrong” (remember that Tennyson does it, even in his first line) but it is nonetheless virtuosic. (4) The great challenge in scansion comes when we try to find a way to integrate all the foregoing historical and technical material into the scansion of modern English verse, meaning metrical poetry written since the mid-16th century. In this time poets and critics, seeking to find a way to scan that makes sense, have used everything from the standard classical notation [◡, —], to combinations of the classical marker for a short syllable and a stress mark [◡, / ], to “x” for an unstressed syllable and “/” for a stressed one [x, / ], to [u, S], to musical notation and on and on, including completely new systems, such as that by the gifted prosodist Derek Attridge and those in the work of linguists such as Paul Kiparsky. Confusion reigns. Yet all these poets, critics, scholars and teachers are trying to explain the rhythmical and metrical structure of the same words. The problem is how to show the underlying metrical pattern of accentual-syllabic verse, verse that measures both stresses and syllables, e.g., “iambic pentameter,” at the same time as one shows how the stresses actually fall in the words in the line, where the range of rhythms that will fit over the metrical base is enormous, indeed virtually infinite. In other words, what we seek is a system of scansion that suggests the nuance of what is going on in real poems. The greatest dangers are using a system that is too simple, such as a one-level adaptation of the Greek system, or a system that is too complex, such as what some linguists have devised, which seeks to show up to a dozen levels of stress, thereby becoming impractical for poets, although it is useful as an attempt to understand language itself. (5) Hence, our solution. Following Robert Fitzgerald, who was himself following in the footsteps not only of the poets, but also of the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and the linguists and literary scholars who agreed with his analysis of how English metrical verse works, we adopt a two-tiered system of scansion for accentual-syllabic verse. This system combines the best of several traditions, honoring history at the same time as it incorporates modern linguistics, without going too far into technical linguistics, which is powerful and interesting, but impractical at this level.

54

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

The steps are simple: (1) Write out the lines: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. (2) Above the line, mark the metrical pattern. You will come to recognize these patterns in time. They are called feet, and all include exactly one stressed syllable along with one or more unstressed syllables. Use classical notation here, the old-fashioned symbols for long and short syllables [u, —]. From here on, we will use the lower case “u” to indicate an unstressed syllable in a “short” position, along with foot boundaries [ | ] and caesura (pause) markers [ || ]:

u — |u — | u —|u — | u — | Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? u — | u —| u —| u — |u — | Thou art more lovely and more temperate. u — | u — | u — | u — |u — | Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May u — | u — | u —| u — |u — | And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. (3) Finally, above the metrical pattern, mark the primary [/] and secondary [\] stresses of the actual words. A good place to begin is to mark the primary lexical stress in words of more than one syllable. A secondary stress is one that you can perceive as more than an unstressed syllable, but clearly not as strong as a full, strong stress. Remember that stresses can appear almost anywhere and in almost any order, although not all patterns will work, and statistically most do not. Also remember that scansion is not a science. Reasonable people can disagree about stress placements once we move beyond lexical stress, which is generally clear. This system only accounts for four or five major categories of stress, and there are clearly more than that in English. Still, this system gets at the major categories and in the long run you will find it to be surprisingly precise for the purposes of verse.

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

55

Here is our completed example, the first in this book to use the full scansion system that we will use from here on out:

/ / / / u — |u — | u — |u —| u — | Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / \ / \ / u — | u —| u —| u — |u — | Thou art more lovely and more temperate. \ / \ / / / / u — | u — | u — | u — |u —| Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May / / / \ / / u — | u — | u —| u — |u — | And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Notice that some “feet,” the groupings in this case of an unstressed followed by a stressed (the “iambic foot”), have one stress, others have two stresses, some are reversed, some have no strong stress at all, and so on. All these variations have classical names, which are, like the iamb, analogues of the classical originals, though we tend to use more descriptive terms. An iambic foot with two stresses is called, in classical terminology, a spondee; a reverse foot is a trochee; a foot with no stresses is a pyrrhic. The interesting thing is that when these variations are combined in an iambic pentameter, or “heroic” line in English, a tremendous variety of combinations of these feet work together like musical variations to create some of the greatest lines in English. These groups of five iambs, “iambic pentameter,” do not merely go “ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum.” They vary their rhythms tremendously against the underlying meter. The trick is to learn which sequences work, and which do not, and why, and that takes time. Again, the Fitzgerald scansion system is not linguistically perfect. No such system is. But it is practical; it makes it possible to describe and discuss a nuanced and large universe of possible line variations, all of which work. It also provides a way to get a sense of what lines may not work, which is just as useful. In the end, scansion is just a tool. There is much more to the music of poetry than the modulation of stresses and the counting of syllables. There is also phonology, the sounds of the words, diction, syntax, rhetoric and much more. Yet all these other phenomena are also available in prose, whereas the structures of metrical verse are not. Scansion is the tool by which we analyze certain qualities of verse language that do not exist, by definition, in prose. It is this carefully modulated accentual-syllabic rhythm of English verse that set it free to begin with and that

56

Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion

continues to give it its energy. Scansion is not easy to master, but such mastery is worth the effort. However culturally determined it may be, it also gets at something in the structure of English that seems to open it up to possibilities otherwise undreamt.

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

The Form At this point you have written four verse forms that roughly follow the development of the English language over the first thousand years of Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. The forms are: Anglo-Saxon strong-stress alliterative verse Ballad meter Stress-based imitations of classical quantitative meters (the Sapphic and the hendecasyllable) In a progression that recapitulates how the verse language of English developed historically, the next step is to synthesize these forms, which is what happened in the late sixteenth century, creating the accentual-syllabic heart of English meter that is still beating today.1 In accentual-syllabic meters there is an underlying metrical pattern in which both stresses and syllables are counted, and certain kinds of strictly controlled but flexible variations are allowed. In other words, what we find is a synthesis of stress counting within patterns of overall syllable counting: accentual-syllabic verse. We then overlay actual language on top of these abstract patterns, or meters. It is

1

The actual history is far from neat. The main exception in the scheme we suggest here is Chaucer, who is hard to account for except as a lone genius (with some imitators), who more or less discovered the system we describe here well over 100 years before it reappeared in the English Renaissance. But if we look at the general movement and development of English poetry in this time, the overall trends are as we describe them. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_4

57

58

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

difficult, perhaps impossible, to schematize the full abstraction of an iambic line, though many have tried, because of hyper-metrical line endings, also called “feminine” endings, three-syllable foot substitutions, and elision of syllables, and much more. All of these terms will make sense soon. But a good place to begin understanding the basic pattern is: | (u) S | u S | u S | u S (u) | where “u” represents unstressed syllables, “S” represents stressed syllables, and parentheses indicate optional syllables. This count must be fairly rigorously maintained. Poets differ in their practice, some adding more unstressed syllables within lines, some using the complexity of the silent first unstressed syllable, and others using the hypermetrical ending, an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of the line. The actual language can be composed to create many possible variations on this pattern, indeed an almost infinite number. In any iambic line, the actual stress patterns of some feet can occasionally be reversed; weak stress-position syllables can be promoted; strong stress-position syllables demoted; weak stress-position syllables eliminated in various parts of the line, and so on. The challenge is that this apparently simple meter is so rich and complex that we cannot possibly list all the exceptions because many of the variations within individual feet only work depending on what is around them, a subtle affair. It would be like trying to name all the possible moves in a chess game. Rhyme only complicates things, but in a delightful way, adding to the pleasure. This week you will write rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets: aa bb cc dd. This form is powerful and is similar to the ballad in many ways, at least as its verse structure goes; the main difference is that the lines are all nearly the same length in terms of syllable count, and there must be just one unstressed syllable between each stressed one. You must count the unstressed syllables as well as the stressed ones. So, the rules are simple: (1) Four iambic feet per line, which means most lines will be eight syllables, alternating unstressed-stressed. (2) Lines rhyme in couplets. This is harder than it seems because of the rigor of the syllable patterning. As you will discover, writing in such a tight pattern reorganizes the imagination. You are about to step through a magical portal. A Poem from the Past Below is Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” a marvelous poem in iambic tetrameter couplets and the first poem in the book to be scanned using the complete scansion system explained in the Interchapter 1. As with earlier examples, we have given you a good start; we then give the pattern without the stresses; we then take out the metrical marks, leaving the foot-boundaries for guidance; and finally pull all the other diacritical marks. Finish it on your own.

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

59

To His Coy Mistress / Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) / / / / | u - | u - | u - || u - | Had we but world enough, and time,

Reversed stress in foot 1.

/ / / \ / | u - | u || - |u || - | u - | This coyness, Lady, were no crime. \ \ / / / | u - | u - | u - | u - | We would sit down and think which way

/ / / \ / |u - | u -| u - | u - | To walk and pass our long love’s day.

|

/ / / / u -| u -| u - | u - | Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Reversed stress in foot 1, though this could go either way, depending on rhetorical choices. Scansion does not resolve all such questions, but rather reveals them.

Secondary stress on “love’s”

Reversed stress in foot 1; Marvell writes “-dian” as one syllable, a y-glide.

/ / / / | u -| u - || u - | u - | Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide

Reversed stress in foot 3.

/ \ / / | u - |u | u - || u - | Of Humber would complain. I would

Reversed stress in foot 4.

\ / / / / / |u -| u -| u -| u - | Love you ten years before the Flood,

\ / / / / | u - | u || -| u - || u - | And you should, if you please, refuse

Fully “loaded” or spondaic feet in the first two feet.

Secondary stress on “you,” rising to the spondee in the second foot.

60

4

/ / |u -| u -| u -| u - | Till the conversion of the Jews.

/ / \ / | u -|u-|u -| u - | My vegetable love should grow

/ / \ / | u - | u - | u || - | u -| Vaster than empires, and more slow;

/ / \ / / | u -| u - | u - | u - | An hundred years should go to praise \ / / / | u -| u -| u -| u - | Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

Articles and prepositions (“the,” “of”) rarely if ever receive stress even when they appear in the stressed position. This means the first foot is a “slack” foot, or, in classical terms, a “pyrrhic.” This line arguably has only two strong stresses. Polysyllabic words such as “vegetable” always have only one primary stress. This means that the second foot is again a slack, or pyrrhic. Note that “vegetable” has three distinct syllables here.

Reversed stress in foot 1; slack in foot 3; spondee in foot 4.

Secondary stress on “should.”

Secondary stress on “Thine” and a slack foot 2.

As you can see, Marvell’s ability to vary the line is extraordinary. These are not “mistakes,” nor is he “breaking the rules.” Marvell is an early master of the music of iambic verse, which is such a superb verse instrument exactly because of the rich possibility of variation against the metrical norm that Marvell deploys here. This modulating richness becomes only that much more interesting when we move from tetrameter to pentameter (five feet), where lines are asymmetrical and have an exponentially greater possibility of variation because of that extra foot. Below, we have removed the stress markers, but left in the foot and caesura boundaries—see if you can add those stresses in, with explanation if possible, as we

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

61

have done it above. We have included a few explanations at the level of foot designation.

| u -| u -| u -| u - | Two hundred to adore each breast,

| u -|u - |u -| u - | But thirty thousand to the rest;

|u -|u - |u - |u - | An age at least to every part,

“Every” is two syllables here, with an elision, “ev’ry.”

|u - | u - | u - | u - | And the last age should show your heart.

| u || - | u || - | u - | u - | For, Lady, you deserve this state,

Marvell uses caesuras, often in pairs, to vary the rhythms of his lines. Note as well that caesuras can come mid-foot.

| u - |u - | u - | u - | Nor would I love at lower rate.

| u -|u - |u-| u - | But at my back I always hear

| u -| u -|u -| u - | Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

| u -| u - | u -|u - | And yonder all before us lie

“Winged” must have two syllables in this case.

62

4

| u – | u – | u –|u – | Deserts of vast eternity.

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

A rhyme need not come on a stressed syllable.

| u -|u - |u - |u - | Thy beauty shall no more be found,

|u || - | u - | u - || u - | Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

|u - | u - || u - | u - | My echoing song: then worms shall try

| u - | u | u - |u - | That long preserved virginity,

| u - | u -| u - |u - | And your quaint honour turn to dust,

| u - |u - | u - | u - | And into ashes all my lust:

|u |u - | u - | u - | The grave’s a fine and private place,

|u - ||u - || u - | u - | But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell varies the usual three syllables of “ech-o-ing,” to “ech-wing,” a w-glide.

“Preserved” has two syllables, unlike “winged,” above, where Marvell expands the “-ed” into a separate syllable.

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

63

For the rest of the poem, we have now also removed the foot boundaries and caesuras. Reverse the process: first add in foot divisions and caesuras above the line, then complete the scansion with stress marks a line above them, with commentary.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

An elision: “ev’ry” is two syllables.

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

An elision: “am’rous” is two syllables.

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

“Thorough” is an archaic pronunciation of “through.”

64

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

Marvell’s witty poem contains a rich and diverse array of variations on the iambic tetrameter pattern, or “metrical frame” as the poet and scholar John Hollander has called it. These variations or modulations give the poem its subtle music (its “strains” of music) instead of the strict beat of a metronome, which is not what good metrical poetry is all about. In good accentual-syllabic verse, modulation is the goal; however, in beginning exercises try to follow the abstract form as closely as possible. Then, over time, your own sense of how to modulate, your own distinct style, will gradually emerge. Poems by Students Erica Smith’s comical exercise about the process of writing poetry is metrically strong and highly regular, but she does not use the complete scansion system. What she does is similar to a more old-fashioned system that combines scansion marks from various traditions, although she has neglected to include foot boundaries. The first example is the way she wrote and scanned it; the second example is her poem with the two-fold Fitzgerald scansion system.

For the Love of Poetry! / Erica Smith u / u / u / u / “There are no rules,” the teacher said. u / u / u / u / “Just write the thoughts inside your head.” u / u / u / u / “However, it cannot be prose, u / u / u / u / Must rhyme, make sense; laid out in rows.” u / u / u / u / “This should not cause you too much pain, u / u / u / u / Try not to go against the grain.” u / u / u / u / She said, “Haikus form lines of three.”

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

65

u / u / u / u / We felt the need for sympathy. u / u / u / u / Oh, Shakespeare, thank you for your gift. u / u / u / u / The sonnet causes brains to shift. u / u / u / u / Beginning with a simple word, u / u / u / u / And quickly becomes the absurd! u / u / u / u / It feels as if it’s mocking me,

The lexical stress in “be-comes” falls on “-comes,” so this line needs revision.

u / u / u / u / Oh, for the love of poetry! Erica’s exercise is an excellent first effort at iambic tetrameter. As she jokes, this exercise does indeed rhyme, make sense, and fit neatly into “rows,” and she skillfully rhymes the three-syllable word “sympathy” with “lines of three” and “mocking me” with “poetry.” Line 12 needs to be revised to fit the metrical pattern. The problem is not the reversal of the foot with “becomes” by itself, but rather that the reversal is preceded by a slack or pyrrhic foot. As a result, when we reach “becomes” we sense that the placement of the word fights against the pattern rather than cooperating with it. The great prosodist and poet (and perhaps former spy) Edward Weismiller once called lines like this a “triple threat to duple meter.” See if you can figure out what he means by this. In any event, the underlying sense of lines 11 and 12 comes through in the context of the exercise, but the sentence is not grammatically correct. “Beginning with a simple word / And quickly becomes the absurd” is a sentence which contains no subject. Consider, instead, as a rewriting exercise, executed only to get the meter and syntax to work: It opens with a simple word, And suddenly becomes absurd! If you scan this, you will see the differences. Now, both the syntax and the meter work. Here is Erica’s poem once again, with the two-step scansion system marked. This system points out unacceptable variations to the pattern, such as the word “becomes” in line 12, that we discussed above. Note that we have also added in

66

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

caesuras and that without these indications of the caesuras, we cannot see some of the excellent pauses inserted in these lines as well. For the Love of Poetry! \ / / / | u - | u - || u - | u - | “There are no rules,” the teacher said. / / / / | u - | u - | u -| u - | “Just write the thoughts inside your head.” / / / | u - | u || - | u - | u - | “However, it cannot be prose, \ / \ / \ / / | u - || u - || u - | u - | Must rhyme, make sense; laid out in rows.”

/ / / / | u - |u | u - | u - | “This should not cause you too much pain,

\ / / / / | u - |u - | u - | u - | Try not to go against the grain.”

|

/ / \ / / u - || u - | u - |u | She said, “Haikus form lines of three.”

/ / / | u - | u - | u - |u - | We felt the need for sympathy.

Excellent line and scansion. Erica is quite good with spondees, or loaded feet.

There should probably be a secondary on “much.”

Nice spondee, or loaded foot, in foot 1.

Reversed stress (trochee) in foot 2.

Note the pyrrhic, or slack foot, in the rhyming position—nicely done.

4

Iambic Tetrameter Couplets

67

\ / / / | u || - | u || - | u - | u - | Oh, Shakespeare, thank you for your gift. / / / / | u -| u -|u - |u - | The sonnet causes brains to shift.

/ / / | u - | u - |u - |u - | Beginning with a simple word, / / / | u - |u - | u -| u - | And quickly becomes the absurd!

See the discussion above.

/ / / / |u - |u -| u - |u - | It feels as if it’s mocking me, \ / / | u || - | u - | u - |u - | Oh, for the love of poetry!

A wonderful line: reversed first foot with medial caesura, slack fourth foot for the rhyme…and the wit and emotion are spot on.

The Exercise Many tetrameter-couplet poems are witty; how about some wit? Feel free to be gently satirical, much like Marvell. Again, try to write strong lines, but enjambment is acceptable. Remember to scan, using the full system: first the feet and caesuras, and then, the primary and secondary stresses in the line above. Explain your variations.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

The Form Ah, the blank verse line, the mysterium tremendum! The concept is simple, but transformative: add one more iambic foot onto the tetrameter, so the underlying pattern is | uS | uS | uS | uS | uS |, or, as we will represent it in the Fitzgerald system | u - | u - | u - | u - | u - |. The strange thing, or the astonishing and magnificent thing, about this simple addition of a single foot is the way it makes the line exponentially more powerful, creating a far greater universe of potential line variations. The poets who seized upon this formula, beginning perhaps with Chaucer, although that story is complicated, and then more definitively with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1530s, were experimenting. They were imitating classical models of foot scansion and the standard 11-syllable Italian line, but they unleashed a creative force that retains tremendous vitality, if we understands its history, structure and use. There are several theories about why the five-foot iambic line is so formidable in English. The one we find most convincing is that English verse tends most easily or naturally to fall into a four-beat pattern. Extending the line to five beats and combining that beating with a strict iambic pattern and syllable count includes those four beats but allows them more room to breathe. The addition of the fifth foot creates a pleasing asymmetry that nonetheless sits well with and close to the underlying four-beat tendencies of the natural language. Some theorists of verse have suggested this addition “caudates” the line, or gives it a tail, like a tag or a coda in music. If anything, however, that addition of a foot is probably best thought of not as a tail, but rather as an expansion within the four-beat structure, giving the skilled poet the ability to bend and reorganize verse rhythms in a myriad of ways, all of them slightly askew if compared to four-beat lines. Another theory has it that a lengthening and regularizing of the line generate greater flexibility in including more and longer Latinate words, thereby allowing for greater play with patterns of rhetorical stress and syntax. Consider how many three

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_5

69

70

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

and four-syllable words there are in fairly ordinary English: “another,” “lengthening,” “regularizing,” “flexibility,” “including,” “Latinate,” “allowing,” “rhetorical.” Without the ten syllables of the longer line, it becomes difficult to use more than just one such word in a single line. At the other end of the dictional spectrum, English has all sorts of small, non-lexical words, especially in the formation of prepositional phrases and complex verbs, and because these syllables use up space, it becomes difficult to deploy many of them in shorter lines. Consider a sentence like “By Tuesday, I will have been camping for a week.” “By… will have been… for a” constitute as many syllables as the lexical words in the sentence, “Tuesday… I… camping… week.” Managing so much necessary grammatical material, unavoidable in English, is a challenge in too short a line. Ten syllables works far better for this than eight, liberating poets to say far more complex things using richer diction. For all the above reasons and more, the iambic pentameter line is a poetic invention of power and durability, still very much alive, even as a ghost of certain kinds of free verse. What you will find is that the rhythmic variation that is possible against the underlying pattern of this meter is seemingly endless. But beware: not every variation works. There are many ways to stumble. The line still must scan and there are many variations that do not work, as you will discover. And such stumbling is fine. In fact, that is how we develop true skill, which is exactly why learning to write verse should be done with exercises like this, where one can focus on getting the music right, rather than focusing on enormous or difficult subjects. That will come with time. In the meantime, by practicing this way you will discover just how rich and flexible the iambic pentameter, or the “heroic” line can be. Iambic pentameter is like a treasure chest filled with possibilities, many still unexplored. It took almost 250 years before people could agree, with thanks to Robert Bridges’ scholarship, that Milton’s lines in Paradise Lost were in fact blank verse. The great 18th-century English critic and poet Samuel Johnson said he thought of that poem as “verse only to the eye.” In our view, the blank verse line is far from exhausted, even though it was first used in the 1530s, by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to translate books two and four of Virgil’s Aeneid. It was a discovery that is still unfolding. Poems of the Past Here is a familiar passage from Hamlet by William Shakespeare, scanned with the Fitzgerald system. We have provided some notes, but there is so much variation and richness, we have left much unsaid. The range of possible and allowed variations in lines such as this makes including all possible notes cumbersome. And consider what happens if we begin to annotate all caesuras, enjambments, and the way that multisyllabic words cross foot boundaries, along with how Shakespeare drapes syntax across lines, breaking it at line-end, within lines, within feet, and so on. Although they are not technically caesuras, we have also indicated end-stopped lines with double bars here as well, to foreground the use of enjambment. When we take all this together, the possibilities become incalculable.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

71

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2. [A room of state in the castle.] [Enter King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes, Voltimand, Cornelius, Lords, and Attendants]. King Claudius: / / / \ / / | u - | u - |u - | u - |u - | Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother s death / \ / / / / | u - | u -| u - || u - | u | u - u | The memory be green, and that it us befitted

Six feet! Feminine ending.

/ \ / / / / / |u - | u - | u - | u - | u - u | To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom

Again, a feminine ending.

/ / \ / / |u -|u - |u - | u - | u - | To be contracted in one brow of woe, / \ / / / / |u - |u - | u - | u - | u - u | Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature

Feminine ending.

/ / / / / | u - | u - |u - |u - | u - | That we with wisest sorrow think on him, / / / |u - |u - |u - | u - | u - | Together with remembrance of ourselves.

Only three strong stresses which works just fine when arranged this way.

/ / / / / | u - | u - | u - | u|| - | u - | Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, / / / / - |u - | u - | u - | u - | |u The imperial jointress to this warlike state,

Elision of Th imperial, and the first syllable -ial in the second foot contains a y-glide -yal. Two elisions in two feet!

72

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

/ / / / | u - || u - | u - | u - | u - | Have we, as twere with a defeated joy,

/ / / | u - |u - |u - |u - | u - | With an auspicious and a dropping eye, / / / / | u - |u - |u - | u - | u u | With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, / / / / / | u -|u - | u - | u - | u - | In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / / / / / | - u | u - || u - |u -|u | Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr d / / / / - |u - | | u - | u - | u || - | u Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone

Only three stresses.

Funeral elides to fun ral”; feminine ending. Stress reversal in foot three. The stress in the first foot and in the third is reversed.

/ / / / \ / | u - | u - |u - || u - || u | With this affair along. For all, our thanks. / / / \ / - || u - |u - | | u - | u || - | u Now follows, that you know, young Fortinbras, / / / / | u - | u -|u -|u -| u | Holding a weak supposal of our worth, / / \ / / |u - |u - |u - | u - |u - | Or thinking by our late dear brother s death / / / / / | u - | u -| u - | u - | u | Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,

Reversal of stress in foot one.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

73

/ / / |(u) - | u - | u - | u - | u - u | Colleagued with the dream of his advantage,

This line is acephalous, or headless. It begins with the second stress of foot one, the stressed position. We scan in the implied unstressed syllable in parentheses. The poet uses the word “colleague” as a verb, a rare functional shift for this noun. The line concludes with a feminine ending.

/ / / / | u - | u - | u - |u - | u u | He hath not fail d to pester us with message, / / / | u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | Importing the surrender of those lands / / \ / / | u - | u - |u || - | u - | u - | Lost by his father, with all bonds of law, / / / \ / / | u - | u - |u - | u || - u | u - | To our most valiant brother. So much for him. \ / / / | u -| u - | u - | u - | u - u | Now for ourself and for this time of meeting:

/ / / / / / | u | u - | u - || u - | u - | Thus much the business is: we have here writ / / \ / | u - | u || - | u - | u - |u - | To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras,

Reversal in foot one; loaded foot 4. Y-glide in “val-yant;” loaded foot 4. Reversal in foot one; Feminine ending

Elision: “bus’ness”

74

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

/ / \ / / | u || - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | Who, impotent and bed-rid, scarcely hears / / / / | u - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | Of this his nephew s purpose, – to suppress / / / / | u - |u - | u - || u - | u – u | His further gait herein; in that the levies,

Feminine ending.

/ / / \ / | u - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | The lists and full proportions, are all made / / / / | u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | Out of his subject: and we here dispatch

Reversal in foot one.

/ / / / / | u || - | u - | u|| - | u || - | u - | You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltimand, / / \ / | u - | u - | u - |u - | u u For bearers of this greeting to old Norway;

|

/ / \ / / / | u - | u - | u - |u - | u - u | Giving to you no further personal power / / / / | u - | u - | u - || u -| u | To business with the king, more than the scope / / / / | u - | u -|u - |u - | u - || Of these dilated articles allow. / / / / / | u - || u - | u - | u - | u - u| Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty.

Reversal in foot one. Elision on pers nal. Feminine ending. Reversal in the fourth foot. Elision in bus ness.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

75

Now that you have used and begun to practice the Fitzgerald scansion system, you can see the enormous variety an iambic line can contain in the hands of a master, indeed the master of masters. Shakespeare uses stress reversals (“trochees”) throughout, including several stress reversals in foot one. This is an acceptable variation if well-managed, because after the initial change in rhythm, the line has four more feet to affirm the music of the pattern. He uses slack feet (“pyrrhics”) and loaded feet (“spondees”). Notice there are elisions (dropped syllables) in some places to make the words fit the pattern. The words that Shakespeare elides may sound archaic to us, but consider all the contractions we currently use, especially in spoken English. And, this speech was written for the stage and meant to be heard. One line is headless, or “acephelous,” which means headless in Latin, meaning he has dropped the first unstressed syllable in the pattern and has begun with a stressed syllable. This is also a completely acceptable variation if, again, managed carefully in the context of the line as a whole. The speech includes several feminine, or hyper-metrical endings: an extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line. It is not a sixth foot, merely an extra syllable, although there is one six-foot line and we don’t know why. Like Marvell, above, Shakespeare uses y-glides. He also enjambs lines quite hard in places, running syntax over the end of the line, creating larger and more complex units of sense in the context of his lines, a great innovation that poets began to use more over time. And now, practice scanning blank verse using this famous poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Scan as many lines as your teacher requires. After scanning, discuss the regularities of the stress placements and any variations that you find. As in the last chapter, we have started you out.

Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) / / / / |u - | u - | u - | u -| u - | It little profits that an idle king, \ / / / / |u - | u - || u - | u - |u - | By this still hearth, among these barren crags, / / / / / | u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Match‘d with an aged wife, I mete and dole / / / / / |u - | u - | u - | u - | u - | Unequal laws unto a savage race,

76

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

/ / / / \ / | u - || u - || u - || u - |u - | That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

|u - | u - | u - | u || -| u - | I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

|u - | u - || u - |u - |u - | Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy‘d

| u - || u - |u - | u || - | u - | Greatly, have suffer‘d greatly, both with those

| u - | u || - | u - || u - || u - | That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

| u - |u - |u -|u -|u - | Thro‘ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades | u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known,–cities of men.

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honor‘d of them all,–

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell‘d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish‘d, not to shine in use!

As tho‘ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

77

78

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,–

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro‘ soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners , Souls that have toil‘d, and wrought, and thought with me,–

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads,– you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Death closes all but something ere the end,

79

80

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho ‘much is taken, much abides; and tho‘

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

81

82

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

Poems by Students Sam / Kelsey Grey / / \ / / / u s | u s | u s | u s || u s | He left for war two months ago, but told / / / / / u s | u s|u s || u s | u s | Me he would always write. I thought I could / / / / / u s | u s | u s | u s |u s | Believe his words because he promised me \ / / \ / u s | u s |u s |u s | u s | He would return to marry me and start / \ / / / u s | u s| u || s | u s | u s Our lives together. We began to write

|

\ / / / \ / u s | u s |u s |u s | u s | Nonstop for nearly over two whole months,

/ \ / / / u s |u s |u s | u s | u || s | Then suddenly he stopped replying. Did / \ / / \ u s | u s | u s |u s ||u s | His love for me just disappear? I could

/ \ / \ / u s| u s | u s| u s || u s | Not understand what I did wrong, but then

Note the added words to make the meter work: “nearly over two whole months” is redundant. We would give “two” a primary stress, “whole” a secondary and “months” a primary. See the explanation below.

Kelsey is trying to label secondary stresses but is not always correct. There are many cases of this here— see the discussion below.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

83

/ / \ \ / u s | u s | u s| u s | u s | I figured out that it was not my fault. / \ / \ / u s | u s |u s | u s | u s | I kind of wish it was because he would / / / / \ u s |u s || u s |u s |u s Be better off. The final letter I / \ \ \ / u s | u s | u s | u s || u s | Received was not from him at all. His friend \ / / \ u s | u s|u s |u s || u s | Had wrote the horrifying truth. My man

Grammar: “wrote” should be “written”

/ / \ / \ u s | u s | u s || u s | u s | Was shot and killed at war, my greatest fear

\ / \ / / u s || u s | u s || u s | u s | Of all. The letter reads, “To his best girl, / / \ / / u s | u s | u s || u s | u s | I wish this wasn’t so, but Sam was shot / \ / / / u s | us | u s |u s | u s | And killed today trying to save my life. / / / / u s | u s|u s | u s | u s | He is a hero in my eyes and you \ / / / / u s |u s | u s || u s |u s | Should be so proud of him. He was a great

The stress in the third foot is on “try.”

84

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

/ / / / u || s | u s | u s| u s | u s || u s | Man. Sorry to deliver that grim news. He loved / \ / / \ u s | u s | u s | u s || u s | You dearly and he always will. Recall

/ / / / / u s | u s | u s || u s | u || s | Him as your perfect man. Sincerely, Ben.” Kelsey Grey writes a sturdy narrative that also contains a letter, a common approach called “epistolary verse,” a lyrical genre. Although one generally hears about the combat death of a relative or someone emotionally close from the military itself, the story is compelling and quite ambitious. The poem scans almost perfectly, although there is some verbal padding and a few grammatical problems that are easily fixed. Most of the challenges with the verse-making come in the scansion, not in the words. Notice that Kelsey is using “u” and “s” to mark the unstressed and stressed positions. At this stage she should mark the pattern with u and -. Also, she leaves out the initial foot boundary for each line, and marks almost every line as end-stopped, when most are not. Again, this is not a problem with the verse because Kelsey’s enjambments are generally good. Rather it is a problem with the scansion and easily fixed. This matters because correct scansion helps us to understand what we, and others, are doing that much better. So, this kind of exercise clearly has two parts: the versecraft first, of course, but also the scansion of it. Perhaps the greatest problem in Kelsey’s scansion has to do with her marking of secondary stresses, which are important, subtle, and difficult both to hear and to scan. The good news is that Kelsey is clearly hearing them because the verse works. Like many students, however, Kelsey is incorrectly identifying many secondaries, adding them where unnecessary, and missing others. In this line, for example, the stresses she has marked as secondary are clearly primary, as “war” and “fear” are lexical words in stressed positions:

/ / \ / \ u s | u s | u s || u s | u s | Was shot and killed at war, my greatest fear

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

85

In other places, things are a bit more complicated:

/ \ / / \ u s | u s | u s |u s || u s | His love for me just disappear? I could We would scan this line as:

/ / \ / / u - | u - | u - |u - || u - | His love for me just disappear? I could In other places, she misses her own well-placed secondaries. Here are a few of her lines scanned by her, then rescanned by us. Notice that again we have not changed a syllable because there is no need, but we have corrected the scansion. Kelsey’s version:

\ / / / / u s | u s | u s || u s |u s | Should be so proud of him. He was a great / / / / u || s | u s | u s| u s | u s || u s | Man. Sorry to deliver that grim news. He loved Now ours: / \ / \ / | u - | u - | u - || u - |u - | Should be so proud of him. He was a great

/ / / \ / / | u || - | u - | u -| u - | u - || u - | Man. Sorry to deliver that grim news. He loved The changes: we replaced “s” with “-” to follow the Fitzgerald system; changed the indication of end-stopped lines to simple foot boundaries because the lines enjamb; and added secondaries over “so” and “grim,” for reasons we explain below. This is solid versecraft. All Kelsey needs to do in this case is work on the scansion. (We made some other changes as well. See if you can find them.) In a number of places, the reason we suggest simpler scansion than Kelsey’s when using secondaries is that even the Fitzgerald system, which is more sophisticated than most, cannot register the subtle distinctions among levels of stress in English, which go further than what we can indicate in any literary scansion. A good rule of thumb for secondary stress is to use it most when there is a

86

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

single-syllable lexical word in an unstressed position, followed by an even stronger lexical word in the stressed position.

/ \ / / / / u - || u - | u - |u -|u - | A good, quick rule of thumb is that we can

\ / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - || u - | Place secondary stress in feet like these. “These” feet being foot two of the first line, on “quick” and then foot one of the second line, on “Place.” This system is far from perfect. Note, among other things, that there is unquestionably more stress on “-dar-” in the word “secondary” than in the syllables to either the left or right of it, but as it sits in a stressed metrical position, in this descriptive system that is enough to indicate its weight appropriately. There is more that linguists and even some other literary prosodists would have to say about this, but for our purposes here, this is enough. In other words: use the secondary stress sparingly, only when there is a substantial variation that needs to be shown. Why are we now trying to simplify things, rather than complicating them? Remember that a poetic scansion system, as opposed to a linguistic one, is just a tool to get at major contours, and it is not able to describe them all. We would argue that no system can do this, though some have tried. Scansion is not the goal, but a tool to understanding verse, to writing stronger verse, and with luck, to arriving at true poetry in the end. The Fitzgerald system can register about seven levels of stress, in feet that might look something like this (in more or less ascending order of stress intensity by foot): | (u) - | Headless line (an absent syllable in the unstressed position, so a true zero) |u-|

Pyrrhic, or slack foot

/ |u-|

Trochee, or reversed foot.

\ |u-|

A standard foot, but with a relatively weak stress in the stressed position, leading \ / / | u - | u - || to a stronger stress in the next foot: “He woke up tired.” This is a common twofoot iambic pattern where stress levels increase across four syllables, sometimes called one version of the “ionic foot,” a four-syllable pattern.

5

Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

87

/ |u-|

A standard foot with a strong stress in the stressed position.

\ / |u-|

Spondee, or loaded foot, with the unstressed position somewhat weaker than the stressed one, which is common in English.

/ / |u-|

A strong spondee, like “up tired,” in the example above.

Provocative and useful as this scheme may be, however, it gives us misgivings to present it in this manner, because it is misleading in several ways. Poets do not write in feet, but rather in lines, and stress contours are powerfully affected by what is adjacent to them, both before and after. So while thinking about types of feet is necessary, it can be misleading if considered in isolation from the line as a whole. Further, the system is not complex enough to account for the tremendous variety of spoken language, where we must also consider rhetoric, morphology and syntax. Just think of all the variations in lines introduced by the placement of…pauses. At the same time, all the foregoing is not a problem. Literary scansion is a powerful organizational tool if we remember that it draws on linguistics but is not science itself. Its purpose is not to describe in an absolute way, but rather to guide and focus. For example, the scansion discussion above may not tell us the one, true answer of how to stress the word “just” in Kelsey’s poem, but it does focus our attention on it far more clearly and precisely than if we did not have the tool of scansion in the first place. And that focused discussion is what leads us into an ever more precise approach to language in verse. This is more art than science. All the foregoing is why we have simplified Kelsey’s suggestions, as she, like so many others, is perhaps over-using the secondary stress mark. But no matter, for Kelsey is writing, learning, and growing as a poet. This process requires taking risks and making both subtle and not-so-subtle mistakes. Indeed, the music of verse can be so intoxicating it leads us to lose sight of sense. When writing verse, the poet can become preoccupied with meter and forget to check grammar; for example, in Kelsey’s line five, “lives” should be “life,” and in line fourteen, “wrote” should be “written.” We believe she knows this, but has lost sight of it momentarily because she is focusing on the versecraft. This is a good thing because she is attending to the music.

88

5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter

Exercise This week’s assignment is a dramatic monologue in blank verse; make up a character, someone who does not exist, and give him or her a speech, just like Claudius’s. Do not use rhyme. And for the sake of simplicity, hold yourself to a 25-line limit. While the basic unit remains the line, and the lines should of course be strong, in this case enjambment is more appropriate, although remember to avoid weak line-endings such as prepositions and articles. Enjambment is not a license to do anything you please; it is the license not to end each line with a major juncture such as a period, colon, comma, or a clause-end. Triple-space your poem, write in the iambic pattern above it, and then scan it, using the Fitzgerald system, showing accents or the lack of them in the zero case across the top of the patterned line to indicate zero, secondary and strong stresses. Copying and hand-marking the poems will probably save you time rather than trying to make such things fit with keyboard marks.

Interchapter 2: Classical Meters Revisited

89

Interchapter 2: Classical Meters Revisited Now armed with the full Fitzgerald system, we can revisit earlier meters to see that there is more in these poems than may at first meet the eye and ear. While, as we discussed above, we cannot describe all the complexities of stress in a poem with this system, it does help in showing us how strong poets play with stress in skillful and beautiful ways. In stress-based imitations of classical quantitative meters, the placement of stress is particularly revealing. Most poets use secondary stresses in such meters to draw on the full resources of the language and avoid sounding awkward and stilted. Consider again the first stanza of the Sapphic “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion,” by William Cowper (1731–1800). Here is how we scanned it above:

S u u S u S uS u S u Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, S u u S u S u S uS u Scarce can endure delay of execution, S u u S u S u S u S u Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my

S uu S u Soul in a moment. But if we now scan it with the Fitzgerald system, some interesting subtleties appear:

/ / / / / - u u u - u- u - u Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, / / / / u u - u - u - u- u Scarce can endure delay of execution, / / / / u u - u - u - u - u Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my / / - uu - u Soul in a moment.

90

Interchapter 2: Classical Meters Revisited

Note that in line 2, on the first syllable of “execution,” there is no stress, as there can only be one strong stress per multisyllabic word in English, and the stress in that word falls on “-cu-,” the third syllable. Similarly, in line 3, the last syllable of “readiness” falls in a stressed position, and cannot take a stress either, as the stress falls on the first syllable. Cowper manages both variations very carefully, however, making sure that the unstressed syllable of the multisyllabic words in question falls in a stressed position exactly two syllables away from a stressed one. Because of the intervening syllable, those unstressed syllables thus fit comfortably into stressed positions in the meter. He is also always careful about putting the stressed syllable of the word into a metrically stressed position. This is far from an easy trick, just as it is also difficult to write poems like Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something,” in which he hardly resorts to this kind of variation at all, using almost no three-syllable words. The revelation of Cowper’s technique with the placement of multisyllabic words in a Sapphic is a good example of why we favor the Fitzgerald system. It helps us to describe things we might not otherwise see, yet which, whatever terms he might have used to describe them to himself, seem intentional as they are consistent throughout the entire poem. A good exercise might be to take a strong Sapphic or Catullan hendecasyllable in English, scan it using only the S/u system, and then rescan it using the Fitzgerald system to see what it reveals about that poet’s technique. You will discover that strong poets take a range of approaches, and this variety only reveals how interesting these meters can be.

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

The Form There are now no new scansion marks to learn; you have them all for this system, although, as you will see from these simple materials can come endless music. It is a bit like chess, where there are only six kinds of pieces (pawn, castle, bishop, knight, queen, king) and only 64 spaces, but an infinite number of variations upon that grid with those pieces. From here on, as in learning chess, it is about different ways to use the pieces and the moves. Triple meters seem to have become popular in English in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although these days they are often associated with light verse, there are many great poems, including some we discuss in this chapter, where they are used for serious purposes. As with other traditional English meters since the 16th century, the original terminology for triple meters comes from Greek, transmitted through Latin. In ancient Greek the dactylic hexameter, six feet of dactyls, is one of the greatest meters; Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are both in dactylic hexameter. The two basic types of triple meter in English are based on the dactyl (- u u) and the anapest (u u -). One easy way to learn which is which is to remember that the word “dactyl” in Greek means “finger,” and if you look at your left index finger, you will see that the first joint is long, and the next two are short: long/short/short. “Anapest” means “reversed,” literally “struck back” and is the opposite. In English, as with all the other meters we have looked at, it is the stress-based version of this which won out, so we treat these meters as S u u (dactyl) and u u S (anapest). When scanning and writing in triple meters, do the same thing as with other meters. First, write out the pattern, including the foot boundaries. Then, above the indication of the metrical frame, add in the stresses: primary, secondary, or missing.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_6

91

92

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

/ \ / / / u u - | u u - | u u - | u u - | ‘ Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house \ / / \ / / u u - | u u - | u || u - | u u - | Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. / / / / (u) u - | u u |u u - | u u | The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, / \ / / / (u) u - | u u - | u u - | u u | In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; / / \ / / (u) u - | u u - | u u - |u u - | The children were nestled all snug in their beds;

(u)

/ / \ / / u - | u u -| u u |u u | While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

/ / / / (u) u - | u u - | u || u - | u u - | And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap, \ / / / / / u u - |u u - |u u - |u u | Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,

(u)

/ / / / u - |u u - | u u - |u u - u | When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

/ / \ / / (u) u - |u u - |u u - |u u - u | I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

“Mamma in” elides.

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

93

As even this short passage suggests, triple meters are much more regular than iambic meters. It is almost unheard of for a foot to reverse. We don’t think we have ever seen one. The main variation that occurs is the placement of secondary stresses in “unstressed” positions, as above on the second syllable of “before” and on “Not” in the second line. The syllable in the stressed position in the pattern will almost always be strong-stressed. What this means is that while this meter is great fun, it is less flexible and therefore ultimately less interesting than the iambic meters, especially the iambic pentameter, which allows so many fascinating variations. One variation that is frequently allowed in English triple meters is the dropping of unaccented syllables here and there, especially the first unaccented syllables in an anapestic line, and the dropping of one or two of the unaccented final syllables in a dactylic line. This exception is necessary in most lines, as you will discover. A surprisingly large number of unaccented syllables can be dropped in a line if it is done right. On the other hand, if you drop too many unaccented syllables anywhere else in the line, it will start to collapse, so be careful. It is hard to define where the threshold is, but you will begin to feel it for yourselves with some practice. As a rule of thumb, it is well more than half of all tetrameter lines that should have the full complement of two unaccented-position syllables. Another interesting problem with triple meters is that dactyls and anapests often seem to fade into each other. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which. In the long run, however, this does not matter much. The real issue is that there is a feeling of three-syllable groups, which becomes very clear in a strong poem. We suggest that it is the anapestic pattern which seems more natural in English (perhaps because it is a rising rhythm, like the iamb, and English seems to favor such rising movements, or movement from unstressed to stressed), which may be why Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” perhaps the most famous poem ever written by an American, is clearly in anapests. The most famous poem in pure dactyls may be Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which is a great poem but does feel somewhat more awkward as speech. Many English poems in triple meters are in rhymed tetrameter couplets, but as Tennyson’s poem suggests, that is not always the case. It does seem that most triple meter poems in English are either humorous, or adventurous, or both, perhaps because of the swaying, rollicking feeling of the meter, but again, there are many exceptions. Rigid as they may sometimes feel, triple meters are still popular and have powerful expressive range in the right hands.

94

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

Poems of the Past/Anapests

Annabel Lee / Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) / / / / |u u - |u u - | u u - |u - | It was many and many a year ago,

/ \ / | u u - | u - || u - | In a kingdom by the sea,

The last foot is iambic. We have not indicated the missing unstressed syllable, but one way to scan it is to show it in parenthesis, | (u) u - |. In our scansion here we do not indicate all of these dropped unstressed syllables, but it is worth doing so in your own scansion to indicate you can see the meter at work under the rhythms. Note that both the second and third feet drop an unstressed syllable.

/ \ / / / | u u - | u u - | u -| u - | That a maiden there lived whom you may know / / / | u u - | u -| uu - | By the name of Annabel Lee; / / \ / / | u u - |u u - | u u -|u | And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Anapest, iamb, anapest.

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

95

/ \ / / | | u u - | u u - | u Than to love and be loved by me.

/ / / / |- | u u - | u - | u u - | I was a child and she was a child, / \ / |u u - | u -| u - | In this kingdom by the sea,

Two implied non-stressed syllables make this a headless line. Anapest, iamb, anapest echoes stanza one, line four.

/ / / / |u u - | u u - | u u - | u - | But we loved with a love that was more than love—

/ / / |-| u u - | u u - | I and my Annabel Lee— / / / / |u u - | u u - |u -| u u - u | With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

/ / / |- | u u - | u - | Coveted her and me.

Headless line.

Notice one iambic foot and a feminine ending.

Headless line.

96

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

/ / \ / / | u - | u u - | u u || - | u - | And this was the reason that, long ago, / \ / | u u - | u - | u - | In this kingdom by the sea, / \ / / / | u - | u - | u u - || - u | A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

/ / / | u - |uu - |u u - | My beautiful Annabel Lee;

\ / \ / / |- | u u -| u -| u - | So that her highborn kinsmen came / / / |u - | u u - | u - | And bore her away from me, / / / |u - | u - |u u -u u | To shut her up in a sepulchre / \ / |u u - | u - | u - | In this kingdom by the sea.

This looks like an irregular line, but is just “craggy.” Poe uses the caesura at the end of the third foot to substitute for two unstressed syllables in the fourth foot note the feminine ending.

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

97

Before you continue scanning this beloved poem, notice, as we describe in our first note above, the number of feet that are not anapests. When Poe substitutes an iambic foot by dropping an unstressed syllable, or even creates a foot with just one stressed syllable (perhaps we should call it a double-headless foot, e.g. “I” in the first line of stanza two), that substitution almost always matches or echoes a substitution in a previous or subsequent line. This creates a larger pattern than the one in each individual line. It also suggests, although we don’t think this is the case in this poem, that Poe is flirting with something called “mixed meters,” in which a poet uses multiple meters in the same poem. In this case, however, Poe’s frequent substitutions do not seem to disturb the triple meter and might be best understood as triple feet with many variations. This is an interesting and tangled question. Is the poem in triple meter or in a new kind of meter, that mixes iambs and anapests? Such mixings can certainly happen. To see a poem that is intentionally written with different meters in different lines, see Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” in which the first four lines of each stanza are written in a trochaic trimeter, and the last line is an iambic hexameter: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse streams of unpremeditated art. Shelley continues this for a total of 21 stanzas. In Poe’s case, we are ambivalent about what to call it. He does seem to mix feet regularly even in specific lines that are repeated stanza to stanza, yet the triple-meter feeling prevails. It seems that once a triple meter feeling establishes itself, it creates a powerful expectation that it will continue. Poe is full of other tricks as well:

/ \ / / u - | u - |u u -u u | To shut her up in a sepulchre This seems to be a rare double-hypermetrical ending. Pay attention to these modulations as you try to scan the rest of this extraordinary work. The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

98

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we—

Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

99

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea—

In her tomb by the sounding sea. Poe, like most great poets, was among other things a virtuoso of technique, as this poem and others make clear. We strongly suggest that you do not try Poe’s virtuosic variations in your own exercises, but this injunction is worth disobeying, as long as you remember that this kind of thing is harder than it looks. Writing in triple meter is challenge enough. We suggest scanning some of “The Night Before Christmas,” which is far more regular, and using that as your baseline instead. Yes, this is to tempt you, and because you now know enough that we could not resist intriguing you with this extraordinary poem. Metrics and prosody will not provide answers to all your questions about poetry, but they certainly further the conversation about what poems do in ways that are otherwise impossible to discuss. Poems of the Past/Dactyls Longfellow’s book-length narrative poem Evangeline is probably the most successful long poem ever written in dactyls in English. It is a justly celebrated sentimental historical romance filled with love, sorrow, and adventure. To make his meter work, Longfellow takes many liberties with dropped unstressed syllables, but he always also places strong stresses into stressed positions, retaining the metrical frame throughout.

Evangeline / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) From “The Prelude” / / / / / / - u u | - u u | - u || u | u u| u u | - u | This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / / / / / / - u u | - || u u | u | - || u u | - u u | - u | Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

100

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

/ / / / | / | / u | - u u | - || u | - u - u u - u | Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, / / / / / / - u | - u | - || u | u |u u | - u | Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. / / / / \ / / u u | - u | - u || u | u | u u | - u | Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean / / / / / / - || u u | - u u | - u u | - u u | - u u | - u | Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. Before you finish scanning, read aloud to notice the audible difference between dactyls and anapests. How would you describe it? Does one or the other sound like it is marching? Skipping? Lagging? Longfellow, like Poe, uses secondary stress, drops many unstressed syllables but never so many that he loses the triple feeling, and he is clearly conscious of the individual lines in context of the entire poem. We offer the same warning: if you write dactyls, do not vary them much, dropping as few unstressed syllables as possible in your exercise and always being careful to fill a stressed position with a strong stress. This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it

Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,–

Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,

Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!

Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

101

Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o‘er the ocean.

Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,

List to the mournful tradition, still sung by the pines of the forest;

List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy. Student Poems

Calc Test / Jensen Teague / / / / u u - | u u - || u u - | u u | ‘Twas the night before calc, and inside of my brain / / / / - u u| - u u| u u |u u - | Numbers and integrals filled my head with such pain. In foot two Jensen wrongly identifies the strong stress as “-grals,” and he also marks the first two feet as dactyls. / / / / u u - | u u - |u || u - | u u - | I try so hard to study, I rack all my mind A secondary stress falls on "try" and on "hard."

102

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

/ / / / u u - | u u - | u u - | u u - | I feel like this review sheet soon will make me blind. In foot one and foot two, Jensen incorrectly identifies the stresses, perhaps hoping to stick with the pattern. Can / / / / you hear the mistake? u-|u u - |u u -| u u - | Into the young night I continue this task

/ / / / u - | u u - || u u - | u u - | I get one all right, in my glory I bask.

Two rhythmically solid lines

/ / / / u - | u u - || u u - | u u - | I call it a night, I can try to get sleep. / / / / u - |u u - | u u - | u u - | Before I could dream my alarm gave a beep. / / / / u - | u u - | u u - | u u - | I scarf down some food and I leave with a flash, / / / / u - | u u - || u u - | u u - | I make it in time, and to calc class I dash.

Can you hear that the poet has locked into the meter?

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

103

/ / / / u-| u u - | u u -| u u - | I sit at my desk and prepare for the worst / / / / u - | u u - || u u - |u u | I feel like this test, I was fully immersed.

/ / / / u u - | u u - | u u - || u u - | I return back to school just the very next day

Metrically this line is fine, but Jensen has distorted diction and syntax for the sake of meter and rhyme. The word “back” is redundant when used with “return.”

/ / \ / / u u - | u u - || u u - | u u - | I find out that I’ve failed, much to my own dismay. This poem’s first line is splendid. Jensen sets us up to expect perfect anapests with his parody of “The Night Before Christmas.” Unfortunately, lines two, three, and four do not fulfill that expectation. If you look closely, you will also see that Jensen didn’t quite get the scansion right in line two, splitting the line between dactyls and anapests, a common error because the meters are so similar. The good news is, first, that once he gets going, Jensen finds the meter and his own rhythm and does well in the second part of the exercise. Look below at our rewriting experiment, which we again should point out is not devised to “improve” the exercise as a poem, but only to guide the versecraft. In some places we have changed a few syllables. In others we have only adjusted the scansion of lines that work or almost work. We have also aligned all the syntax and adjusted the diction in a few places to make it more idiomatic.

104

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

/ / / / u u - | u u - || u u - | u u | Twas the night before calc, and inside of my brain / / / / - | u u -|u u - |u u - | Numbers and integrals filled me with pain.

\ / / / \ / u u - | u - |u ||u - | u u - | I try hard to study, I rack my poor mind / / \ / \ / u - | u u - | u u - | u u - | I feel this review sheet will soon make me blind.

\ / / / / u - |u u |u u -| u u - | Well into the night I continue this task \ / / / u -| u u - || u u - | u u - | ‘til I get one right. In my glory I bask. / / / / / u - | u u - || u u - | u u - | I call it a night, then I try to get sleep, / / / \ / u u - |u u - |u u - | u u - | But before I can dream my alarm gives a beep.

Note that this line drops both unstressed syllables at the beginning. This works just fine if the underlying meter stays in place (and notice that the rest of the line is completely regular). This is one of the cases where the boundary between dactyls and anapests in English seems to become blurry.

6

Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests

105

Notice that after the first few lines, aside from a few idiomatic errors or awkward syntax or diction, Jensen clearly starts to get the hang of things. Triple meters are not easy, and this is an excellent effort. Jensen is a quick study. Though it makes for a good story, it is doubtful that he failed that calculus test. Exercise For next week—how about a pile of rhyming rollicking anapestic tetrameter couplets? Write at least twelve lines. Come on, said the teacher, “Start writing, start now! I’d like to see anapests…please show me how!” And if that sounds a bit like The Cat in the Hat—well, yes, it does. We can’t quote Dr. Seuss. They won’t give us permission. They won’t even sell it! And so, by attrition, We’re left just with meter. But we’re fine with that. This is the meter of The Cat in the Hat. You have something to do: write anapests.

7

Free Verse

The Form Now we come full circle to “free verse.” We hope that after all we have done here, which is still just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the deep study of verse, this forms looks different to you than it did a few chapters ago. Free verse is wonderful, but difficult to write, and usually done poorly, meaninglessly, pointlessly. Both of us write free verse and enjoy it. But in our view, the notion that there can be free verse which is merely the spilling of words down a page “in the rhythm of the breath” (to quote a famous poet who will remain anonymous here) verges on nonsense. That is not “free verse,” it is “formless verse,” a contradiction in terms. Every great practitioner of the forms of free verse, from Mallarmé to Whitman to Sandburg to Lawrence to Eliot to Bishop, Moore, Langston Hughes, Williams to Ginsberg and all the rest, has had a deep understanding of the history of the language and of metrical techniques and they could all write in all of them. They may have been contentious, or wrong in their ideas about versification, but at least they had them, and understood that verse is a technique of language, not merely a pure emanation of breath, spirit, or some other non-linguistic reality. The great free verse poet William Carlos Williams was the author of the entry on free verse in the first edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. It was theoretically incorrect, in our view, but not uninformed. Robert Fitzgerald described Williams’ technique better than he did himself, talking about Williams’ incorporation of prose rhythms. It was Williams, in his Encyclopedia article, who asserted that even for free verse “the crux of the issue is measure.” The bottom line: free verse is a form of verse, not a form of freedom. Specifically, free verse in English is a way of making verses that does not count stresses patterned together with syllables. Instead, it sets up some other kind of expectation, from the highly restricted to the relatively open, but all such expectations still do involve measurement in some way, even if only as a concept. Yes, it is possible to write verses without counting linguistic features. Good, perhaps even sometimes great poems have been written in such ways. It is also possible, perhaps, to play © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_7

107

108

7

Free Verse

great music without counting, with no measure whatsoever, but how common is it? A rather limited diet. Even the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman knew how to count; indeed, he was superlatively good at it. Free verse has its own fascinating history. As with so much else we have looked at, the term and the technique are imports that were transformed in crossing from one language and culture to another. The term originated in the 1880’s in France and was arguably yet another in a long line of very serious French cultural practical jokes, such as the “Salon des Refusés,” surrealism, post-structuralism, “the new novel” and so on. All these terms are either intentional oxymorons or redundancies, designed in part to perplex, but with a serious purpose, which was to tweak the sensibilities of the highly centralized and conservative Academie Française, the great cultural institution that seeks to control even the words that are allowed into the French language. In this case, the poets of vers libre, the self-contradictory “free verse,” were reacting against the incredibly tight strictures of French poetry at the time, including its versification, whose rules make English look chaotic by comparison. All the first English and American poets who began to write “free verse” in the early part of the 20th century were deeply conversant with French poetry and culture, and many even lived there. It would be hard to overemphasize the influence of French culture at that time. Just as in the Renaissance, artists from countries or regions that the artists themselves considered to be less sophisticated than Italy sought to enliven their own art by imitating the painting, poetry and music of that country, in the late 19th century many imitated the French in the same arts for the same reasons. In poetry, many became particularly enamored of French poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898). Of course, much was lost in translation, and French practical jokes often become dully serious in the hands of English and American artists and professors. Still, there is no question that this new concept of how to make verses, just like the importation of rhyme into English from France after the Norman Invasion in 1066, or the renaissance imitation of classical prosody in the idea of “feet” from Greece and Rome via Italy and France, or the imitation of the sonnet from Italy and France, had a tremendous impact on poets writing in English, and has produced, as all those earlier imitations did, many masterpieces and a set of vital traditions. In contemporary America, free verse is often treated and taught as a monolith, which is not helpful. We argue that over time there are six major strains of free verse that have developed in English. The boundaries between them are not always obvious and clear, but each has now existed long enough that they have developed into well-defined bodies of work and could even be called traditions. While these techniques are understandably called “free,” they do have rules, are by now steeped in their own history and constitute major strains of our poetry. (1) Anaphora/Parallelism, à la the King James Bible, Christopher Smart, Whitman, Ginsberg and their followers. In this case, each line, or almost every line, involves a syntactic reiteration, often with repeated words. You do not need to stick to just one reiteration; they can shift, but read Whitman to get a sense of

7

Free Verse

109

how this might work. Of course, this tradition, like many of the others, reaches far back before French “free verse,” and Whitman was writing before that school even began in France and even inspired it in certain ways. At the same time, his work feeds into the larger notions of how to make poems that became more and more accepted as a result of the free verse movement. Translation of the Bible is key to this history and provides an excellent example of how poets reach back—sometimes quite far back—to reinvigorate contemporary verse with ancient techniques. Look at even the opening of the King James translation to get a sense of this: 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. Notice that every verse after the first two begins with “And God [verbed],” and the syntactical structures all run parallel. Even the number of verbs is limited: said, saw, called, made. God is given a limited repertoire of actions, but certainly knows how to use them. For many centuries, scholars thought that the versecraft of the Hebrew Bible had to scan according to classical models. Remember, again, that there was no historical linguistics, so people did not necessarily understand how different languages were related to each other. As a result, beginning quite early, scholars assumed, since the greatest poetry had been written in Latin and Greek, that the Bible must somehow follow the verse rules of those languages, for certainly God would choose to write verse according to the best principles. However, this was not the case, as a scholar named Bishop Robert Lowth (1710–1787) demonstrated in 1753, in a book titled De Sacra Poesi Hebraerum (Of the

110

7

Free Verse

Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews). Lowth convincingly argued that the rhythms of Old Testament poetry did not depend on counting or measuring syllables and stresses, but rather on repeated patterns set up by rhetorical anaphora, which is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of clauses, as we see above. In English as in every language, such repetition sets up its own rhythmic patterns that constitute a powerful way of making verses. Poets have drawn on this tradition in English, including Christopher Smart, Martin Tupper (a terrible poet), and especially Walt Whitman, whose final version of “Song of Myself” begins: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Note how Whitman takes the traditional, four-square anaphora of the Bible and transforms it, loosens it, while retaining its fundamental principle of repetition. Where the Bible’s clauses are obviously and directly parallel, Whitman’s interweave musically. In the third stanza above, “My tongue” fills the same function of “every atom of my blood,” and then both become objects “form’d” from “this soil, this air,” and both are then “Born here of parents” who themselves similarly were “born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.” And only then, at the beginning of the third line, do we arrive at the subject, “I,” which we now realize has been modified by all this complex parallel modification that came before, and is now modified by what follows, “now thirty-seven years old in perfect health,” which only then is followed by the verb “begin,” before being modified yet again. Essentially, the sentence is “I begin,” and everything else is a modifier of that simple statement. This is what genius looks like: Whitman not only has something to say, but the way that he says it created a new kind of American verse instrument. Many poets since Smart and Whitman have taken up their tools, perhaps most notably Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell and D. H. Lawrence. (2) Syllabics. Marianne Moore is a poet strongly associated with this tradition, but there are many others. The concept was first articulated by Elizabeth Daryush, the daughter of Robert Bridges, the poet who first accurately described Milton’s prosody, and scores of other modern poets have pursued it from

7

Free Verse

111

Dylan Thomas to W. S. Merwin and many more. It seems to reach back in time to the quantitative meters of the Greeks and Romans, but in this case there is no question of syllable length, just counting of English syllables on an abacus. Pick a line length, such as seven syllables per line, and execute it without regard to stress placement. There are some other rules: avoid line-end hyphens. The line-ending should almost always correspond to a word end. Also, enjambment is fine, but no weak line-endings, in other words, no ending lines with words like “the” or “a” or with a preposition. Some poets do this, but it is something to be careful of. As with any other kind of verse, the point is to write strong lines. See below, in “Poems of the Past,” for a stellar example of syllabics from Marianne Moore. (3) Loose Iambics. Take an iambic measure and loosen it up until it does not easily scan, but clearly relates back to that model, presenting, as T. S. Eliot said, “the ghost of meter.” Be careful that it does not fall into a purely rhythmical meter either, which the language may try to do. There are very strong examples of this in Green with Beasts, the third book by one of our best recent American poets, W. S. Merwin, published in 1956. He loosens almost every form we have been looking at here, freeing it and changing it. Free verse at its best. See below, in “Poems of the Past,” for discussion of a very tight example of loose iambics from Robert Frost. For another that we admire, far looser but still tied to the iambic tradition, look at “Traveling through the Dark,” by William Stafford. The loosened iambic line is an enormous tradition, and it grows directly out of the give and take of rigorous syllable counting across the entire history of accentual-syllabic verse in English, as there were different approaches to the counting of syllables at different times. The only difference, or progression of this tradition to free verse, is that in the modern period such loosening went further than before. But there is a world of difference between loosened iambs, no matter how loose, and chaos. (4) Non-Alliterative Stress-Counting. Poets have flirted with this, notably Eliot, Kipling, David Mason, and others. Probably the greatest modern practitioner is Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), in whose mature work there are endless variations on patterns of counting stresses per line, without systematic rhyme or alliteration. Jeffers was trained in classics and modern European languages and cared deeply about his versecraft. It is always the poets who generate ideas about craft. Who else would know it as well? As with syllabics, the idea of a pure, unrhymed stress-based line comes from Bridges, once again in one of the editions of Milton’s Prosody. As in every free verse tradition, note the reaching back in time, in this case to Old English alliterative meter, to find something that is made new under the modern dispensation of freedom from accentualsyllabic models.

112

7

Free Verse

Here is the entirety of Jeffers’ “Inscription for a Gravestone”: I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: That is to say, Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, But not as a man Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete Stripping for the race. The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer Of certain fictions Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain And expand with pleasure; Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope: That’s gone, it is true; (I never miss it; if the universe does, How easily replaced!) But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free. I admired the beauty While I was human, now I am part of the beauty. I wander in the air, Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean; Touch you and Asia At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises And the glow of this grass. I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth For a love-token. While Jeffers has some wonderful looseness in his counts, floating back and forth between lexical stress and syntactical stress, even also using various ghostly tricks to promote relatively weak syllables (e.g. “have” in the fourth line from the end, giving strong stress to both halves of the hyphenated “love-token”), it seems clear that his pattern is 5 strong stresses/2 strong stresses in alternating lines, and he follows this pattern rigorously. Why? Well, does it matter? It works. (5) Skeltonic Rhyme-Driving. Most people associate rhyme-driving with Ogden Nash, who was a great master of it, but there have been many others, such as Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), in “Dover Beach,” and the technique is ancient, dating back to John Skelton (146?–1529), for whom one variety of it, Skeltonics, is named. The idea is that rhymes can be employed either with metrical or non-metrical verse, but in ways that are surprising and unpredictable. Because there is a reiteration but irregularity, such verses create a sense of freedom, even if they are metrical. You cannot tell when a rhyme will come, how many of them there may be, or in many cases even how long the line will be in which one appears, so the notion of regular meter is challenged. The

7

Free Verse

113

playfulness of the rhyming helps drive the verse, organizing it in surprising ways because of its irregularity. Once again, there are precedents for this in earlier poetry, such as the typical English Romantic ode, which, while metrical, often includes lines of varying lengths. Even Milton’s great elegy “Lycidas” does this, with irregular rhyme and irregular, albeit accentual syllabic, line lengths throughout. This is not to argue that such poems are “free verse,” but rather that they suggested new directions for modern poets. Here is the opening of Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Every line is metrical, but an unpredictable length, and every line eventually rhymes, but without a clear pattern, creating an elusive music: The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. The rhyme scheme of this stanza is abacdbdcefcgfg. Highly patterned, yet free. And the meter scans yet loosens the iambs and proceeds in terms of numbers of feet per line 34555544454544. We might not call this “free verse,” yet it is a precursor to it, certainly a freeing up of the precise expectations associated with the tighter line of the tradition, and highly suggestive of how lines can be loosened and yet patterned. All these modern rhyme drivers ultimately descend from John Skelton, who was by far the strongest English poet between Chaucer and the English Renaissance. In long satirical poems, notably “Phyllyp Sparowe,” “Elynour Rummynge,” and “Collyn Clout,” Skelton uses a short, irregular line, with generally two or three stresses, frequent alliteration, and rhymes that range from a couplet to as many as twelve lines in a row, sometimes called “leashes.” Skelton was dismissed by many who came after him as a “rude, railing, rhymer,” as George Puttenham said in his 1589 treatise The Arte of English Poesie, but he clearly knew what he was doing when writing his own form of intentional doggerel, satirical work that appears clumsy on purpose. In what may be his best-known poem, “Collyn Clout,” that character says:

114

7

Free Verse

For though my ryme be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rayne-beaten, Rusty and mothe-eaten, Yf ye take well therwith It hath in it some pyth. Note the way the rhyme ties the lines together, and the sense of order, combined with the bouncing and unpredictable rhythms and foregrounded strong-stress alliteration and other patterned sonic effects. This is what has kept the work alive, along with its saucy, learned sarcasm, and has appealed to many modern poets seeking alternatives to the accentual-syllabic tradition. Another wonderful sample, from the opening of “Phyllyp Sparrowe,” a mock elegy spoken by Jane Scrope, a young woman, for her dead sparrow, killed by a cat: Whan I remembre agayn How mi Philyp was slayn, Never halfe the payne Was betwene you twayne, Pyramus and Thesbe, As than befell to me. I wept and wayled, The tearys downe hayled; But nothnge it avayled To call Phylyp agayne Whom Gyb our cat hath slayne. This is gentle for Skelton, who could be quite bawdy, but it shows how he worked, with endlessly playful rhythms and a good ear for both natural speech and the vitality of daily life. While few have written exactly as Skelton did, his influence is substantial, including modern poets such as Auden, Basil Bunting, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, John Crowe Ransom, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, and even Allen Ginsberg, one of the most learned of American poets, who praised Skelton at length in an interview: I’ve been using Skeltonics for rhymed poems that I write fast on the instant, usually a series of the same rhymes or rhymes repeated, for a series of love poems that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years and two samples are at the end of a book called Mind Breaths, the last book I wrote…

7

Free Verse

115

Ginsberg elaborates on how Skeltonics work as a compositional process, in ways that resonate with everything we have been discussing here. When writing in this way: Other ideas come up that have got to be squeezed in fast without breaking the gallop, without breaking the march ahead of the rhythm. So, instead of eliminating your thoughts as they rise when you’re writing in rhyme, you include them in such a funny way that they can be…included (so that they can be included in this funny way that will syncopate the line). My own theory is that variation and syncopation in lines comes from having a rich brain, where lots of thoughts rise, and have to be “squozen” into the line. Robert Graves even wrote a poem titled “John Skelton,” as an homage. Graves and Ginsberg demonstrate as well as anyone that there is little new under the sun. The greatest originality, including in free verse, lies in refashioning the past to new purposes. In this sense, writing is a highly developed form of reading; the strongest free verse poets have always depended on the past. Let us give Graves the last word. If you wrestle with the scansion here, you will find a delightful variety, an old technique made new: What could be dafter Than John Skelton’s laughter? What sound more tenderly Than his pretty poetry? So where to rank old Skelton? He was no monstrous Milton, Nor wrote no “Paradise Lost,” So wondered at by most, Phrased so disdainfully, Composed so painfully. He struck what Milton missed, Milling an English grist With homely turn and twist. He was English through and through, Not Greek, nor French, nor Jew, Though well their tongues he knew, The living and the dead: Learned Erasmus said, Hie ‘unum Britannicarum Lumen et decus literarum. But oh, Colin Clout! How his pen flies about, Twiddling and turning, Scorching and burning, Thrusting and thrumming!

116

7

Free Verse

How it hurries with humming, Leaping and running, At the tipsy-topsy Tunning Of Mistress Eleanor Rumming! How for poor Philip Sparrow Was murdered at Carow, How our hearts he does harrow Jest and grief mingle In this jangle-jingle, For he will not stop To sweep nor mop, To prune nor prop, To cut each phrase up Like beef when we sup, Nor sip at each line As at brandy-wine, Or port when we dine. But angrily, wittily, Tenderly, prettily, Laughingly, learnedly, Sadly, madly, Helter-skelter John Rhymes serenely on, As English poets should. Old John, you do me good.

(6) Sprung Rhythm. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was not only a gifted poet but was also deeply knowledgeable about prosody and obsessively determined to forge a new idiom in both poetic language and verse structure. While few have directly imitated his notions of “sprung rhythm” (a subsequent Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, perhaps coming closest), his influence is so broad and deep, especially on strong free verse poets, that it often goes unmentioned. The challenge in terms of too close an imitation of sprung rhythm may be that almost everyone who tries to do it sounds up winding a bit too much like Hopkins, the sign of his authority and influence. Still, it is frequently in the mix, with almost unqualified admiration from those who draw on Hopkins’ ideas and practice. Hopkins’ primary goal was to create a more English idiom for English poetry in a time when he felt that continental influence was too strong. In this sense, his work takes a strong stand in the ongoing and highly productive contest between attempts by English poets to imitate sophisticated continental poets, especially French and Italian, and attempts on the other hand to advance the native qualities of English, which is more anarchic and decidedly not a Romance language. This tension runs through the entire history of English

7

Free Verse

117

poetry, affecting everything from diction to prosody to thematics. The entire debate over rhyme, for example, could be cast in terms of this tension. Indeed, the entire English Renaissance could be understood as a conversation about how to respond to the achievements of continental artists, which, for the poets, included their versecraft. Despite his interest in common speech, Hopkins’ verse may not sound like what contemporary Americans would call a native idiom. It is highly crafted language that takes an innovative approach to accentual-syllabic meter that stresses it to the breaking point. Hopkins claimed to be using traditional metrical feet, but they could vary from one to four syllables, were often loaded up with as many stresses as he could manage, and frequently began with a stressed position, creating a turbulent, craggy intensity that feels metrical yet borders on the unscannable by traditional means. He resembles strong earlier poets in this, notably Donne, Milton and Shelley, but he pushes his use of stress well beyond them. Consider “Pied Beauty,” one of his best-known lyrics: Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. Note that Hopkins occasionally introduces his own diacritical marks into the text of his own poem (“áll trádes”), to indicate exactly where he wants some stresses. Take it as evidence of how much he cares about his versecraft, as much as his spiritual life and his diction. Strong poets care about their prosody and study it. Scanning this poem and describing its meter in a group makes for a fascinating exercise and discussion, as the work is so rich that there can be many perspectives. It is itself “counter, original, spare, strange.” We believe it definitely does scan, and that most of the lines can be construed as iambic pentameter, but only by loosening the rules in careful, crucial ways. Give it a try, and see if you agree. While, again, Hopkins has few direct poetic descendents, his influence is everywhere, from Auden, to the Beats, to Sylvia Plath and far beyond. William Carlos Williams’ idea of the variable foot (see below) is deeply indebted to Hopkins’ concept of sprung rhythm and the native rhythms of English.

118

7

Free Verse

(7) The Variable Foot, Projective Verse and the Influence of Prose. Many of the theories of verse language advanced in the last 75 years or so by mostly American free verse poets (William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and Denise Levertov for example) are interesting but have more to do with a poetics influenced by prose and certain branches of aesthetics and philosophy than with verse language proper. Many of these theories, however interesting aesthetically, are linguistically weak, though some of the poetry will survive. We do not recommend this as a practice, but if you do try it, be prepared to explain what you are doing in a linguistically justifiable way. Perhaps that last comment is too harsh. There is much to admire in the strongest of the prosy poets. Williams is extraordinarily fine, and prosodists such as Natalie Gerber have made a convincing case for his care in composing phrasally. He did more than that as well, creating all sorts of interesting ways to think about measure. His notion of the variable foot resembles not only Hopkins’ technical approach to sprung rhythm discussed above, but also attempts to scan prose advanced by prosodists such as George Saintsbury, who wrote an entire book about the rhythms of English prose and sought to scan it like verse to illustrate his ideas. In Williams’ variable foot, anything could be scanned, and was. Williams may not have realized that everything old is new again: the Greeks had a term for it: “logaoedic verse,” lines in which meters were mixed to give the effect of prose. The terms describes it all, suggesting a mixture of speech and song: logos, speech + aoidē, song, poetry. In any event, Williams’ famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” suggests just how compelling this kind of work can be at its best: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens There is a tremendous amount to say about this poem. As many have pointed out, despite its prosiness, it is obscure, unlike anything anyone would be likely to say in a conversation. And consider the kinds of patterns it presents. Each of the four stanzas has three words in the first line, one in the second. Each second line is one two-syllable word. Three of those four second lines are trochees. As the linguist Haj Ross has pointed out, the disposition of all the prepositional phrases does in fact make the sentence depend syntactically upon the red wheel

7

Free Verse

119

barrow. You can see this clearly if you diagram the sentence in a syntax tree. And there is much more. Williams was quite aware of the structures of language itself, even if his techniques were far less replicable than he may have believed. The best poets who work in this tradition do play with language in innovative ways, even as what they do fades into ideas rather than words themselves. ***** These are the major free verse traditions, though there are perhaps others, depending on where one wants to draw the line between aesthetics and versecraft. At a certain point, such forms fade into nonce forms, meaning new and eccentric meters that do not have such long traditions, which we will take up in the next chapter. Poems of the Past Whitman is often rightly cited as the orignator of free verse based in anaphoric versicles resembling the Hebrew Bible. But he certainly knew how to make perfectly metrical poetry, as in “O Captain! My Captain!” and in other places he cunningly disguises loose iambics in highly varied line lengths, without rhyme. Many people think he is writing a completely “free” verse in such cases, but he is not. Consider “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

/ / / / (u) - | u - | u _ |u -|u - | When I heard the learn’d astronomer, / / / / / / (u) - | u - || u - | u || u - |u -| u u - u | When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, / / / / / / / \ u -| u - | u - | u -| u - || u - || u - || u - | u - | When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

120

7

Free Verse

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. Whitman purposefully uses the term “measure,” always a giveaway with a strong poet that meter is under discussion. And the poem is cunning. Whitman uses anaphoric versicles, and he varies line length substantially. At the same time, however, the poem also scans as a loosened iambic, foreshadowing the free verse poets of the twentieth century by 50 years. Certainly the poem is about the importance of wonder, which in another pun he describes as “unaccountable,” but it is also about Whitman’s own practice as a maker of verses. If you look at the lines we have scanned above, and scan the rest of the poem, you will note that it is unusual, and not merely natural speech. Whitman has written carefully concealed iambic lines, with very few secondary stresses or reversals, and only a few added unstressed syllables, such as in the fourth and sixth feet of the second line. He is not rejecting measurement; rather he is expanding it, dilating it, making it more capacious. He is taking a strong, even fierce position against mere measurement, but it is not exactly a rejection of the past, but rather a conversation with it. He has even adopted the use of apostrophes to make sure readers drop the syllables he does not want to be included in his counts. Many decades after Whitman died and his techniques had become far more common practice, Robert Frost, as we mentioned above, wrote his well-known poem “The Road Not Taken” in loose iambic tetrameter.

The Road Not Taken / Robert Frost (1874-1963) / / / / u - |u - |uu - |u | Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

a

/ / / / u - |uu - | u - |u - | And sorry I could not travel both

b

/ \ / / / u - | u - |u u || - | u - | And be one traveler, long I stood

a

/ \ / / / u | u - |u - |uu - | And looked down one as far as I could

a

/ / / \ u - |u - | u u - |u - | To where it bent in the undergrowth;

b

7

Free Verse

121

/ / / / u - | u - | u ||u - | u - | Then took the other, as just as fair,

c

/ / / / u - |u u - |u - |u - | And having perhaps the better claim,

d

/ / / / u - |u u - |u u - |u - | Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

c; two trisyllabic substitutions.

\ / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | Though as for that the passing there

c

/ / / / u - | u - |u u - | u - | Had worn them really about the same,

d

Even the first line exemplifies this, loosening the third foot by adding a single extra syllable:

/ / / / u - | u - |uu -|u - | Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Frost’s poem is much loved, and many of you are already familiar with it. We love it too. The content is universally understood by readers, but the simplicity of the poem is deceptive. Writing in loose iambs requires a poet to be able to write in strict meter, so that he or she might understand when a trisyllabic foot makes the poem better and when it is simply lazy writing. Frost is in no way lazy. In stanza one, Frost allows himself exactly one three-syllable foot in every line, but almost always in a different position, and the extra syllable is always a very short, soft sound, such as an article like the word “a” in the first line. In English, the necessary uses of an article (a, an, the) often occur in spots where a tri-syllabic substitution makes the poem read more naturally. In stanza one, line three, Frost’s use of the word “traveler” creates a three-syllable foot. We do not think he was eliding “traveler” to “trav’ler” as may have been done in the 19th century. The caesura following “traveler” provides a pause for the poet to reconnect with the rhythm. And note the irony that the word that completes this long foot is “long.” The final foot of line four is also trisyllabic.

122

7

Free Verse

Look carefully at stanza two, line three, which begins with the word “Because,” “where” Frost doubles down on his substitutions, adding an extra unstressed syllable in both the second and third feet. Although Frost uses extra syllables in two feet, he continues the pattern by insuring again that the added sounds are tiny, and that there are only four strong stresses in this line as with the lines before and after. Continue scanning the rest of this poem and discuss what you find. Then consider: on what part of the body does someone walk on a road? Is Frost’s great choice as a poet, during the rise of free verse, about where he is going to point his “feet,” not just literally but perhaps also metaphorically? We did not finish Frost’s poem above. Here is the ending. See if you can complete the scansion: And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

7

Free Verse

123

***** In the following syllabic poem, which does not scan, we count syllables and note other poetic devices.

The Fish / Marianne Moore Wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the

sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices–

In and out, illuminating

the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff; whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, inkbespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.

a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables b / 9 syllables b / 6 syllables x / 8 syllables, elision on “opening” a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables b / 9 syllables b / 6 syllables x / 8 syllables

a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables b / 9 syllables b / 6 syllables / off-rhyme with “-ness” and “-es,” because of vocalized versus non-vocalized “s.” x / 8 syllables

124

7

Free Verse

All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice— all the physical features of accident—lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm-side is dead. Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth. The sea grows old in it. Moore sets a strict syllable and rhyme pattern for this poem, and she sticks to it with only two minor exceptions. One is the off-rhyme we noted above of “-ness” and “-es” and the other might be the two-syllable increase in the line “of iron through the iron edge,” though it seems likely that Moore intends a y-glide, pronouncing “iron” as one syllable, “irn.” Although this is a free verse poem that does not count or pattern stresses, we invite you to mark the strong stresses in each line (though not feet, as we believe there are none). The combination of counting syllables and including rhyme in the first four lines of each stanza almost results in a rhythm pattern. Notice the influence of Anglo-Saxon strong stress alliteration in stanza three, among other places: “split,” “spun,” and “spotlight.” Also notice the attention to detail and color: “black jade,” “crow-blue mussel shells,” “pink rice grains,” “ink-bespattered jelly fish,” “crabs like green lilies,” and on and on. Writing well syllabically presents different challenges than writing well in accentual syllabics, but it is challenging, nonetheless. One interesting phenomenon, foregrounded by Moore’s technique, that has implications for all literary verse, meaning any kind of writing and speaking or performance related to that writing: Notice that this poem intentionally makes itself difficult to read aloud because of the extremely hard enjambments and the off-stress and word-internal rhymes. If you were to read it as printed, with a pause at the end of each line, however brief, the emphasis on certain rhymes and the breaks in syntax from line to line would make it sound like something so far away from spoken English as to be almost incomprehensible. Yet if you read it aloud as if it were speech, all the technique embedded in those wonderfully quirky line-breaks and rhymes is completely lost, e.g. “The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff; whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, ink-bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.”

7

Free Verse

125

Surely no one imagines that Moore wrote this sentence first and then chopped it up. The meaning is only one source of the sentence; the versecraft, the inarticulable versecraft, the prosody, is the other. The contradiction of trying to perform the poem does not need to be resolved. That lovely contradiction is part of the poem’s appeal. Let it stand and enjoy it. And so, we end where we began. We leave it to you to discuss both what this poem does, and partly as a result, what the fish, the waves, the cliff, and the stars all mean. Poems by Students This poem is long, but we include the entirety because it chronicles the poet’s school day. It uses Moore’s syllable pattern but only the first two lines in each stanza rhyme.

I go “moo” on days like these / Paul Wright Beep. Beep beep beep. Perhaps if I ignore it—BEEP BEEP! Fine! No more snooze! I’ll trudge Out as you, villain, win yet again.

a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables a / 9 syllables x / 6 syllables x / 9 syllables, variation

Look as a book at the face. Hair in, like, fifty-five different places. Wow. Never one for morning, I was.

a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables x / 9 syllables x / 6 syllables x / 8 syllables

Step with no pep in the shower. Water goes cold, then hot as I lather, rinse, and repeat. Oddly, still asleep.

a / 1 syllable a / 3 syllables x / 9 syllables x / 6 syllables x / 8 syllables

Dry, I apply clothes to my skin, and paste to my brush. I wake up, slightly, as I paint circles around my teeth. Stares down the stairs are blank as something that’s really blank. Like a lot. Step after step, I burn holes of contentment in front

126

7

Free Verse

of me. I love breakfast, my morning salvation. I pour some OJ and sit, waiting for a ding and a smell. Toast. It’s the most wonderful, with butter and sugar— some cinnamon, too! It’s simply magnificent. Ding. Yay! Paul Wright offers us an amusing and admirable first draft of a syllabic school day. Notice the sensory imagery: the beep of the alarm, the cold/hot water, stares at stairs, and the smell of cinnamon toast. Great! The next step for revision in this poem is the diction. Notice spots where words could be stronger. In stanza five, “are blank as something that’s really blank” adds no information to the poem. In syllabics, as in any poem, be careful not to add syllables for syllables’ sake. Finish analyzing this poem and notice its strengths and potential spots for revision.

Driving—fly— In my head, of course—to school, so I can learn stuff. Whatev’. It’s just the daily grind, to me. First is the worst— until two through seven—calculus. Differentiate this, integrate that, all while I’m asleep. Next is the text, English that is. It’s simply the best, of course. I write things like, um, I can’t remember right now. Walk– ing and talk– ing through the hallway on my way to chemistry. Chemistry? It don’t matter in chemistry.

7

Free Verse

His– tory is fourth. I learn about Europeans, The Klinger way. Help me. Luckily, I’m not alone in here. Band is just dand– y, a well-deserved rest in my day. I play my tenor sax, And then…back to reality. Ge– ography sixth, with Klinger again; Mrs., that is. We’re in Asia now, for Asia is where we are in. Lunch! Since no brunch, this is just heavenly! OMG! I cannot express my happiness for this time! It’s—Ring. Off to French. Oft– en I wonder why I’m still taking it. I then remember that I actually like it. Now like a cow has been tipped to stand again, but not until tomorrow, school lies vanquished. I do my homework

127

128

7

and eat not cand– y (until later, lol), but dinner. I set off to bed like A knight in the night. Ah, sleep.

Free Verse

BEEP!

***** The next poem is syllabic: nine syllables per line.

Nature’s Music / Crystal Holmes The sea makes music along the beach; The wind whispers a harmony back. The ocean pounds a rhythm now; waves Echo like the loud crashing of cymbals. The birds chirp a high soprano line In this beautiful song of living. The sun is shining so brightly now; It shimmers in summer’s golden beams. The forests sing a droning bass line Their rushing branches swish in time.

Bees buzz and crickets hum as violins; Footsteps of furry critters keep time. The rivers washing over the rocks Murmur a bubbling reply right back. The sun sinks low and the rehearsal Comes to a close as the evening falls. The song of life continues, yet every Creature holds its breath awaiting day.

10 syllables

8 syllables

10 syllables

elision on ev’ning? Elision on ev’ry?

“Nature’s Music” contains lovely sonic images and is an extended metaphor of nature as a symphony. The danger of free verse is that the poet feels too “free.” In revision, Crystal should strive to keep each line at nine syllables, not because that is “better” as poetry, but to insist on the rigor of the exercise, to meet the challenge. Such rules force us to reach laterally, not logically, but listening to the prosody, for different ways to say things. For example, instead of “Bees buzz and crickets hum as violins,” which is ten syllables, why not simply write “Bees buzz, crickets hum as violins”? Or, “Bees buzz and crickets hum: violins!” At the level of versecraft, these lines are quite different from what she wrote. They are not necessarily better, but they do keep time, and this craft is at the core of learning to think about how to make verses.

7

Free Verse

129

Crystal also adds unnecessary words to fill out the syllable count in some places. For example, in line five, “high soprano” is redundant. Soprano lines are high, so “high” is implied in the word “soprano.” Why not then pick an adjective that seems more unusual, or unexpected, since we do need a syllable? Instead of “The birds chirp a high soprano line,” how about “The birds chirp a dark soprano line”? Or “The birds twitter a soprano line”? “Thirteen birds chirp a soprano line”? There are endless options here. The poet could replace any word to make the count work. With this kind of trimming and smoothing, this draft will become a solid poem. Exercise For next week, read the samples and try one of the following exercises. No more than 20–25 lines per poem. In each case, explain what you are doing, and remember that free verse, true free verse, may well be harder than metrical verse, not easier. In our view, it is arrogant to believe one can write good, let alone great poetry if one ignores the metrical resources of language, which are the collective wisdom and practice of billions of people in thousands of languages over many thousands of years. If anything, it takes great, great skill—perhaps even greater skill than in writing metrical verse—to achieve the effects of poetry by purposefully modifying the collective wisdom of humanity. Among other things, you need to know what you are changing. It most certainly can be done. But easy it is not. Otherwise, while it may be interesting writing, it is just prose, albeit prose cut into lengths.

130

Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools

Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools The seventh category in the chapter above, “The Variable Foot, Projective Verse, and the Influence of Prose,” deserves more room here because so many poets take it to be the entirety of modern poetry. There are many self-described “schools” of modern poetry in English that make a loosely defined “free verse” a central principle of poetic composition, all of them descending in one way or another from the concept of vers libre in French Symbolism, and later also relying occasionally on the term “open form” to include prosody and other aspects of poetic composition. While the affiliations are loose and many poets moved over time in and out of these various groups, and while there were factional battles and realignments over the years, the major schools and movements include, in roughly chronological order: Imagism: T. E. Hulme, Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, John Cournos, John Gould Fletcher, Alfred Kreymborg, and even, on the fringes, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Objectivism: Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, and later Lorine Niedecker. The Black Mountain School, issuing notably in Olson and Creeley’s notion of “Projective Verse,” hence sometimes leading to the group name Projectivism: Williams, again, Larry Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Joel Oppenheimer, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams and Robert Creeley. The Beats: Williams and Rexroth, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Edie Parker, Joyce Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Diane DiPrima, Ruth Weiss, Elise Cowen, Anne Waldman, and later Janine Pommy Vega, Lotti Golden, Patti Smith, Anselm Hollo and Hedwig Gorski. The Confessional Poets: Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Snodgrass, Sexton. The New York School: Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, O’Hara, Berrigan. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry: Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, John Ashbery (the forebears); Leslie Scalapino; Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tina Darragh, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen. There are many other terms that poets and especially critics have used to group modern poets in and around these movements, including geographical regions such as California Poets, Chicago Poets, Harlem Renaissance Poets, and groupings based on personal identity, or critical, theoretical or political systems of affiliation such as Black Poets, Hispanic Poets, Gay Poets, Feminist Poets, Political Poets, Post-Modernist Poets, but these groupings all differ from the schools identified above, as these schools were based on intentional choices, usually tied to ideas

Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools

131

about the craft of composition among other things. In the case of the above, all emphasized free verse or open form as a cornerstone of their collective work. Other schools, such as the Fugitives and the New Formalists, did not champion free verse in this way, taking other paths, usually a defense of meter and also occasionally narrative. Some of the writers in the free verse schools we listed above did write about prosody, but in most cases, the purely linguistic elements of craft were secondary to questions of style, leading to some interesting and even compelling writing, but very weak ideas about versecraft. Although it was not his fault, all of it descended in one way or another from Williams. The fact that many of these writers mutually disliked each other’s work and ideas and fought vigorously among themselves can be seen as a set of fraternal battles within one larger tendency when it comes to craft: more or less overt hostility to meter and to what many loosely describe as “traditional form.” A good summation of this entire tendency: as the poet Robert Creeley put it, and as Charles Olson echoed, and Williams enthusiastically supported, in a credo that seems to fit many if not all these groups, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” The poet Mark Doty has concisely discussed this observation in A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: In 1950 Charles Olson published his essay “Projective Verse” and systematized an aesthetic rooted in the work of Pound and Williams…. the poem Olson advocated must work in “open” form, finding its organic shape in the dynamic relation of breath and perception. “Form,” Olson quoted Robert Creeley in a statement that was to become an essential credo, “is never more than an extension of content.” “Open form” stood in contrast to what Olson described as “that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English and American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams.” Williams responded to Olson’s dictums with enthusiasm, and Robert Creeley notes that “it was an excitement many of us shared.” Creeley (and later Levertov) would elaborate upon and clarify Olson’s pronouncements that “a poem is… a structure possessed of its own organization in turn derived from the circumstances of its making.” Structure, then, must arise from the content as it is perceived in the act of composition. There is a new reliance on spontaneity here, a new investigation which replaces fixed form with the idea of entering the field of the poem, creating the text as a sort of experience in itself whose form is determined by what will most embody that experience. Olson’s long poems then, such as the Maximus sequence, work by means of complex juxtapositions of present and past, replicating or recording the speaker’s field of perception. One can understand why and how this approach gained favor in many different schools or styles at the time, but in prosodical retrospect, such work is all of a piece, and of a wrong-headed and particularly messy and mischievous piece. When it comes to the entire tradition of literary prosody, such an approach utterly confuses res and verba, “thing” and “word.” Languages—words and their rhythms—in

132

Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools

poetry are not mere “content.” They have their own independent existence and history as phenomena, and to subordinate their prosody to subject, theme, style and content is to obscure this entire history at a single stroke. Further, this tendency ultimately is, as Robert Fitzgerald saw long ago, a result of the influence of prose, albeit dressed up as a reaction against “tradition,” which is wrongly conceived and described in the polemics against it by most of these writers. There is good writing that has emerged from the schools listed above, and we encourage you to seek it out. Googling any one of the authors above will give you a whole slew of books to read, but the claims many of their adherents made, and still make, about the linguistic and prosodical ramifications of what is only rhetoric miss the point, which is that poems not only say things, they also do things, and those things are highly meaningful but not in any obvious or easily demonstrable way related to the meanings of words and syntax. Further, there is a lengthy history of how to approach questions such as “How does rhyme work?” which is more productive than merely treating them as manifestations of content first and foremost, no matter how sophisticated the questions about that content or its style may be. The important distinction to keep in mind is what words do in distinction to what they say. Unless a prosodical theory addresses this question, it is useless for verse technique. The challenge is that this strangely non-verbal action of words in verse is difficult to describe because we still must describe it with words. As a result, those who approach it frequently turn the meaningfulness of prosody back into meaning. But it can be done, which is what the best linguists and especially the best prosodists and the best poets have worked for a very long time to learn how to do. Free verse is therefore not exactly what many of those in the various tendentious schools listed above would have us believe that it is, an open form of idiosyncratic composition, dependent upon content first and foremost, despite the volume of their rhetoric and their popularity. Much of the best free verse depends on self-conscious techniques that organize the measured meaningfulness of language in distinction from its connotations, especially in the various strains of more clearly articulated traditions like anaphoric versicles, syllabics, stress-counting, rhyme driving; and perhaps this explains why there is less attention paid here to the pronouncements of Pound, Williams, Creeley, Olson, Levertov, Bernstein and others, for despite some strong writing, none of them have added much to deep prosodical thinking or craft. Though all of them have produced strong poems, their doctrines have done damage to the teaching and criticism of poetry, if not to the art itself, although that art will survive. In the long run, we are comfortable predicting that the entire tendency of treating form as merely an extension of content will eventually be seen as just one eddy in a far greater tributary, and that the strongest free verse that survives will be of the kind that keeps measuring in view even as it challenges more traditional ways of measuring in English.

8

Nonce Meters

The Form You now have a full complement of the major meters in English. While we certainly have not explored every nook and cranny, we have looked at all the major models. Further, we have looked at them in approximately the order that they made their progress into the language over the last 1,500 years. Of course, these meters can be combined in ways that we have not directly considered, such as iambic trimeter, dactylic heptameter and many other line lengths. Also, as we discussed above, meters can be mixed from line to line, or even within lines. Still, the principles in those lines would be the same as those we have considered in their most important forms for English, although complexity can change drastically, as it does when we move from iambic tetrameter to iambic pentameter. We have also looked at the major free verse forms. The most important area that remains, and it is a large area, is a range of things we have lumped together under the notion of “nonce meters,” by which we mean metrical forms invented out of whole cloth that would be unlikely to be used as the basis of more than one poem or a sequence at most. At the same time, we should remember that every traditional meter began as a nonce meter itself, such as Surrey’s invention of blank verse in the 1530s. The ones that became traditional are the ones that, for some reason, stuck. Nonce forms are more than metrical forms, as they expand outward into stanza forms, and we are going to stay away from those here, considering some of them in the second half of the book. For example, Donald Hall has written sequences of poems composed in stanzas that are nine lines long, with each line having nine syllables, which we would call a syllabic combined into a nonce stanza form. All the poems are about baseball, so it all makes sense. The nonce meters we are concerned with here, however, are linear forms, because lines or verses in and of themselves are the focus of this part of the book. The crucial issue, as with anything else that is called a “meter,” is of course measure. Just as all the metrical forms we

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_8

133

134

8 Nonce Meters

have looked at so far somehow count prominent features in lines, so should your nonce metrical form. Whatever it is you decide to count need not be apprehensible to the ear; after all, stress-based imitations of classical forms are not, nor is enjambed blank verse, for that matter. As we mentioned above, Samuel Johnson famously referred to Paradise Lost as “verse only to the eye.” What might you do to create a nonce meter? Just about anything that strikes your fancy, as long as it includes clear patterns of measuring. You can count words per line; you can count occurrences of a letter (for example, perhaps each line ends with the word that includes the 5th occurrence of the letter “r” in that line, or the word just before the 6th occurrence); you can count orthographic deviations from the standard; you can count punctuation marks, or verbs or other parts of speech; you can count numbers of letters or numbers of spaces; you can count recurrences of the word “the,” or any other word; or any number of other things. The world is your oyster. Four caveats, all important: First, as noted above, try not to make “nonce-stanzas” yet, where the lines in the stanzas are all different, but in a reiterated pattern. Make every line function according to the same principle all the way through your poem. We will look at nonce stanzas in the second part of the book. Second, remember that this is not really “free verse.” In one sense it is, as your lines will not be accentual-syllabic or otherwise modulated as the great traditions of verse have been in English. But you are not writing syllabics or counting stresses. You are not working in the by-now great traditions described in the earlier chapter on free verse, though you may draw on them in some way. Let those forms stand as derived directly from other traditions. What we are after here are your own idiosyncratic, eccentric and interesting innovations in linear forms: your own meter, which you can name as you see fit. Third, remember that while your choice does emphatically not have to make sense, or put another way, you do not have to justify it, it has to be a choice that provides you with some kind of creative source, that you find interesting and useful for reasons you may not be able to describe. Indeed, you do not need to describe why it works for you, although if you have ideas about that, all the better. Instead, all you need to do is describe how it works. Finally, remember that it is not enough to write a line and then back-form or impose a metric on it. Rather, find an organizing principle you like and use it to generate the strongest lines you can. Poems in Nonce Form Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too / Jim Hall All my pwoblems who knows, maybe evwybody’s pwoblems is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth dat I am SPIDERMAN.

8

Nonce Meters

I know. I know. All da dumb jokes: No flies on you, ha ha, and da ones about what do I do wit all doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat’s funny yeah. But you twy being SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead. You get doze cwazy calls fwom da Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who’s only twying to wip off color T.V. sets. Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets? But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit, wit da sucker cups on da fingers, and get my wopes and wittle bundle of equipment and den I go flying like cwazy acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top. Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob and I fall on him and we westle a widdle until I get him all woped. So big deal. You tink when you SPIDERMAN der’s sometin big going to happen to you. Well, I tell you what. It don’t happen dat way. Nuttin happens. Gubbener calls, I go. Bwing him to powice, Gubbener calls again, like dat over and over. I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make my heart beat at a difwent wate. But den you just can’t quit being sometin like SPIDERMAN. You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can’t even buin my suit. It won’t buin. It’s fwame wesistent. So maybe dat’s youwr pwoblem too, who knows. Maybe dat’s da whole pwoblem wif evwytin. Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent. Who knows?

135

136

8 Nonce Meters

Hall’s tremendously fun and funny poem may hardly seem to be a nonce, until we realize that almost every single line includes an intentional mis-spelling. While this may not be a great device for writing large numbers of poems, it works here, as it gives every single line an unexpected twist. The Icicle / David J. Rothman Like a tree triumphing over a nail, The icicle had grown across the gutter, Embedding it bite by slow, relentless bite, Reached up and over, grabbed slate tiles, And gathered at the corner spout’s hole. There each brick’s nook, cranny, and crook Yielded to the uniform logic of water, Which gives ice muscles to crack rock, Bend metal, sparkle, and sparkle with darkness. Thicker than a man and shot through With blue, white, black, and glassy clarity That narrowed to a single, motionless finger, It pointed its twenty-five foot body down At trampled snow and the earth’s center. Liquid sunshine conspired with February’s harsh evidence To build ice out of slow time, An ice joining touch, sight, and silence, Except for the way a small breeze Gusted around the corners. A great manifestation Of winter, an architecture of magnificent patience Dug downward into the evening’s breaking fact. And dug. The icicle absorbed the touch, The eye, the silence, especially the eye, Until sight became a thing changed, transformed Into an empty greatness. Each perfect molecule, Obeying its four laws, could not bridge The gap between the ice and love. No one had done this to song, Or to the icicle. Instead, deep down, Somewhere inside the icicle, a spinning sun That drank all things into its eye Had captured evening, air, and manifold icicle Within an inarticulable grasp, broken things away From their decorous places in any pleasure,

8

Nonce Meters

Or pleasure’s memory of unasked, green questions. No, within the gigantic king of icicles There was no icicle, and no crown Stood on the crown-like nonsense of ice. No wing could be imagined to beat Back up the great spike of thinking Into flight. Less than a missing word And more empty than an empty cup, The icicle smashed, motionless, its own fact Into less than pieces of dark glimmering, Or stories in any genre. No mother, No matter, could suckle such a famine Of ice and deeper ice, ice signifying Ice and the freezing isolation of seeing. Was it a perfection of boyish play? The icicle held no voices or ink Up to that plea, took no authority Upon itself to disprove the self-devouring facts. The only winter, it gripped no syntax, Nor a fact named cold, nor worked From water, and would not answer queries About its body, its likeness, its implications And evaporating implications beyond, beneath, away, drowning In the landscape of Boston and abstraction. No human voice, or hand, no animal, No green, spring stem, no mute rock, No light, no darkness, not even yesterday Brooded broken in the blank, perfect tense Of that empty, unnamable God in February. Deeper, darker, blanker, more shattered than marble Under the numb thunder of time’s thumb, The world tumbled down in fractal static, Unsupported by the ground of any thing, Any thought, any force that might work, Open, build, love, make and make right This immense loneliness into what could be. Unpragmatic word that resonated nowhere but questions, How fortunate you were, are, and become! For it was only loneliness, loneliness without

137

138

8 Nonce Meters

Its name, big loneliness, boy, looking, hooked Within you, for its name, finding yours, And bringing it up into the air That spoke in silent voices breaking open. Loneliness, now named, deep in the icicle, Turning after so many years and bowing To the terrible world, is what cut The insufficient bonds, unblessed the sophomore world, Broke every word into animal sounds, unbuckled Life from word from thing from love. It was only loneliness, and under it, Reborn, as true as any king icicle, Was every lonely thing and word, fragmented Out, signs of terrible, unborn, inward fires. That infernal icicle pierced a thinking eye With loneliness unnamed, afraid of itself, masquerading Its gaps with ideas, but merciless, returning Moment upon moment, growing inch by inch Into an icicle. Only alone, it rippled Down over itself, terrible, adult, alive, wordless, Hissing angrily to be named and take Its place above the other, quiet beasts. Part of no eye’s vocabulary, the icicle That hung from Grays Hall in February Shimmered in the lamplight, and prophesied silence, The silence of each thing utterly alone, Speaking only to itself, unmothered, unfathered, thought-embedded, As if dirt and every friend’s hand Had to be perceived before becoming real. But a you in loneliness makes loveliness, And after and beyond the icicle returned The Yard, the elms, the students, paths Between the old brick, and the company Of lovely others, although time took time To build that insight out of loneliness, The fact that had begun the work. And time took time to turn up That one word, loneliness, which was sleeping In every meditation: the loneliness of thinking, The loneliness of naming all the animals,

8

Nonce Meters

139

Of watching the Cambridge sky go purple Then black in February, marking dark clarity With no word that could couple it To another’s ear or eye, leaving imagination Unfulfilled, screaking and scrambling in its loneliness. False, painful prophet, ice Jeremiah, your gift Was your savage, thorny shape, which revealed Fragments talking to themselves, aspiring to touch Defining love and faith against their gaps— Loneliness that failed to devour what remained, The signatures of others! For in purgatory All things rise, flowing from unknown springs, Even the man-child shocked into seeing himself Alone in the contemplation of an icicle. This poem is organized isologically. The prefix “iso-” means equal or similar, and “logic” comes from the Greek “logos” which means “word.” You read in the beginning of this chapter that nonce lines are based on measuring, as is “The Icicle.” The numerical organizing principle is that there are exactly seven words per line, though the length of each word is open in terms of syllable count. The strength of a form such as this is also its potential weakness. The poet need not heed any pattern of stress. “Ah, freedom!” you may be thinking, but not so fast. Writing a strong seven-word poetic line where every line is strong, and with no fluffy, filler words is just as challenging as writing a strong iambic line. The poet must weigh each word for its effect in not only its immediate line but in the context of the surrounding lines. Counting words rather than syllables creates the possibility of using more delightful polysyllabic words, indeed a huge range, the entire language at any point in the line. Consider the line “And evaporating implications beyond, beneath, away, drowning”: it contains seven words for a total of seventeen syllables. Now consider the line “And time took time to turn up”: it contains seven words for a total of seven syllables. Quite a difference. The challenge, of course, is that any work of prose could be cut up into lines of seven words. The trick is to realize that one must use the meter as a generating principle, not merely an organizing one. There is a tremendous difference between casting sentences into heptalogical (seven-worded) lines, as opposed to creating the best lines you can on a heptalogical principle. Read this poem carefully and look for the poetic devices: personification, symbolism, alliteration, consonance, assonance, and rhyme within the lines. With the abundant description of the icicle, some readers may classify this poem as a lyric poem. Read it several more times and look for an underlying narrative.

140

8 Nonce Meters

Poems by Students Kaleidoscope / Kate Lewis

I feel as if I’m a character in The story in a Doctor Seuss rhyme. Like a faucet running, harmonica humming, Everything is in perfect time. I feel as if I’m slowly freefalling Past the stars of the vast Milky-Way. Like a story unfolding, a sculptor molding, Everything starts to slowly fray. I’m trapped between the past and the future, Where my memories and dreams collide. Like Frost’s “Fire and Ice”—but we can’t perish twice. By my choices, I must abide.

a / 10 syllables b / 9 syllables c / 12 syllables / internal rhyme b / 8 syllables a / 10 syllables b / 9 syllables c / 12 syllables / internal rhyme b / 8 syllables a / 10 syllables b / 9 syllables c / 12 syllables / internal rhyme b / 8 syllables

In this nonce exercise, Kate Lewis has chosen to include rhyme, which is perfectly fine, but goes beyond the assignment to create a nonce stanza and creates some challenges for herself. Kate organizes her poem around a syllable count (10, 9, 12 and 8—two odd numbers and two even numbers), end rhyme in lines two and four, and internal rhyme in line three. Although the lines do not follow a pattern of rhythm, the end-rhyme tends to rhythmically synchronize lines two and three, and the internal rhyme in the third lines creates a pleasant echo. Note that with fewer available syllables per line, Kate uses fewer adjectives and adverbs. You will also notice that, however, probably because of the rhyme, Kate’s poem does tend to fall into a rhythmic pattern, with most lines beginning to lilt in groups of mostly four beats, occasionally three. Rhyme is tremendously powerful in this way, quite hard to resist. Marianne Moore works hard at such resistance in “The Fish.” Kate is doing something risky if the goal is to create a verse form idiosyncratic and new. The great verse historian George Saintsbury has argued that it was the introduction of end-rhyme that pushed English poetry towards its eventual metrical traditions, because “rhyme,” a word related to “rhythm,” is such a powerful device that it tends to push lines into rhythmical shape. Still, this is an excellent effort. Exercise Write a short 12–20 line poem in a nonce metric form, all lines governed by the same rule, with a brief description of the rule or rules. You can combine several. We do encourage you to avoid rhyme, or, if you choose to use it, to be careful that it doesn’t pull you into an overly-rhythmical lilt.

Interlude

Interlude What Will Come Again / David J. Rothman How happy it can be to hear What so many poets have sought to sing In one way or another, willingly Studying the stubborn stanzas until One day, without realizing quite how it happened, Time turns into more: A song, a tale, a vision, a gift That opens like an old door, Leading surprisingly to slow, sad power, Power beyond what anyone could realize Lonely in language. Each of us needs others, Spirits to show us The way the world has figured out To make a figure out of doubt, When words not only say things but They also do things delicate, Until, finally, they find their place The way a planet always stands where time And gravity determine that it must, Dust spun into meaningfulness now And always, wherever it comes and goes. Strange what light can become when we listen to time, When we measure it out with a tally or rhyme. Oh, the places you’ll go when you both act and know How to make a thought burn, or make love go slow. Beyond this, even in flight patterns thrive, Even in the open field figures step, Even in the careful avoidances precision calls, Recurrence, measure, insistence on if not rage For order, the assurance Of what will come again Out of the infinite zero:

141

142

One Sound Growing Slow, greater, Sweet and powerful, Still, singing, gentle, carrying Us, then within us, calling us, becoming us, now.

Interlude

Part II

Stanza Forms

Introduction: Stanza Forms We now come to a turning point in this book. Up to this point, although we have considered certain kinds of stanza forms such as tetrameter couplets, triple-meter couplets, ballad quatrains and Sapphics, we have looked primarily at their meters, surveying the sources of all the major meters in English: Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Meter, Ballad Meter, Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters, Iambic Meters, Triple Meters and the major forms of Free Verse. There is not much more than that, although there are many variations on these forms. For example, there are successful poems in trochees, and there are great poems in mixed meters, in which poems shift meter from line to line, or even within lines. But these important variations can all be learned with the material presented in Part One if you keep reading, scanning and practicing. Now we are going to look closely at how poets in English have combined lines in these various meters into repeating, as opposed to lyrical, stanza forms. Usually, though not always, these stanza forms have been written in various lengths of iambic meters, although triple meters are used widely in couplets and quatrains. The most interesting thing is that the different stanza forms all have different effects; the feeling of rhyming couplets is quite different from the feeling of nine-line Spenserian Stanzas, even though there are couplets embedded in Spenserian Stanzas. These repeating stanza forms, which run from two to fourteen lines, are the major forms that poets who write in English have used to make long poems, all have been used successfully to make great work and many are still in use. The more one learns about them, the more one comes to see that, as with the meters, there are endless variations on how to deploy them. Further, at the end of the sequence of studying all these stanza forms, one comes to see how it might be possible to create nonce-form repeating stanzas that might work in a new imaginative universe. After all, some highly original poet invented each of the traditional forms and that first use was at the time a “nonce.”

144

Part II: Stanza Forms

Why Stanza Forms? Why do we focus on repeated stanza forms in this book? Because they are tremendously important in the history of English poetry and poetry in many other languages as well, and because most contemporary books that aim to teach the craft of poetry rarely discuss them. Most such current books and courses focus on the fixed lyrical forms, which are wonderful and very popular: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, pantoum, haiku and so on. And yet these lyrical forms, beautiful and important as they are, offer us only one dimension of what poetry can be. Poems in these forms are rarely more than 30 lines long and often far shorter. And yet the strongest poets in almost every language and culture, across thousands of years, have spent more energy and focused more closely on longer poems, and these poems frequently tell extended stories. Marie de France, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Byron, Browning, Auden, Vikram Seth (a gifted contemporary poet) and hundreds of other strong poets in all the European languages and in other cultures across the world have used such repeating stanza forms to frame their most ambitious long poems, and that is why they are worth studying and learning how to enjoy and to imitate. Poets in English have also used other forms to write long poems with great success, including the blank verse of Milton and Wordsworth, and the free verse of Eliot, Pound, Williams, Jeffers and other modern poets. Many strong poets have also used repeating stanza forms to write shorter, lyrical poems, but our emphasis here is on the long tradition of long poems in rhyming stanzas. Rhyme: Crime or Sublime? Before we jump into the stanza forms, we should consider the question of what rhyme is. Many poets now claim to dislike it, and refuse to use it, and even criticize those who do, but this is an error. For, properly understood, rhyme is everywhere and cannot be avoided if one cares about the sounds and resonances of language. Poems need not rhyme, of course, and many of the strongest do not. But poets should understand what rhyme is, be able to read it right, enjoy it, and use it or not use it with confidence, as they see fit. And rhyme is everywhere. Although it is a technique that was grafted onto English, once it took hold it sank deep roots, as it has in so many other languages. The standard definition is easy to follow, as all of us are so familiar with it. Here is a take by the great scholar and bibliographer of versification and poetics, Terry Brogan: In the specific sense of the term as used in English, rhyme is the linkage in poetry of two syllables at line end…which have identical medial vowels and final consonants but differ in initial consonant(s)—syllables which, in short, begin differently and end alike.

Part II: Stanza Forms

145

As Brogan points out, however, following other scholars and linguists, if we define rhyme more broadly, to include all the possibilities of sonic resonance among syllables, things quickly become richer. The model Brogan suggests to show this richness of rhyme is the “CVC” model for a syllable, where “C” stands for a consonant and “V” for a vowel. In even the simplest one-syllable words we then have many possibilities for such sonic resonance, depending on which part of the syllable echoes from word to word. Consider the word “cat.” If we pick other words that repeat the last consonant but avoid repeating the first consonant and the medial vowel, we get an interesting set of words, including “bit,” “rot,” “eat,” “hot,” “tote” and more. None of these technically rhyme with “cat” in the usually understood sense, and yet they do resonate with it in a way that we don’t have a colloquial word for in English. Following Brogan, we can go through the range of all such resonating possibilities in a systematic way. In the set below, every word resonates with “cat” based on the repetition of the bold elements of the original word. The words offered are only examples, of course. Each variation could offer up many more. “CAT” CVC hot CVC fan (assonance) CVC cup (alliteration) CVC mat (standard rhyme) CVC cut CVC cap CVC cat (identical or perfect rhyme) CVC dog (the null set, where nothing resonates) That is quite a range of variations for resonance, and it only begins to tell the story, as these variations don’t include slant rhyme, or multiple syllable variation, or doggerel rhymes, or variations on all of these that rhyme or resonate one word against other variants. How do we describe the relationship, for example, between words like “cat” and “catch”? and “cast”? and “cattle”? “catastrophe”? “battle”? How about “cat” and “satire”? and “calico”? With a little playfulness, the possibility for such sonic resonance among words becomes endless and even goes well beyond individual words on their own. Consider this little verse: Meet my cat. He’s not much to listen to, but fun to talk at. Is this a “rhyme”? Or rather, given that the strong stress falls on “talk” not “at,” what kind of rhyme is it? This is a common technique. Consider the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

146

Part II: Stanza Forms

Shakespeare’s rhyme of “temperate” with “date” exemplifies rhyme with stress displacement. The playfulness suggested above, which can run the full range from the sublime to the silly, is the real point of rhyme. Especially in English, because of its structure, such apparently meaningless resonances among the sounds of words and even other aspects of their context that evoke sound, e.g. “cat” and “ATM,” are woven into the language and its verbal art at every turn. Again, no one needs to write in rhyme, but in a language such as English where there is by now almost a millennium of its involvement in our poetics, it seems hard to argue that one can or should avoid its resonances, which are everywhere. Instead, we should study them, to enable us to understand what strong poets are doing, and how to make such choices for ourselves in the light of that practice and knowledge. Wait, there is more. Brogan suggests at least a dozen considerations for analyzing the nuances of rhyme, places where sound and sense interact in delightful ways. Some of these we have covered, others not: 1. Rhymes can be single, double, or triple. More than that is rare. 2. Morphology can vary, i.e., polysyllabic words can rhyme with multisyllabic words (poet / know it). 3. Position of stress can vary (sing / loving; sees / mysteries). 4. Lexical category can vary (go / slow). 5. Degree of sound-match can vary when rhyme is not identical (tin is more like din than like bin, call is more like gall than like stall, pull is more like bull than like full). 6. Degree of variation of semantic function (law / flaw vs. look / book). 7. Further complication of sound patterning within rhyme schemes (bones / cold / old / stones / groans / fold / rolled / moans. This is the rhyme scheme of the octave from Milton’s sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” abbaabba; the vowel holds constant but the rhymes shift). 8. Participation of the rhyme in nearby sound patterning. All words resonate with each other, not just those that overtly rhyme. In “One, two / buckle my shoe,” notice that the vowel in the first syllable of each line (one / buckle) assonates. 9. Position of rhyme in the line, other than at the end. 10. Shifting interval between rhymes; distance is necessary for the repetition to work, and it can vary widely, even within one poem (see Keats’s Odes; any poem by Ogden Nash). 11. Order of sequencing of rhymes. 12. Sight versus sound (two / to; love / prove).

Part II: Stanza Forms

147

One could go on and on, as many of these effects can be simultaneously combined. Rhyme can even be ironic, defeating expectations: One, two, Buckle my shoe. Three, four, Shut the window. In the end, rhyme is not a straitjacket, but just an opportunity to consider the full spectrum of sound equivalence and departure from it in verse. A tool, not a rule. One more note: like so much else in English, rhyme is borrowed. There is little to no intentional rhyme in the poetry of ancient Greek, classical Latin, Old English, biblical Hebrew and many other languages. The scholarly consensus seems to be that rhyme began, like many other cultural inventions such as gunpowder, paper, the compass, silk and more in China, and passed along the silk road into western Asia, and hence into Arabic, another language and culture that gave us so much: algebra, basic astronomy and the preservation of the classics. Beginning probably in the 8th century, it was in the Iberian Peninsula, in what is now Spain and Portugal, and this is probably how it passed into the Romance languages, notably the poetry of the Troubadours of Provence, only then coming into English with the Norman Invasion of 1066. So, the consciousness of rhyme is a cultural artifact, not a natural phenomenon. At the same time, once a language decides to allow rhyme in, it seems to stick forever. It shows no signs of disappearing from English. Think of almost every great song you know, let alone the long tradition of poetry, although poets have debated its merits as a new-fangled unnatural innovation ever since it arrived. Even Milton, in the Preface to Paradise Lost, denounced it as “no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre.” Yet this denunciation came from someone who knew how to rhyme with the best. Learn the craft and the history to inform your choices. In the chapters that follow we look at all the major repeating stanza forms in English, beginning with what appears to be the simplest, the couplet, just two rhyming lines. Then we proceed through longer and more complex forms until we arrive at the Spenserian Stanza, which has nine lines, with a closing glance at the Eugene Onegin stanza, which has 14 lines. This is different from the first part of the book, in which we looked at forms as they entered the language chronologically. Here we consider the patterns of how the rhyme schemes interact with each other as structures, rather than through a historical lens, though each one of these stanza forms has its own long history. This approach shows how adding one or two lines at a time to basic combinations creates new challenges and opportunities.

9

Couplets

In English, poems in couplets are as old as Chaucer and as modern as hip-hop. They are everywhere in the history of the language, including Chapman’s famous translation of Homer’s epics, published beginning in 1598 and in its entirety in 1616, which stands as the first complete translation of that work into English. Generally, couplets are not thought of as stanzas, but of course they can be and have been represented on the page in this way. The point is that they are the simplest initial way to use patterns of “perfect rhyme” as a generative device. The concept is simple: each sequential pair of lines must share a rhyme: aa bb cc dd ee ff, and so on. The definition of couplets seems easy, yet as we hope you have begun to see, the questions of what a rhyme is and how it works run far deeper than many assume, even in such a simple form. Rhyme is what regular repeating stanzas are all about, with the exception of a few forms, e.g., Sapphics, blank verse paragraphs and a few others. Rhymed couplets, especially in regular meter and especially in English in iambic pentameter, create a powerful resonance and symmetry that the strong poet can exploit to great effect either by following or fulfilling that symmetry, or by modifying, modulating or contradicting it. This can be accomplished metrically, rhythmically, lexically, syntactically, semantically, emotionally or representationally, to your heart’s content. For example, sentences can end on rhyme words but need not do so. Shifting syntax against the obvious rhyme scheme of couplets creates an astonishing array of rhythmic and semantic possibilities. For that matter, the sentences can run directly against the rhyme scheme in all sorts of ways, creating an endless variety of tensions. “Closed” couplets are those in which the syntax follows the rhyming pattern, ending sense, in the form of clauses or phrases, with rhymes. Open couplets

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_9

149

150

9 Couplets

do not do this, and if we are generous in our definitions, there is an almost endless way to open them. Consider the following heroic couplets: Not every line or every couplet has to end Where sentences and syntax bow and bend. A sentence can end anywhere. It can End here. Or here. There is no perfect plan. You can play around. It is quite free If you know the rules. As you can see, My sentences are going where they choose. And if you know the rules, you just might win. With a little luck, we even got you to think of the word that is the opposite of “win” at the end of the last line, imagining a rhyming word that we didn’t write. Rhyme is alive, and the couplet foregrounds its rich possibilities. Indeed, the word’s history in English, and in many other European languages, shows how deeply it has affected our thinking about language, and how deeply the rhymed couplet is embedded in our sensibility. “Rhyme” derives from the same word as “rhythm,” because we inherently sense that such magical repetition creates a rhythmic expectation, a sense of orderliness, that is part and parcel of what is so delightful about other aspects of verse as well. And no stanza form brings this out in a more direct and forceful way than the couplet, which at first may seem tight, but whose orderliness frees the skilled poet to muck around in all sorts of delightful and surprising ways. Below, we have included a short selection from Pope’s “Essay on Man.” The bit from Ogden Nash that follows shows how radically different the couplet can be from what one finds in Pope, yet notice that Nash is also, obviously, a satirist. In fact, the snap of the rhyme has proven to be irresistible to verse satirists from John Skelton to the present, and in languages other than English as well, for hundreds of years. As you read these poems, think about how each poet modulates both sound and sense to create a wide range of effects. Why, for example, do certain rhymes evoke laughter? A difficult question to answer. Poems of the Past In every case, when we scan, we do not complete the passage. We encourage you to continue on your own. Scan, scan, scan. EPISTLE II. From “Essay on Man” / Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

9

Couplets

/ \ / / \ / / u || - || u - || u - | u - | u - | Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; / / \ / / u -|u - |u -| u - | u - | The proper study of mankind is man.

151

Reversal in foot one.

Strong secondary in foot four.

/ / / / u - | u - | u - |u - |u - | Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / / / / / u -|u - | u - || u - | u - | A being darkly wise, and rudely great: / \ / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

/ \ / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u | With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

Notice the repetition creates an echo in the rhythm of these two lines, and repetition is itself a form of rhyme.

/ / / / / u - | u - || u - | u - || u - | He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; / / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - || u - | In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - | In doubt his mind or body to prefer; / / / / u - |u - || u - | u - | u - | Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

repetition, parallel structure, alliteration

152

9 Couplets

/ / \ / \ / u - | u - | u -| u || - | u | Whether he thinks too little, or too much: / / / / / u -|u | u - | u || - | u | Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; \ / / / u - | u - | u - || u - |u | Still by himself abused, or disabused;

Reversal in foot one

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Created half to rise, and half to fall; \ / / / \ / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Reversal in foot three

\ / / / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | u | Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: / / / / u - | u || - || u - | u - | u | The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! / / / / / / u || - | u - | u || - || u - | u | Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, / / / \ / / / u || - | u - || u - || u - | u - | Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;

Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old time, and regulate the sun;

Go, soar with Plato to th’empyreal sphere,

The strong imperative in foot one creates two strong stresses

9

Couplets

To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;

Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,

And quitting sense call imitating God;

As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,

And turn their heads to imitate the sun.

Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

Superior beings, when of late they saw

A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,

Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape

And showed a Newton as we show an ape.

Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind,

Describe or fix one movement of his mind?

Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,

153

154

Explain his own beginning, or his end?

Alas, what wonder! man’s superior part

Unchecked may rise, and climb from art to art;

But when his own great work is but begun,

What reason weaves, by passion is undone.

Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide;

First strip off all her equipage of pride;

Deduct what is but vanity or dress,

Or learning’s luxury, or idleness;

Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain,

Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain;

Expunge the whole, or lop th’ excrescent parts

Of all our vices have created arts;

Then see how little the remaining sum, Which served the past, and must the times to come!

9 Couplets

9

Couplets

155

Pope is a master of the formal and symmetrical couplet, but like Mozart in music, his gift lies in the endless variation he plays upon basic forms. Notice, among other strengths, that almost each line contains a grammatical unit that makes at least phrasal sense even though it stands alone. The end rhyme tends to bring closure to the thought. Pope has used syntactical and rhetorical structures such as anaphora, repetition, and parallelism in addition to prosodical features such as alliteration, consonance, and assonance, all of which go far beyond pure rhyme and make his lines resonate even more deeply with each other. Consider just one couplet from the perspective of rhyme, broadly conceived: Alas, what wonder! man’s superior part Unchecked may rise, and climb from art to art; Even a few simple observations prove the point: “what” and “wonder” alliterate, though Pope might have given the “h” in “what” more weight than do most Americans; “superior” and “part” alliterate; “wonder” and “unchecked” share a vowel sound, suggesting that not only is the “superior part” unchecked, but also the wonder at it; “man’s” and “may” alliterate; “rise” and “climb” assonate; “climb” and “from” end with the same consonant; the repetition of “art” at the close of the second line of the couplet creates a resonance in the rhyme. And, there is much more. In this way of looking at the verses, their sound has been activated as much as their sense. We are attending to what they do as much as what they say. The connection between those two realms is deeply intriguing, and far from self-evident. Perhaps the trick is not to try to “explain” such effects in terms of what they mean, but rather to note that, like the meanings of the words and sentences, the phonological resonances, their “sounds,” also exude meaningfulness creating patterns of repetition, equivalence, substitution and variation. As you can see from Pope’s title, his poem is a portion of an essay in verse. As such, it has a clear set of arguments. Pope is one of the strongest philosophical poets in English, indeed in the history of the world. An interesting question then becomes why, given the strength of the thinking in the poem, a writer would also go to such lengths to create such complex patterns of verse. What does this reveal about poetry’s power? As you scan more of Pope, we encourage you to dive into that practice without asking that question, but then to return to it again and again. If we leap forward a century or so from 1734, the publication date of Pope’s poem, to 1842, we find a very different deployment of the heroic couplet in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” one of the great dramatic monologues in English, which depicts a neurotic, sadistic aristocrat discussing his late wife, whom he probably has had murdered: That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

156

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

9 Couplets

9

Couplets

157

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. When you scan the poem, you’ll notice not only more rhythmical variation than Pope (though Pope is far richer than many believe), but also a diversity of enjambment techniques that Pope hardly touches. Browning frequently drapes his rhymes and meter across the couplets, using many of the techniques that Brogan describes in his twelve ways to turn a rhyme. He rhymes different parts of speech, fills his lines with pauses in interesting places, and both enjambs and endstops. The poem is an encyclopedia of techniques, at the same time as it is a cunning character study and a small play. One effect of Browning’s rich prosody is that the poem seems to come closer to what we might call natural speech, even as it obviously remains a work of art. And yet, as with all poems, the question remains how these techniques of orderly language create meaningfulness at the same time as the words and sentences create meaning. In the 20th century, the following poem by Ogden Nash, reminiscent of Skelton, more than 400 years after he wrote, illustrates what rollicking fun yet another approach to rhyming couplets create.

158

9 Couplets

Nota Bene: Before you scan this poem, you must discern the rhythm pattern (iambs? trochees? dactyls? anapests?) that Nash uses. We have scanned it as an anapestic dimeter, because Nash uses enough trisyllabic feet to create that rollicking triple-meter feel, but reasonable people disagree. Perhaps it is just a two-stress line, and we shouldn’t be counting syllables at all. What do you think? Fahrenheit Gesundheit / Ogden Nash (1902–1971)

/ / (u) - | u u u | Nothing is glummer / / u u - |u u - u | Than a cold in the summer. / / u - | u - | A summer cold / / u u - | u u - | Is to have and to hold. / / u - | u u - | A cough in the fall

/ / u - | u u - | Is nothing at all, / / u -|u - u | A winter snuffle / / u - |u u - u | Is lost in the shuffle, / / u - |u - u | And April sneezes / / u |u u - u | Put leaves on the treeses,

9

Couplets

But a summer cold

Is to have and to hold,

And there is no rescue

From this germ grotesque.

You can feel it coming

In your nasal plumbing,

But there is no plumber

For a cold in the summer.

Nostrilly, tonsilly,

It prowls irresponsilly;

In your personal firmament

Its abode is permament.

Oh, would it were curable

Rather than durable;

159

160

9 Couplets

Were it Goering’s or Himmler’s

Or somebody simlar’s!

O Chi Minh, were it thine!

But it isn’t, it’s mine.

A summer cold

Is to have and to hold.

We hope you see from “Fahrenheit Gesundheit” how much fun rhyming couplets can be. The short lines of two strong stresses in a highly variable triple meter, coupled with end rhyme, give this poem snap. Of course, Nash’s intentional misspelling, neologisms and tricks of pronunciation to create perfect rhyme (rescue/grotesque) offer a strong example of the playfulness we suggested above, more modern in its sensibility than Pope’s use of the couplet technique, though he too is playful in his own neoclassical mode. One way to consider all of this: Would Nash’s short poem be as humorous without the rhythm and the rhyme? We do not think so. If anything, his poem foregrounds the way that ordered verse language creates all sorts of patterns of perception and expectation almost before we even realize it is happening. In strong poems, the patterns of meaningfulness are just as important as the meanings of the words.

9

Couplets

161

Student Poem

Consecration / Nick Bergh / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | If something sacred slithers out, / / / / u - | u - |u -| u - | Be sure you don’t allot it clout / / / / u - | u - || u - | u | On gleam alone, or where they claim / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | They found it laying, or its name. / / / / u -| u - |u - |u - | Recall they had to dig it up; / / \ / u -|u -|u - | u - | The holy grail is just a cup / / / \ / u - | u -| u - | u | They pulled from standard Walmart shelves, / / \ / u - | u -|u-| u | Then ruled they’d bury it themselves. / / / / u - | u - | u || - | u | Inside there’s water, maybe booze

“Slithers” infers that the “something” moves on its own. “Allot” is imprecise word choice. Now “they” claim they found it. Take care with logic in your poems.

162

9 Couplets

/ / / / u - | u -|u - | u | If huge expenses were approved. \ / / / / u - |u - | u - |u - | True power comes from mighty God, \ / / / / u - | u -| u - | u - | Look out for cutting-edge facades.

Almost a splendid rhyme because of that pesky “s.”

Technically, this poem is solid. The meter is correct, and the rhymes are mostly perfect with exceptions for the slant rhyme on “booze” and “approved” which the assonance renders just fine, or “God / facades,” which is lovely but a bit troubled by that final “s,” the most troublesome letter in English poetry. Inside this poem there is a cautionary tale, but as it reads right now the warning is difficult to understand because the logic is a bit choppy. In line one, the indefinite pronoun “something” leaves us in the dark. What is this gleaming thing to which we should not give any clout? In lines six and seven the poet hooks us with “the holy grail is just a cup / They pulled from standard Walmart shelves.” But line eight confuses again: Who are “they” and why do they rule that they must bury a cup from Walmart? Given time for revision the poet could clarify these issues, and revision would be worth the effort. Occasionally there is a poem which excels in craft but needs clarification in meaning. In the long run, however, it is best to get the music right from the first; logic is more common and may in the end be easier to deploy. Exercise For the purposes of this assignment, we encourage you to keep your lines, rhymes, and meter tight, using mostly end-stopped lines. See where this leads you. That end-stopped form is what we call a zero-grade form, stealing a term from linguistics and changing it for our purposes. In our concept, the zero-grade is the purest form, as it were. In this case it is the least complex, the closest to the model. Try to do it justice. Scan the lines of Pope in heroic couplets and the two-beat rhyming couplets of Ogden Nash. Then write 20 lines, 10 rhyming couplets of your own. Do not try to imitate Pope’s style, as we are writing in the 21st century, but do try to make it work as described above. Tone is open, although as with other kinds of couplets, you will find that the foregrounding of rhyme in the couplet tends to accentuate thoughtfulness, which includes humor, although it can also be quite serious. *****

9

Couplets

163

At the end of each of the chapters in Part 2, we present a list of some of our favorite long poems in the stanza form under discussion, no matter what the meter is, sometimes along with lyrical poems that have used the form as well. This is not meant to be a definitive or exhaustive list, merely a suggestive guide to some of the major poems that have led this form to be regarded as canonical over many hundreds of years. Long, Strong English Poems in Couplets Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man,” “Essay on Criticism” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel” John Keats, “Endymion” Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” Clement Clark Moore, “The Night Before Christmas” Ernest Lawrence Thayer, “Casey at the Bat” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire Clive James, The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media, The Improved Version of Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World and Brittania Bright’s Bewilderment in the Wilderness of Westminster

Terza Rima

10

The form of Dante’s Divine Comedy still beguiles. The concept is simple: compose in three-line stanzas whose rhymes interlock: aba bcb cdc ded, and so on, for as long as you wish. End either with a couplet or, as Dante generally did, with a single line which is the first of a new tercet and makes the last four lines feel a bit like a quatrain, although they are not quite a quatrain because the first rhyme of the apparent quatrain will have appeared as the second line in the penultimate tercet, e.g. aba bcb cdc ded e. So far so good. In practice, however, the fascinating development is the way that the form is always throwing itself off balance, and tumbling forward because of its “fearful asymmetry,” to pun on William Blake. This asymmetry is built into the form, exactly its point. If one tries to align the syntax with the tercets like Dante, after the first tercet there is always an echo of both the previous tercet and a projection of the next one. On the other hand, if one tries to align the syntax in any other systematic way, the tension between the rhyme scheme and the sense become even more tangled. There is simply no way to create a neat, symmetrical alignment. As a result of this irresolvable tension which pits syntax against rhyme, the form is complex in terms of the variations that can be played, which is perhaps why Dante used it to write a long narrative. It is always moving and dynamically off-balance, like a person walking sideways. At the same time, as if to strain against this inherent awkwardness, strong poets have written beautiful terza rima sonnets that magically round it off, rhyming aba bcb cdc ded ee. One of these, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” is a sequence of five such sonnets. In “Acquainted with the Night,” Robert Frost goes even further, cycling back at the end to his initial rhyme and making his final line his first: Aba bcb cdc dad aA.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_10

165

166

10

Terza Rima

Shelley’s poetry is tremendously rich in metrical variation and we have sought to describe some of that here. After this chapter we will offer the scansions, but not the notes, as the terms should begin to be familiar. You should now be able to do much of this yourself, referring to the many examples we have offered. Ode to the West Wind / Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

I \ / \ / / / / u - | u - || u - |u -| u - u | O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, / / / / / u || - | u -| u -| u -| u - | Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

/ / / / u - || u - | u - | u - | u - u | Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

/ / / / / u - || u - || u - || u - | u - | Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, / / / \ / u-| u - | u - | u - || u - | Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, / \ / / | u - |u - |u - | u - |u Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

Reversal in foot one; no stress in foot four; two strong stresses in foot five; strong enjambment Think “driv’n.”

Reversal in foot one

Reversal in foot one; foot four is slack

Y-glide in foot two; strong secondary stress in foot four

10

Terza Rima

/ / \ / / u -|u - || u - | u - | u - | The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

\ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - || u - | Each like a corpse within its grave, until / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - | u - | Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

/ / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - || u - | Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill / \ / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - |u - | (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) / / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | With living hues and odours plain and hill:

\ / / / \ u - |u || - | u - | u - | u | Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

/ / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u || - || u - | Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear! II

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

167

Foot three is slack; strong secondary stress in foot four

Foot one reversed

Foot three slack

Y-glide in foot two; elision in “o’er”

Foot one reversed; Foot two loaded up

Goodness—a regular line!

Foot one loaded; elision in “ev(e)rywhere”

168

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

10

Terza Rima

10

Terza Rima

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

169

170

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

10

Terza Rima

10

Terza Rima

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

171

172

10

Terza Rima

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? After you have read and discussed our scansion of Shelley’s first sonnet in this series, scan the remaining sonnets either individually or in groups. Note how rich and “craggy” his versification is, with all sorts of secondary stresses and playful patterns. He never breaks the pattern, but he pushes it as hard as any poet of his time did, foreshadowing even greater complexity in subsequent poets such as Hopkins. In this ode, the poet addresses the wind directly, one feature of odes in general, especially of this period. Shelley passionately and intricately sings the wind’s praises. In phrases of direct address such as “O Thou,” “Wild Spirit,” and “O Hear” the unstressed spot in the rhythm usually takes a secondary stress. When we address

10

Terza Rima

173

a person or an object, we tend to accent the name and any exclamatory words strongly. The best-known terza rima sonnet of the twentieth century is surely “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost.

Acquainted with the Night / Robert Frost (1874-1963) \ / / / u - | u - |u - |u - | u - | I have been one acquainted with the night. \ \ / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | I have walked out in rain and back in rain.

Note anaphora.

\ \ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | I have outwalked the furthest city light. \ \ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -|u - | I have looked down the saddest city lane. \ \ / / / u - | u -| u - | u -| u - | I have passed by the watchman on his beat / / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. / / / / / / u - | u - | u | u - |u - | I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet / / / / u -|u - |u -|u -|u - | When far away an interrupted cry \ / / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | u - | Came over houses from another street,

Two strong stresses in foot two, with alliteration Skillful enjambment

174

10

Terza Rima

/ / \ / / \ / u - |u - | u - |u - | u - | But not to call me back or say good-bye; / / / / u - |u - |u -|u - |u | And further still at an unearthly height, \ / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | One luminary clock against the sky / / / / / u |u - | u - |u | u - | Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. \ / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - | I have been one acquainted with the night. Frost’s choice of terza rima is a good fit for a poem about taking a walk. One step forward, one step back, or at any rate, wandering, until one ends where one began. Parallel structure and anaphora propel the poem steadily forward, yet even with the similarity of syntax and the end-stopped lines, this sonnet does not sound repetitive when read aloud. The imagery is concrete and yet universally familiar: night, rain, light, lane, a watchman, a cry, a street, the moon. Frost also uses secondary stress, but not as Shelley does in direct address. Frost’s meter is far more regular than Shelley’s, and his tone is relatively subdued. This poem is a technical masterpiece, and a poem about loneliness that resonates with most readers. Beyond this, as the poet Teow Lim Goh has argued, Frost also appears to be making his usual cunning allusions to his own practice of writing verses. Note all the puns on the writing of poetry itself: the poem resonates to “the sound of feet”; the watchman is “on his beat”; the speaker, like Frost the poet and like poets in general, is “unwilling to explain” because explaining is not the purpose of such writing; the moon has become a clock that proclaims the time “is neither wrong nor right,” much like the time of a poem, which escapes such categories altogether in favor of song, even if it is a sad song. The loneliness that the poet proclaims here is a poet’s loneliness. And in all this order, the meter, the rhyming and rhyme scheme, the sonnet stanza, the precise echoes of Dante’s Inferno, Frost seems to suggest that beyond the sound of feet and the careful parsing of the watchman’s beat, there is something more, a meaningfulness, in this case a dark, lonely meaningfulness, the untellable time of the moon, that is suggested by the words but goes far beyond them. In the end, terza rima is a deceptively simple form with tremendous implications. Since Dante, and up to the present, poets have seized on his intentionally awkward invention because of the way it helps them to drive stories forward. It is a curious engine that demands ever more invention. In English, it appears often in translations of Dante and in shorter lyrics, again beginning with Chaucer in parts two and three

10

Terza Rima

175

of his “Complaint to His Lady,” but there are a number of more ambitious efforts, such as Shelley’s “Ode” and his long poem The Triumph of Life, the neglected work of the English poet E. H. W. Meyerstein who wrote three books entirely in terza rima, isolated pieces like Frost’s, and more recently the loose terza rima of Derek Walcott’s 1990 epic Omeros and Colin John Holcombe’s ambitious three-book version of a modern inferno, That Still Abiding Fire, along with others listed below. Student Poem String Music / Kate Lewis

/ / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | They say a sport is just a game of skill, / / / / / u - |u - |u - | u - | u - | In truth it’s deeper than the sweat on skin. / / / / u -| u -| u - |u - | u - | Poetry’s motion helps to bring the thrill,

Kate did not mark the reversal in the first foot.

/ / / / / u - | u -| u - | u -|u - | But mind and matter make the loss a win.

/ / / / / u - |u -| u - |u - | u - | From this equation don’t remove the fans, / / / / / / / u -|u - | u - | u - |u - | Or noisy crowds would sound just like a pin.

/ / / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u | Instead our hearts beat strong to clapping hands;

Kate has put strong stresses on “would” and “just,” whereas “would” receives no stress and “just” would receive no more than a secondary.

The primary stress on “beat” should be a secondary stress.

176

10

Terza Rima

/ / / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u | * Each basket filled with orange fruit shakes walls. / / / / / u - |u - | u - |u - |u We scream above the noise of marching bands,

/ / / / / u -| u - | u -| u - | u | Forgetting grades and kisses snuck in halls.

The band does not march at basketball games; remember to mark the final foot boundary. Great line!

/ / / / / u | u -| u | u - |u - | ** Who knew metaphors jumped through hoops of life? / / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | u - (u) ***A soul can grow from shots of life’s basketballs. Again, the final foot boundary is missing. Kate Lewis communicates a truth most students understand: sports teach us about life. This poem is an example of a strong first draft, and it is an example of how difficult it is to combine syntax with metrical terza rima lines. Technically, much of the poem is quite solid, but there are a few slips. In line three, Kate misses the stress reversal in foot one. The stress in “poetry” must follow its lexical stress on the first syllable: “po-.” The poet adds a strong stress to “would” and “just” in line six; these words receive a slight stress in speech but not strong enough to be primary stresses. Also, at the end of line six, the word “pin” is not the best word choice. Kate may have chosen it because it rhymes with “win” two lines above. Now let’s examine three lines with metrical problems that can be easily repaired:

/ / / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u | * Each basket filled with orange fruit shakes walls. This might not at first seem to be a metrical problem, but perhaps it is. We suspect that Kate hears the word “orange” as one syllable, “orange.” That would then make her think she needs another syllable which may be why she added “fruit.” If we pronounce the word with two syllables, however, the need to add “fruit” disappears:

/ / / / / u - | u - | u -|u | u - | * Each basket filled with orange shakes the walls.

10

Terza Rima

177

On to this line:

/ / / / / u - | u -| u | u - |u - | ** Who knew metaphors jumped through hoops of life? The problem in this case is that “met-” must fall in the stressed position because it is the lexical stress of a three-syllable word. How about this?

\ / / / / u - | u - |u - | u | u | Who knew that metaphors could jump through hoops? Kate is lucky here, in that this line need not rhyme, so we can shift the final sound. And finally:

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | u - (u) | ***A soul can grow from shots of life’s basketballs. The problem here is that final foot, which would be reversed and have three syllables, which is too much strain. But a simple solution presents itself; by deleting “life’s,” this line flows with subtlety and efficiency:

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u - | A soul can grow from shots of basketballs. Exercise Write 12–18 lines of terza rima. Allow the penultimate line not to rhyme. Do not charge ahead and write a sonnet, which adds another degree of difficulty; focus on the tercets themselves. Use either tetrameter or pentameter and scan your work. Long, Strong English Poems in Terza Rima Dante, The Divine Comedy. Many English translators have sought to translate Dante into English terza rima, perhaps most recently Robert M. Torrance in 2011, but also Dorothy L. Sayers, Lawrence Binyon and others. The uninflected nature of English makes this a challenge compared to Italian. Lord Byron: “The Prophecy of Dante” Shelley, The Triumph of Life E. H. W. Meyerstein, The Visionary; Division; The Unseen Beloved Sylvia Plath, “Sow” Derek Walcott, “The Bounty” and Omeros Colin John Holcombe, That Still Abiding Fire

Quatrains

11

The quatrain is such a major stanza form that it is difficult to know where to begin. So much has been written about it that it boggles the mind. As Terry Brogan points out in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, it is “the most common stanza form in European poetry, and very probably in the world.” As in music and so many other arts, four seems to be a magical number. So far as poetry goes, the interest seems obvious: patterns of four create various possibilities of symmetrical and asymmetrical balance that can be played with, for, or against sense, and they convey a strong impression of their own shapeliness. In contrast with terza rima, whose secret is its asymmetrical drive forward, the quatrain is almost always self-contained, yet it provides a wide range of variations that go well beyond what can be done in the couplet. The exceptions are in various nonce forms, such as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which proceeds aaba bbcd ccdc, and so on, and there are many others. The basic quatrain forms are obvious, but each has lengthy history. We have already explored several of them, as they tie to a particular meter or metrical concept: the ballad stanza (abab or xaya, generally stress-based) and the Sapphic, which follows a stress-based imitation of classical quantitative forms and doesn’t rhyme. The other best-known forms in English would be the elegiac or heroic quatrain, iambic pentameter rhymed abab, of which the most famous of many thousands of good poems still probably remains Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; the In Memoriam stanza, rhymed abba, which Tennyson wrote in iambic tetrameter; and the more difficult triple-rhymed “Omar Khayyám Stanza,” aaxa, iambic pentameter, so named because Edward FitzGerald chose it for his great translation, which is not really a translation but rather an adaptation of, or creative inspiration derived from, its original. It seems obvious to point out that the quatrain, like the couplet, appeals to our sense of symmetry, as opposed to the odd-numbered stanza forms, which play against it and create energetic, carefully organized asymmetries that do not organize

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_11

179

180

11

Quatrains

themselves as neatly. At the same time, the quatrain presents an astonishingly rich basis for variation, so rich, in fact, that it serves as the point of departure for every other major repeating stanza form in English, even those with an odd number of lines. The Venus and Adonis stanza (six lines), rhyme royal (seven lines), ottava rima (eight lines), and the Spenserian stanza (nine lines), all begin with quatrains that rhyme abab. Even the sonnet begins either with an abab quatrain (English or Shakespearian) or an abba quatrain (Petrarchan or Italian). To hazard a generalization, this is perhaps because the quatrain has an obvious structure that feels as natural as anything in poetry yet is susceptible to so much variation that in the hands of a strong poet it can become like plastic. If we take Brogan’s taxonomy of rhyme and combine the complexity of syntax as it can be deployed across four lines as a rhyming unit, the possibilities increase exponentially from the couplet, where they are already complex and rich. Consider just the opening stanza from one strong, long poem in heroic quatrains, John Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis,” published in 1667, which discusses events of the previous year when the English defeated the Dutch at sea and the great fire of 1666 nearly destroyed London: In thriving arts long time had Holland grown, Crouching at home and cruel when abroad: Scarce leaving us the means to claim our own; Our King they courted, and our merchants awed. Even in Dryden’s orderly syntax, there is wonderful ambiguity, which the standard punctuation does not clarify. Does the third line complete the first two as if there were a comma after the second line, or does it point more directly to the final one? In other words, are we to construe the quatrain like this: In thriving arts long time had Holland grown, crouching at home and cruel when abroad, scarce leaving us the means to claim our own. Our King they courted, and our merchants awed. Or like this: In thriving arts long time had Holland grown, crouching at home and cruel when abroad. Scarce leaving us the means to claim our own, our King they courted, and our merchants awed. And what do these differences mean? Syntactically they mean quite a bit, which we could see if we were to draw syntax trees. More importantly, however, the beauty of the situation is that we do not have to choose. Both these possibilities, and perhaps others, are contained in the quatrain, or perhaps suggested by it, the whole thing held together not only by its clear but fluid syntax, but also by the precise meter and

11

Quatrains

181

of course the rhymes. And these lines are all end-stopped! Imagine the possibilities once one keeps the metrical structure and rhyme, yet introduces asymmetrical syntax, enjambed lines, enjambed stanzas, and more complex rhymes. Poets have done all this of course, leading to tremendous richness, and the possibilities are far from exhausted: The quatrain is a rich, sly, cunning beast Of verse, that coils up like a snake or springLoaded wild gizmo and then, when you least Expect it, suddenly begins to sing. Master the rhymed, metrical quatrain and the entire range of English poetry unfolds before you, from song lyrics in every genre to epics, to the freest variations imaginable, all in terms that may either accord with tradition or depart from it in innovative ways. Poems from the Past Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard / Thomas Gray (1716–1771)

/ / / / / u -| u - | u - |u - |u - | The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / / \ / / / u -|u - | u - |u - | u - | The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

Secondary stress in foot three; elision in “over.”

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / / / / u - | u - |u -| u - |u - | And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

/ / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | u | Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight, / / / / / u -| u -|u -| u - | u - | And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Elision in “glimmering.”

182

11

/ / / / / u - | u -|u - | u - |u | Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

Quatrains

Primary stress on “save,” an archaism meaning “but” or “except.”

/ / / / / u - |u -| u - | u -|u - | And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

/ / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r / / / / / u - |u - | u -| u - | u - | The moping owl does to the moon complain

/ / / / / u - || u - | u - | u -|u - | Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow’r,

Elision in “tower.”

Archaic syntax inversion: “the owl complains to the moon.”

Elision on “wandering” and “bower.”

/ / / / u - | u - | u - |u -| u | Molest her ancient solitary reign.

/ / / / \ / u - | u - | u - || u - | u | Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, / / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - |u - | Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - |u -|u - | Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / \ / / / u - | u - | u -| u -| u - | The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Y-glide on “many a” elision in “mouldering.”

11

Quatrains

/ / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, / / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u - | u | The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, / \ / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

\ / \ / / / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire’s return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

183

Y-glide on “clarion,” w-glide on “echoing.”

184

11

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,

If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Quatrains

11

Quatrains

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,

Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

185

186

11

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’applause of list’ning senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,

And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,

Quatrains

11

Quatrains

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;

Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

187

188

11

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’unletter’d muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?

Quatrains

11

Quatrains

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of th’unhonour’d Dead

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely contemplation led,

Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

189

190

11

“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,

His listless length at noontide would he stretch,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by.”

“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove,

Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,

Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.”

“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,

Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;”

Quatrains

11

Quatrains

“The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.” THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,

And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,

He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

191

192

11

Quatrains

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

The bosom of his Father and his God. Gray worked on “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” for many years, drafting specific lines of the poem beginning in 1742 and not finishing until 1750. Readers are drawn to it for its extraordinary thematic strength and clarity. Few if any poems more compellingly convey the importance of each common human being and the inevitability of death. At the same time, few can resist Gray’s graceful and stately verbal music. After reading and scanning Shelley’s Romantic, intense “Ode to the West Wind,” Gray’s poem seems highly regular, showing what can be composed with simple but well-placed variations. In fact, Shelley and the other Romantics were reacting in part to this calm, smooth, regular technique, also exemplified by Pope, Dryden and others of the Augustan period. The Romantic revolution in poetry was as much about music as it was about subjects. The good news is that we do not have to choose between one or the other. We can enjoy both. Still, we should emphasize the differences in technique here because learning to appreciate such differences is crucial to developing your own style as a critic and as a poet. If you were to run a statistical analysis of the rate and kinds of variation in Gray’s poem as opposed to Shelley’s, and scholars such as Marina Tarlinskaja have done this, the profile that emerges is of a radically different linguistic sensibility. It is like comparing Mozart to Beethoven in music. Even Gray’s elisions are regular; although they may seem archaic to readers today, they were not when the poem was first published. Think about all the contractions we use: did not / didn’t; could not / couldn’t, will not / won’t, that is / that’s, and scores of others. Contractions and elisions are conversational speech, although there are also conventional literary contractions and elisions as well. And we have those too. How many people, when imitating a country song, for example, might write ain’t when they would never say it? Notice also that the lines we have scanned are almost all end-stopped. There are no harsh enjambments, yet the poem does not fall into a sing-song rhythm. Part of the memorability of Gray’s lines has to do with the subtle and cunning way he deploys individual words. He does not write of the “weary” plowman; it is the “weary” way. The beetle drones his “drowsy tinklings”; by putting the adjective before “tinklings,” Gray personifies the sound. “Straw-built shed” describes the

11

Quatrains

193

swallow’s nest, using the noun “straw” and the past participle “built” to create the distinctive adjective “straw-built.” As you continue to scan these stanzas, notice how Gray uses adjectives in unusual ways and note the strong verbs. Although this poem is an elegy, it is more than that. It weaves a story that qualifies as a lacrimae rerum, or lament over the human condition. Sections I and II from In Memoriam / Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) I

/ / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | I held it truth, with him who sings / \ / / / u - | u - |u -| u - | To one clear harp in divers tones, / / / / u - | u - | u -| u | That men may rise on stepping-stones / \ / / / u - | u - |u - |u | Of their dead selves to higher things.

/ \ / / / | u - | u -| u - | u But who shall so forecast the years / / / / u - |u - |u - |u | And find in loss a gain to match? / / / / u - |u - | u - |u - | Or reach a hand thro' time to catch / \ / / u -| u -|u -| u - | The far-off interest of tears?

Reversal in foot three.

strong secondary stress in foot two

194

\ / \ / / / u - | u - | u - | u | Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,

11

Quatrains

Notice in foot two, that when a strong verb is in the unstressed position it often takes a secondary stress.

\ / / / / u -| u - | u -|u | Let darkness keep her raven gloss: \ / / / u || - | u -| u - | u - | Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, / / / / u - | u - || u - | u | To dance with death, to beat the ground, / / / / u - | u -|u - | u - | Than that the victor Hours should scorn / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | The long result of love, and boast, / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | ‘Behold the man that loved and lost, / / \ / u -| u - |u -|u | But all he was is overworn.’ These two sections are only a fraction of this lengthy poem which Tennyson wrote to memorialize the friend of his young adult years, Arthur Henry Hallam. This stanza form, abba, in iambic tetrameter, is often called the In Memoriam stanza. Just as Dante invented terza rima, Tennyson left such a strong stamp on this stanza form it is named for his poem. Knowing what you now know, imagine creating a meter or form so sturdy and interesting that it is forever after named for you or your poem! Yet this does happen: the Sapphic, Catullan hendecasyllables, Skeltonics, Hudibrastics, the In Memoriam stanza, the Venus and Adonis stanza, the Spenserian stanza, and so on. Read Tennyson’s stanzas aloud to notice how radically different the tetrameter lines sound from pentameter lines. It may at first seem surprising to see the difference two syllables can create in the music of a poetic line, and yet, now that you

11

Quatrains

195

can think about them metrically, perhaps it makes more sense. The number of syllables in a metrical line does more than simply affect its length. It amplifies the range and shape of all the rhythmic possibilities in that line and in all the others that surround it. Note as well that the rhyme scheme abba is a variation on the standard quatrain and is sometimes referred to as an “envelope.” Whereas the abab pattern progresses forward and generally suggests a stronger sense of closure at the end of each stanza, the envelope stanza creates different expectations, although a strong poet can play this in any number of ways. Tennyson’s poem, in its entirety, contains 133 cantos. Tennyson was particularly proud of his versecraft and was deeply skilled. These stanzas, like much of his work, seem effortless. They flow gracefully, yet, as in Gray’s poem, contain relatively few metrical variations. While variation is something that all strong poets understand, there is no correct way to use it. Strong poetry can be surprisingly regular, as in Gray, or so dense with variation it almost does not scan, as in Donne or Hopkins. II Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

That name the under-lying dead,

Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

The seasons bring the flower again,

And bring the firstling to the flock;

And in the dusk of thee, the clock

196

11

Beats out the little lives of men.

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,

Who changest not in any gale,

Nor branding summer suns avail

To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

And gazing on thee, sullen tree,

Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,

I seem to fail from out my blood

And grow incorporate into thee.

Quatrains

11

Quatrains

197

Student Poem The Little Seed / Jenna Ahlborn

/ / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | A little seed planted in dirt / / / / u - |u -| u - |u - | Dreamed of becoming a tree, / / / / u - | u - |u - |u - | He tried so hard to sprout a root / / / / u -|u -|u - |u - | Fearing it wasn’t meant to be.

\ / / \ / u -| u -| u - | u - | For so long he sat there waiting

/ \ / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u - | But something just wasn’t quite right, / \ / / u - | u - | u - | u - | The dirt was just simply too dry / \ / / u - |u - | u | u | But finally it rained one night.

“dreamed” is only one syllable

acceptable reversal in foot one

The scansion is incorrect, and the line does not scan iambically. See below.

No strong stress on “just” awkward reversal in foot three. Incorrect placement of stresses in foot two and foot three makes this a triple meter line. Excellent line!

198

11

/ / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | The little seed started to grow / / / / u -|u - |u - | u - | He began sprouting leaves so fast, / / / / u | u - | u -|u - | He grew and grew and got so tall / / / u - | u - |u - |u - | And then he was a tree at last.

Quatrains

This line is also triple meter.

The strong stress in “began” must be on “gan” the lexical stress.

“Was” takes a secondary stress.

Jenna Ahlborn’s stanza narrative has the ingredients for a charming poem. She personifies the tree, creates a conflict, and the rain resolves the conflict, all in three stanzas. But the versification is not correct yet. One way to approach this is to point out that Jenna has used the adverbs “so” and “just” to fill out the metrical pattern, and these words take up space that lively nouns and verbs could occupy. In many lines she does not line up the strong stresses with the stressed position in the metrical pattern, and this mistake causes the lines to fall into triple meter. In fact, it seems that Jenna is probably hearing a triple meter, not an iambic meter. This is a common error that Edward R. Weismiller has called “triple threats to duple rhythm.” For example, Jenna writes:

/ / / / u - |u -| u - |u - | Dreamed of becoming a tree, This line, correctly scanned would be: / / / u u | - u u | - (u) (u) | Dreamed of becoming a tree, As our scansion suggests, Jenna is probably hearing a triple meter. A possible revision to fit an iambic pattern: / / / \ / u | u - | u u - || u - | And dreamed of being a large, green tree.

tri-syllabic substitution with “a”

11

Quatrains

199

Jenna has not correctly scanned this line, because again, she may be hearing a triple meter, but the line itself can be construed as iambic.

\ / / \ / u -| u -| u - | u -| For so long he sat there waiting Correct: \ / / / (u) - | u - | u - | u - u | For so long he sat there waiting

It is a headless line with a feminine ending.

The problem in the next line stems from the filler adverb, which pushes the line toward a triple meter with primary stresses on “dirt,” the first syllable of “simply,” and “dry.”

/ \ / / u - | u - | u - | u - | The dirt was just simply too dry Let’s try revising with stronger words than “just” and “simply,” and even more importantly, to make the meter iambic.

/ / / / u - | u - |u || - | u - | The dirt was rocky, hard, and dry. And now for the final problem line:

/ / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | The little seed started to grow The trouble here stems (pun intended) from the fact that while this line can scan iambically, it is preceded by lines that create the expectation of triple meter, which pushes it towards triple meter as well, with strong stresses on “lit-,” “start-,” and “grow.” Scansion is not only about lines but also about larger patterns that pertain throughout an entire poem. The concept of a mis-apprehended meter is difficult so we want to reiterate: Jenna’s lovely poem shows us something that often happens as students learn how to think metrically. We have seen this many times: she has scanned the poem as one meter, but she is probably hearing something quite different, mostly end-stopped

200

11

Quatrains

four-beat and three-beat lines that tend to fall into triple meter. Consider this scansion, in which we do not mark the secondaries and foot boundaries. This reveals what appears to be happening more clearly:

/ / / A little seed planted in dirt / / / Dreamed of becoming a tree, / / / / He tried so hard to sprout a root / / / / Fearing it wasn’t meant to be.

/ / / For so long he sat there waiting / / / But something just wasn’t quite right, / / / The dirt was just simply too dry / / / But finally it rained one night. / / / The little seed started to grow / / / He began sprouting leaves so fast, / / / / He grew and grew and got so tall / / / And then he was a tree at last. Jenna is marking both stresses and feet, but there are enough errors here in the attempted foot-scansion to suggest a Procrustean bed. She is trying to make what she has heard fit the assigned meter, but it does not quite fit. It is crucial to

11

Quatrains

201

understand that this is not exactly “wrong.” Jenna has in fact fulfilled part of the assignment, writing rhymed quatrains. The challenge comes because she has scanned what she has written with a different set of assumptions than those with which she composed. Accentual-syllabic meter is not “better” than stress-based meter; still, it is important to understand the differences, the better to read and write both. We take the liberty of revising metrical problems not to “correct” the poem, or to rewrite the content, but rather to illustrate how you can solve metrical problems in your own poems. Write, revise, write, revise! Exercise Take a long look at the Gray and Tennyson poems. Scan verses from each and compare the two different rhyme schemes. The point is, in each case, to realize how these different stanza forms can be used to create long, sustained poems. Each stanza form, of which there are many, presents its challenges and opportunities. For the purposes of this exercise, select one of these two major forms, write at least four stanzas, and keep the lines all in one meter. Try to discover that feeling of tight, accentual-syllabic balance that strong poets across many centuries have used for their own ends. Long, Strong English Poems in Quatrains John Dryden: “Annus Mirabilis” Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” Coleridge, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (and all other long ballads) Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Tennyson, In Memoriam.

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

12

As we move on from couplets, terza rima, and quatrains, we cross a verse Rubicon, as we now have all the building blocks of the larger and more complex stanza forms. While fixed lyrical forms have far more complex kinds of iteration such as the sestina, the repeating stanza forms all build upon the simple building blocks we have now already examined. The fascinating development we will now see at work in the remaining, more complex forms, is how the addition of a new line or two in the rhyme scheme alters such patterns, creating utterly new patterns that incorporate symmetry and asymmetry simultaneously. One of the tricks to being able to use them well is figuring out how to adapt them for yourselves as modes of expression. Some writers may prefer the more symmetrical forms, others the more asymmetrical ones. Remember that different poets in different times and places have found them all useful. English Quintains Five-line stanzas in English are rare in sustained sequences. There are various collections of them, but they do not appear in extended, unified poems. The limerick is one such stanza, with an aabba rhyme scheme. One way to think of the limerick is as a tercet interrupted by a couplet, with all the “a” lines in anapestic trimeter and both “b” lines in anapestic dimeter. Some scholars argue that the limerick should always sport obscene content, that bawdiness is its purpose, although there are many limericks that are not obscene. It was popularized by the never-obscene English poet Edward Lear (1812–1888) in a book he published in 1845, though he did not use the term limerick to define what he was doing. Many of his poems are what we would call “nonsense verse.” The cinquain is a form invented by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey (1878– 1914). It does not use rhyme and simply counts syllables in each stanza in a pattern of 2-4-6-8-2. Crapsey was interested in the Japanese tanka, which, when imitated in English, is given syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7. Crapsey wrote some lovely poems, though her work is rarely read now. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_12

203

204

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

There are poets who have created other kinds of five-line stanzas, such as Shelley in “To a Skylark,” which has stanzas rhyming ababb. Shelley’s poem has other rules as well, as he shifts his meters from mostly trochaic trimeter in the first four lines of the stanza, to an iambic hexameter for the fifth line, in a virtuosic display that evokes the beauty of the bird’s song, at the same time as he claims to fail to do so. Other English poets who have used five-line stanzas of their own devising include Dunbar, Sidney, Donne, Carew, Herbert, Waller, Wordsworth, Poe, Browning and many more, so the attraction is surely there. There is also the haiku. Despite this, however, five-line stanzas have in general not caught on as patterns for long poems in English. Most are nonce forms. The Venus and Adonis Stanza The six-line Venus and Adonis stanza, named for Shakespeare’s poem of that name, has tremendous appeal that seems to elude the five-line stanza forms in English. It is a form of great beauty and power that has led to the creation of some very strong poems. It rhymes ababcc and generally appears in iambic pentameter. Other poets such as Surrey, Sidney and Spenser used the form before Shakespeare, and many have used it since then as well, including Wordsworth and twentiethcentury poets such as John Wain, Theodore Roethke, Thom Gunn and Robert Lowell, though many of them have adapted it for lyrical poems rather than extended narratives as Shakespeare used it. To illustrate the point about the roots of all lengthier stanza forms, we can see the Venus and Adonis stanza as a heroic quatrain followed by a heroic couplet. As with all such forms, however, the sum is far greater than the parts in the hands of a strong poet. After all, while syntax can stop after the quatrain, it need not, and can flow on into the couplet, binding these larger units together in all sorts of ways. Shakespeare and later poets such as Wordsworth endstop most of their lines, drawing on the obvious symmetries that the stanza offers. Yet Wordsworth’s opening stanza of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” does something that Shakespeare almost never does. Shakespeare couples the movement of thought to the movement of the verse in a way that foregrounds the stanza’s shapeliness. This is evident from his first stanza: Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase; Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him. The quatrain begins with Adonis; the couplet presents Venus, in a self-contained unit. In contrast, Wordsworth’s opening stanza, in addition to being in tetrameter, runs the sense over from the quatrain to the couplet:

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

205

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Here the syntax does not respect the closure of the quatrain but flows over it. The lines all include complete phrases even if they are only noun phrases or prepositional phrases, but the syntactical play is more complex. Wordsworth’s poem is far shorter than Shakespeare’s, but nonetheless responds to it, changing the way the stanza does business. Although it is a far weaker poem, Oscar Wilde’s 46-stanza poem of 1881, “The Garden of Eros,” uses the form fluently and refers directly to Wordsworth with its “daffodils,” among other things, and to Shakespeare with its theme of love:

It is full summer now, the heart of June, Not yet the sun-burnt reapers are a-stir Upon the upland meadow where too soon Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer, Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees, And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze. Too soon indeed! yet here the daffodil, That love-child of the Spring, has lingered on To vex the rose with jealousy, and still The harebell spreads her azure pavilion, And like a strayed and wandering reveller Abandoned of its brothers, whom long since June’s messenger The missel-thrush has frighted from the glade, One pale narcissus loiters fearfully Close to a shadowy nook, where half afraid Of their own loveliness some violets lie That will not look the gold sun in the face For fear of too much splendour,—ah! methinks it is a place

206

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Which should be trodden by Persephone When wearied of the flowerless fields of Dis! Or danced on by the lads of Arcady! The hidden secret of eternal bliss Known to the Grecian here a man might find, Ah! you and I may find it now if Love and Sleep be kind. Wilde is far more conventional than Wordsworth, and yet conventional poems can be none the worse for that. Wilde’s poem is one among many that show how traditions persist. Contrast all three of these earlier works with a poem from 1992, Thom Gunn’s “The Man with Night Sweats,” a well-known poem about a man confronting AIDS. Gunn set himself a difficult task. He shortened the line yet again, to iambic trimeter, meaning the rhymes come thick and fast. He resolves this in part through cunning enjambments that cut directly across phrases in places, often rhyming stressed syllables with unstressed ones, although the lines, while craggy, scan and construe with grace. While he ends each stanza with a period, he has cracked the syntax open across the lines, creating a wide range of effects unimagined in earlier times. His poem may be the strongest poem of the twentieth century in this stanza in English. While long, strong poems in Venus and Adonis stanzas are now few and far between, the form nonetheless has a compelling history and attractive shape and may yet return to favor. Poems of the Past Amaze / Adelaide Crapsey

I know

two syllables

Not these my hands

four syllables

And yet I think there was

six syllables

A woman like me once had hands

eight syllables

Like these.

two syllables

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

207

This cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey appears simple on the page. Yet look closely at “Amaze” and you will discover that its intrigue lies in the unusual syntax and the complex possibilities that syntax presents. For instance, “I know / that these my hands” in normal prose syntax might be written as “I know / Not these are not my hands,” or, more probably, we discover as the poem goes on, “I do not recognize these hands, although they are my own hands.” And the next lines: “And yet I think there was / A woman like me once had hands / Like these” would be more clearly stated as: “And yet I think there was / Once a woman like me who had hands like these.” Why do you think Crapsey decides to use this unusual word order? What does it add to or detract from this diminutive verse form? Limericks / Edward Lear

/ \ / / u - |u u - | u u - | There was an Old Man with a beard, / / / u - | u u - |uu | Who said, 'It is just as I feared! \ / / u - | u u - | Two Owls and a Hen, \ / / u - | u u - | Four Larks and a Wren, / \ / / u -| u u - |u u | Have all built their nests in my beard!' Who does not love a limerick? Lear’s comic five-line stanzas are prime examples of the importance of form. The humor lies in the comic timing of each line, the perfect rhymes, some gentle triple-meter variations, and of course the joke itself. And yet, while the joke must work, the poem falls to pieces without its meter, rhythm and rhyme. Consider: There was a bearded man who mumbled, ‘I was afraid of this! Two Owls and a large Hen A robin and four larks Have all built their nests in my beard!’ Not so good. Even if we keep the last line exactly as it is in the original, it now falls completely flat. One can learn a great deal about verse, and about poetry, by pondering why that is the case.

208

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Now scan the Lear limerick below. Notice that lines three and four are slightly different than lines three and four in the limerick above. That is fine if there is consistency within each limerick. There was an old man in a tree,

Whose whiskers were lovely to see;

But the birds of the air,

Pluck'd them perfectly bare,

To make themselves nests on that tree.

Now consider the far greater complexity of the Venus and Adonis stanza. Venus and Adonis (first twelve stanzas) / William Shakespeare

/ / / / / u -| u -| u - |u -| u Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face

| Elide “even” to “e’en.”

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | u - | Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, \ / / / / u |u -|u - | u - | u | Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase;

Reversal in foot three

/ / / / / u - |u - || u - | u | u | Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn; \ / / / / / u - |u - |u - |u - |u - u | Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,

Feminine ending strong stress on “to” to rhyme with “woo”

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

/ / \ / / / u - |u - | u - |u - |u- u | And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.

209

elision in “begins”

\ / / / / u - | u - | u - || u -| u - | ‘Thrice fairer than myself,’ thus she began, / \ / / / / u | u - | u || - | u - | u - | ‘The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare, / \ / \ / / / u -| u || u -|u - |u | Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,

reversal in foot one

\ / / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -|u - | More white and red than doves or roses are; / / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, \ / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.

‘Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed,

And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow;

If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed

A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know:

Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses;

reversal in foot one

210

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

And being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses.

‘And yet not cloy thy lips with loath’d satiety,

But rather famish them amid their plenty,

Making them red and pale with fresh variety;

Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty:

A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,

Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.’

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,

The precedent of pith and livelihood,

And, trembling in her passion, calls it balm,

Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good:

Being so enrag’d, desire doth lend her force

Courageously to pluck him from his horse.

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein

Under her other was the tender boy,

Who blush’d and pouted in a dull disdain,

With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;

She red and hot as coals of glowing fire

He red for shame, but frosty in desire.

The studded bridle on a ragged bough

Nimbly she fastens;–O! how quick is love:–

The steed is stalled up, and even now

To tie the rider she begins to prove:

Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust,

And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust.

So soon was she along, as he was down,

211

212

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Each leaning on their elbows and their hips:

Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,

And ‘gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;

And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,

‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.’

He burns with bashful shame; she with her tears

Doth quench the maiden burning of his cheeks;

Then with her windy sighs and golden hairs

To fan and blow them dry again she seeks:

He saith she is immodest, blames her miss;

What follows more she murders with a kiss.

Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,

Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,

Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone;

Even so she kiss’d his brow, his cheek, his chin,

And where she ends she doth anew begin.

Forc’d to content, but never to obey,

Panting he lies, and breatheth in her face;

She feedeth on the steam, as on a prey,

And calls it heavenly moisture, air of grace;

Wishing her cheeks were gardens full of flowers

So they were dewd with such distilling showers.

Look! how a bird lies tangled in a net,

So fasten’d in her arms Adonis lies;

Pure shame and aw’d resistance made him fret,

Which bred more beauty in his angry eyes:

213

214

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

Rain added to a river that is rank

Perforce will force it overflow the bank. Poetry does not get much sexier than that. Before you begin scanning the remainder of these stanzas, note that Shakespeare is liberal with reversing stresses in the first foot of lines. This is because the iambic pattern can be easily picked up in the subsequent four feet, seemingly without interruption. It is rarer in this poem to see a reversal in foot three as he does in stanza one, line two, though other poets favor this and so does Shakespeare in other places. Stanza one, lines five and six, offer us a lesson in rhyme. The “to” of “unto” must take the strong stress to perfectly rhyme with “woo.” Student Poem A Gift for Gardening / Christine Rempel

/ / / / u - | u - |u - |u -| u - | I chose to start a garden in my yard, / / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | I’d plant some flowers, vegetables and fruits.

Elision in veg’tables.

/ / / / / u - |u || u - | u - | u - | But when I checked, the ground outside was hard \ / / / u - | u -|u -| u - |u | Without nutrition for the flowers’ roots. \ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - || u | They will not grow in soil like this, I thought / / \ / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u | I’ll find the fertilizer that I bought.

The “-out” of “Without” should have a primary stress.

No secondary on “-lizer.”

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

/ / / / u - | u - |(u) - | u - | u - | I grabbed my wheel barrow from the shed / / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | And filled it high with soil and hoes and seed,

215

“Wheel” is one syllable.

Note: the poet considered “soil” as one syllable.

/ / / \ / / u - | u || - | u - | u - || u - | “These shovels, rakes and picks should do,” I said. / / / \ / / u -| u - |u - | u - | u - | I cannot think of much else that I’ll need. / / / / / u - || u - | u - || u - | u - | But wait! Tomato cage! Almost forgot! / \ / \ / u - | u - | u- | u - | u - | And nice rock decorations for the plot!

“cages” is more natural

diction: “nice” could be a stronger word. Again, no secondary on “dec-.” Multisyllabic words take just one stress.

/ \ / / / u - | u - | u -| u -|u - | The last rock pushed the “barrow” to its max, / \ / / / u - |u -| u |u - | u - | Excitedly I turned to push my load.

No secondary on “-ly.”

\ / / / / u - || u - | u | u -| u | “Hey there!” I heard and stopped there in my tracks. / / \ / \ / \ / u -| u -| u - | u - | u | “I see you’ve got some ground back there you’ve hoed.” strong secondary stresses

216

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

/ / / / / u - |u - |u - | u - |u - | I turned to see a man I’d never seen. / / \ / \ / / u - |u - || u - || u - | u - | With dirty hands, dark hair, quite tall and lean. / / / \ / / u - | u - |u | u - | u | “I’ve something here I thought might help you out.” / / / \ \ / u - |u - | u - |u - | u - | He held a can for watering new plants, / / / / / u -| u - | u|| - | u - |u | With silver handle; long and curvy spout.

No secondary on “-ing.” incorrect use of semi-colon

/ \ / / \ / u - | u - || u - | u - | u | “It works quite well. It used to be my aunt’s. / / / \ / u -|u - | u -|u - | u - | She finished though with gardening last year

No secondary stress on the “-ing” of “gardening”.

/ / / \ / / u - | u | u -| u - | u | But said she thought that I might find you here.” / / \ / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u | “This lovely can would make my flowers bloom! / \ \ / / / u - | u - |u - |u - |u - | I need one ‘cause I have no hose to use. / \ / / / u - | u || -| u - || u - | u But sadly, as you see, I have no room

Primary stress on “cause” and no stress over “I.”

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u | So with regrets your offer I refuse.” / / / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | My hands were full, so without can I tried, / \ / / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | To grow plants without water: They all died.

217

Awkward syntax to create the rhyme: “I refuse your offer.” Awkward syntax.

The stress in “without” belongs over “out.”

Christine Rempel’s skilled Venus and Adonis stanzas tell a story, just like the original. Her versecraft is strong, and the narrative arc moves from beginning to middle to end, bringing us a comic tale with a mock tragic ending. As you study her scanned poem, you will notice that she hears and marks the secondary stresses. For example:

/ / \ / \ / \ / u -| u -| u - | u - | u | “I see you’ve got some ground back there you’ve hoed.”

strong secondary stresses

While she has gone a bit too far, and we would not put a secondary on “you’ve,” she has marked the others correctly. It is common when learning the Fitzgerald system to become enthusiastic about marking secondaries. This is understandable, but in the long run, remember that they rarely if ever need to be used in multisyllabic words. Their function is to help us see when a stressed syllable falls into an unstressed position, which usually means a single-syllable lexical word in an unstressed position. A good example in Christine’s poem is the well-turned final foot of the final line, “all died.” But in a word like “watering” in the line “He held a can for watering new plants,” “-ing” does not take a stress, even though it falls in a stress position. This is a subtle but important point, that comes clear with time and practice. Here we just point out that in this case “-ing” fits in the stressed position because of what surrounds it, and because it does not contradict the overall stress pattern of the line. Hearing the delicate variety of pitches in lines comes with time and practice. Christine also skillfully manages elisions and glides. We have marked several words that could be stronger or that create confusion and two awkward syntactical reversals. There is much to admire in this strong first draft. Narrative, meter, rhyme, and wit!

218

12

Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas

The Exercise Scan at least four stanzas of Shakespeare’s vivid and sexy poem; then write four stanzas in this form. The five-line forms are useful as well, but most of these are nonce forms. It is good to be familiar with them, but they have not become widely used in long poems. Long, Strong English Poems in Venus and Adonis Stanzas Spenser, “January” and “December” in Shepheardes Calendar Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis” Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue” Oscar Wilde, “The Garden of Eros”

Rhyme Royal

13

We are now moving into the more complex repeating stanza forms in English, beginning with the seven-line rhyme royal, the form that Robert Fitzgerald considered the most beautiful of all stanzas. All these more complex stanza forms are built up from the simpler elements of couplet, tercet, and quatrain. The fascinating developments are that, first, the more complex forms are the ones, out of many possibilities in each case, that became the standard; and that, second, the addition of a single line as we move into longer and longer stanzas makes things more complex in each case. The resulting possibilities of variation are enough to satisfy any number theorist. Rhyme royal, originally spelled rime royal, is a seven-line stanza that rhymes ababbcc. This is an old form in English, again dating back to Chaucer, in this case his Troilus and Criseyde. Indeed, it is astonishing to realize how many of these forms enter the language with this mysterious poet, who had no peer either before or after his time for many hundreds of years. How did he do it? Chaucer also uses rhyme royal in The Parlement of Foules and in The Canterbury Tales, in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Prioress’s Tale” and other poems. It is also the meter of the Scottish King James I’s The Kingis Quair, which is where it probably earned its royal name. Such namings do not necessarily reflect historical reality. It was also employed by Henryson, Wyatt, Sackville and then Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. As with so many English stanza forms, rhyme royal derives from forms in the Romance languages. It was quite popular in England up through the early 17th century and has also been used and adapted by a number of Romantic and modern poets, notably Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence.” The American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) who wrote the sonnet inscribed at the base of the

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_13

219

220

13

Rhyme Royal

Statue of Liberty, wrote a long poem in the 1870s titled “Epochs” that uses rhyme royal in many of its sections. Here is the opening: I. Youth Sweet empty sky of June without a stain, Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills, Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain, That each dark copse and hollow overfills; The rippling laugh of unseen, rain-fed rills, Weeds delicate-flowered, white and pink and gold, A murmur and a singing manifold. The gray, austere old earth renews her youth With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze. How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth, While all is fresh as in the early days! What simple things be these the soul to raise To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat, With nameless pleasure finding life so sweet. On such a golden morning forth there floats, Between the soft earth and the softer sky, In the warm air adust with glistening motes, The mystic winged and flickering butterfly, A human soul, that hovers giddily Among the gardens of earth’s paradise, Nor dreams of fairer fields or loftier skies. Rhyme royal has rarely been used for long narratives in recent times, but there are at least two major exceptions: John Masefield’s Dauber and the audacious, exuberant, superb Auden poem “Letter to Lord Byron”; Roethke’s nonce-rhyme royal, “I Knew a Woman,” is a gorgeous lyric that rhymes ababccc. Roethke’s use of the triple-rhymed tercet at the end of each stanza creates a different effect from the true rhyme royal but shows its influence. These poems bring the form into the modern world. Before proceeding, it is worth expanding on this notion of the many possibilities of creating seven-line stanzas with three rhymes. This thought-experiment foregrounds the question of why the one that has proved most popular over many hundreds of years is the one that it is: ababbcc. After all, the possibilities seem virtually endless. Why not abcabca? Why not abbaacc? Why not abcabbc? Indeed, we can devise a simple mathematical formula to figure out exactly how many

13

Rhyme Royal

221

possibilities there are. In every case, the first line rhyme must be an “a” so that would be a factor of 1. The second could be an “a” rhyme repeated, or a “b,” as there is no way to jump to “c,” as logically any new rhyme must be the second, not the third, assuming we are sticking to end-rhyme only. So, in the second slot of the stanza, the second line ending, there are exactly 2 possibilities, which brings us to 1
2 = 2. From there on, however, there are three possibilities per line, as every line from there on can have one of three possibilities at the end. If you write this out as 1233333, where 1 = a, 2 = a or b, and 3 = a or b or c, you will discover that there is no possible combination that doesn’t fit the formula. The way of thinking outlined above results in a formula that looks like this: 1
2
3
3
3
3
3 ¼ 486 In short, there are 486 ways to create a stanza of seven lines using three line-end rhyme words. Roethke’s rhyme scheme suggests that poets do think like this when they are experimenting with forms in order to make new ones. The question to be asked, that Roethke did ask, is “Well, why not try it this way instead?” But the larger question remains: why did so many poets find the ababbcc arrangement so compelling when it is but one out of 486 possibilities? Let us suggest one way to approach this kind of question in poetics. Cultures, languages and styles vary in all sorts of ways, but one thing seems to hold true across them: poets like orderly, rich fields of possibility on which to work with language. If this is true, the ababbcc pattern is particularly interesting, as it presents a cunning and delightful asymmetry. One way to think of it is as a heroic quatrain that then links with two couplets, pointing to the key function of the fourth line, which links the completed quatrain to the first couplet. Is it then a quatrain followed by an echoing tercet, abab bcc? Or a tercet followed by an echoing couplet, aba bbcc? Another way to think of it is as a Venus and Adonis stanza with an extra “b” rhyme, abab(b)cc, yet this extra line changes everything. The point is not to resolve the tension, but rather to use it. It is provocative and exciting. For however we think of it, and our thinking can change from stanza to stanza, the addition of that extra “b” line makes the form asymmetrical, as all the odd-numbered stanza forms are. This is perhaps why Robert Fitzgerald loved this form so much that he would offer a prize for the best exercise in it during the week he taught it. However you may choose to approach this complex form, see what you can do to use its tension to help you generate lines, sentences, and delight. As you will discover below, such an approach will place you in good company.

222

13

Rhyme Royal

Poems of the Past Resolution and Independence / William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

/ / / \ / u - |u -|u -|u - |u - | There was a roaring in the wind all night; / \ / / / u - | u - |u - | u - | u | The rain came heavily and fell in floods; / / / / / u - |u - |u -|u - | u | But now the sun is rising calm and bright; / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u - | The birds are singing in the distant woods; / / \ / / \ / u -| u - | u - | u - | u | Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;

Reversal in foot one.

/ \ / / / u -| u -| u -| u - |u - u| The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;

Feminine ending.

/ / / / / / u -| u - |u - | u - | u - | u - u| And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

\ / / / / / u - | u - |u -| u - |u - | All things that love the sun are out of doors; / / / / u - |u -|u -| u - | u - | The sky rejoices in the morning's birth; / / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | The grass is bright with rain-drops;—on the moors

Feminine ending; note that Wordsworth ends every stanza with an Alexandrine, or six-foot line

13

Rhyme Royal

223

/ / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | The hare is running races in her mirth; / \ / / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | And with her feet she from the plashy earth / / / / u -| u - || u || - | u - | u - | Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,

Elision on “glitter’ing”

\ / / / \ / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

/ / \ / / u - |u - |u - |u -| u - | I was a Traveller then upon the moor; / / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - | I saw the hare that raced about with joy; / / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | I heard the woods and distant waters roar; / / / / u - | u - || u - | u -| u - | Or heard them not, as happy as a boy: / / \ / / u -| u -| u - | u - | u - | The pleasant season did my heart employ: / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u - u | My old remembrances went from me wholly; / / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | u - u | And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.

Elision in “Trave’ler”

224

/ / / / u || - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might

13

Rhyme Royal

reversal in foot one

/ / \ / / u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | Of joys in minds that can no further go, / / / u - | u -| u - |u - | u - | As high as we have mounted in delight

Just three stresses

/ / / / / u - |u - |u -| u - |u - | In our dejection do we sink as low; / \ / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - | To me that morning did it happen so; / / / / / u - | u - | u - |u -| u | And fears and fancies thick upon me came; \ / \ / / \ / \ / u - | u || - | u || u - | u || - | u | Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.

I heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky;

And I bethought me of the playful hare:

Even such a happy Child of earth am I;

Even as these blissful creatures do I fare;

Far from the world I walk, and from all care;

13

Rhyme Royal

But there may come another day to me—

Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,

As if life’s business were a summer mood;

As if all needful things would come unsought

To genial faith, still rich in genial good;

But how can He expect that others should

Build for him, sow for him, and at his call

Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,

The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;

Of Him who walked in glory and in joy

Following his plough, along the mountain-side:

225

226

By our own spirits are we deified:

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Now, whether it were by peculiar grace,

A leading from above, a something given,

Yet it befell that, in this lonely place,

When I with these untoward thoughts had striven,

Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven

I saw a Man before me unawares:

The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie

Couched on the bald top of an eminence;

Wonder to all who do the same espy,

By what means it could thither come, and whence;

13

Rhyme Royal

13

Rhyme Royal

So that it seems a thing endued with sense:

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;

Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead,

Nor all asleep—in his extreme old age:

His body was bent double, feet and head

Coming together in life’s pilgrimage;

As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage

Of sickness felt by him in times long past,

A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.

Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face,

Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood:

And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,

Upon the margin of that moorish flood

227

228

Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,

That heareth not the loud winds when they call,

And moveth all together, if it move at all.

At length, himself unsettling, he the pond

Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look

Upon the muddy water, which he conned,

As if he had been reading in a book:

And now a stranger’s privilege I took;

And, drawing to his side, to him did say,

“This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.”

A gentle answer did the old Man make,

In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew:

And him with further words I thus bespake,

13

Rhyme Royal

13

Rhyme Royal

“What occupation do you there pursue?

This is a lonesome place for one like you.”

Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise

Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes.

His words came feebly, from a feeble chest,

But each in solemn order followed each,

With something of a lofty utterance drest—

Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach

Of ordinary men; a stately speech;

Such as grave Livers do in Scotland use,

Religious men, who give to God and man their dues.

He told, that to these waters he had come

To gather leeches, being old and poor:

229

230

Employment hazardous and wearisome!

And he had many hardships to endure:

From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor;

Housing, with God’s good help, by choice or chance;

And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.

The old Man still stood talking by my side;

But now his voice to me was like a stream

Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;

And the whole body of the Man did seem

Like one whom I had met with in a dream;

Or like a man from some far region sent,

To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills;

13

Rhyme Royal

13

Rhyme Royal

And hope that is unwilling to be fed;

Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;

And mighty Poets in their misery dead.

—Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,

My question eagerly did I renew,

“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”

He with a smile did then his words repeat;

And said that, gathering leeches, far and wide

He travelled; stirring thus about his feet

The waters of the pools where they abide.

“Once I could meet with them on every side;

But they have dwindled long by slow decay;

Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.”

231

232

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,

The old Man’s shape, and speech—all troubled me:

In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace

About the weary moors continually,

Wandering about alone and silently.

While I these thoughts within myself pursued,

He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed.

And soon with this he other matter blended,

Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,

But stately in the main; and, when he ended,

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find

In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.

“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;

I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!”

13

Rhyme Royal

13

Rhyme Royal

233

Compared to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, “Resolution and Independence” is metrically conservative, even though Wordsworth lived two hundred years later. Wordsworth provides variety with a handful of secondary stresses, slack feet, several elisions and feminine endings. A reverence of nature, characteristic of the Romantic Period, is clear here, as is the almost mystical approach to one’s own psychology, which foreshadows certain strains of Modernism. More importantly for our purposes, some of the power of Wordsworth’s poem depends upon the way he exploits rhyme royal’s asymmetrical tensions. If we look at syntax, imagery and ideas throughout this poem there is an extraordinary fluidity and playfulness. The stanzas are never quite the same in their structure, alternating among all sorts of patterns that only such a complex stanza structure can suggest. In an unpublished essay, Rebekah Martindale1 identifies this playfulness with great clarity and accuracy: [In the first stanza,] after three lines of general setting of the scene, Wordsworth introduces another general idea about the singing of the birds, but these are followed by more detailed descriptions of the birds. So is the middle “b” line completing a quatrain of general background scenery or is it the beginning of a pair of couplets about birds? Here the middle “b” line is constructed as a true transition line. In the following stanza the middle “b” line also seems to be a transition line as “The hare is running races in her mirth;” could be a stand-alone sentence. Further, it is linked topically to both the general description of nature in the lines before it and the specific description of what the hare is doing as she runs in the three lines below it. However, Wordsworth avoids monotony by using the conjunction “and” to link the middle “b” line with the final three lines, giving the stanza more of a terza rima plus two couplets feel. Then, in stanza three, Wordsworth begins the action of his narrative and the constructions start to change. Here the middle “b” line is clearly linked to the preceding lines, giving the stanza the feeling of a quatrain followed by a tercet. He proceeds with this construction through stanza eight. These stanzas are also marked by a shift in topic between the quatrain and the tercet. For example, in the stanza above, he goes from a tangible description of what he saw and heard in the quatrain to a description of his internal thoughts in the tercet. Martindale pursues this kind of analysis throughout the entire poem, showing just how aware Wordsworth is of what he is making. The closer we look, the more it seems that Wordsworth is everywhere conscious of exactly how this stanza works and is using its asymmetrical tension to his advantage. Further, we do not necessarily need to tie this tension explicitly to the theme of the poem. That is too easy. Rather we should, at least at first, simply seek to describe it. This may seem to be a strange approach, but the more you try to read in this way, in what may seem like a

1

One of Rothman’s former graduate students.

234

13

Rhyme Royal

paradox, the more significant the words may become. This is because the intense patterning inherent in forms like rhyme royal is itself one basis for the meaningfulness of poems. Martindale has identified one of the things that strong poets do: they draw upon patterned language to create imaginative energy. Notice, again, that Wordsworth does not seek to resolve the tension in the stanza, but rather to heighten and exploit it, playing with it in all sorts of ways. This is one of the deep truths of craft: sometimes independence comes from choosing not to seek an easy resolution. Student Poem My Heart Lies with the Wild / Kyle Meienberg

/ / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | For now above the western sky, / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | I see a sun so bright and gold, / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - | It sets the clouds ablaze with dye, / / / u -| u - | u - |u - | New rainbows form with colors bold, / / / u - |u -|u - | u - | A rain is fading with the cold, / / \ / / (u) - || u | u - |u - | Ah! The warmth has come at last, / / / / u - | u - | u - | u | A new surprise since day has passed.

Diction: “dye”

Awkward rhetorical reversal: “bold colors”.

13

Rhyme Royal

/ / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | I gaze toward the mountains high, / \ / / u - | u - | u - |u - | Where snow has not yet gone away, / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | And rock so bare up there does sigh,

235

Awkward rhetorical reversal: “high mountains”. “Toward” should have the primary stress above the syllable to-”

Wordy: “bare rock”. “so” and “does” require secondary stresses.

/ / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | As mountains see the light of May, / / / u -| u - | u | u - | As sunshine glints all through the day, / \ / / u - |u - |u-| u - | In places that I so much love,

“all” should have a secondary stress and “through” should have a primary stress. Reversal: “love so much”.

/ / \ / / u - | u - | u - |u - | Amidst the clouds so high above. / / / / u - |u - | u -| u - | I look upon the forests fair, / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | So green they seem without the snow, / / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | In valleys low, on hills not bare,

Reversal: “fair forests”.

“So” should have a secondary stress. Diction: is there a word for “not bare”?

236

13

/ / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | The meadows green so far below,

Rhyme Royal

“so” should have a secondary stress.

/ / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | With lovely lakes, and streams that flow, / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - | To falls that barely seem that high, / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | But there my heart will always lie. Kyle Meienberg gives us a technically excellent first draft whose syntax and diction are a bit awkward, showing once again how difficult it is to master all aspects of writing a poem in meter and rhyme. In revision, the poet should probably consider changing some of his syntactic reversals; he has placed adjectives after the nouns they modify to accommodate the meter and rhyme scheme, giving the poem an archaic tone. His use of phrases like “streams that flow” seems odd, as what else would streams do? But this is still a good thing; he is working hard to make the meter and rhymes work, and when this happens sense is often disrupted a bit. You already know how to make sentences; let the metrical muse take over, then rein it back in. His effort shows how hard he is trying to do that, and it bears repeating that this is a good thing. This is exactly how to learn how to write verse. We have marked a few spots that beg for a more precise word to bring the poem to life. Kyle’s poem is also highly regular metrically, and he could consider adding more variation. In short, he has fulfilled the stanzaic and metrical requirements of rhyme royal, and now he needs to revise for the sense requirements of idiomatic English. This does not mean making the poem sound exactly like speech. After all, it rhymes. But in the end, we generally do not want readers to feel that syntax and diction have been manipulated just to get the meter and rhyme to work. It should feel like a complicated dance where they meet each other somewhere in the middle. In any event, this poem is a good place for Kyle to be; it shows he is listening carefully to the resonance of the rules, which is an important step to mastering them. The Exercise Write two or three rhyme royal stanzas of your own. Remember that this is just a taste; these stanzas generally appear in groups, if not full narratives. The point is to start to get the feel of it and how it differs from other stanza forms.

13

Rhyme Royal

Long, Strong English Poems in Rhyme Royal Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; The Parlement of Foules James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” William Morris, “The Earthly Paradise” John Masefield, Dauber W. H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron”

237

Ottava Rima

14

As we pointed out in the preceding chapter, the more complex stanza forms are built from the simpler elements of couplet, tercet and quatrain. It is intriguing that, first, these forms are the ones, out of many possibilities in each case, that became the standard; and second, how the addition of a single line makes things so much more complex in each case. As we now move back to an even number of lines with ottava rima, “eight rhymes,” we once again have a form that emphasizes symmetry, though now in a much more extended format than the couplet or quatrain. In English, ottava rima is generally eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc. It appears first in 14th century Italian poetry and was probably invented by Boccaccio, who also wrote the great prose work for which he is best remembered, The Decameron. For several centuries ottava rima was the primary form of long narrative poems in Italian, including many of the most highly regarded long works in that language, notably Boccaccio’s Filostrato (c. 1335) and Teseide (1340), Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Ottava rima appears in English in the 17th century but usually only in translation of Italian works. It became a major English form in the hands of Byron in the early 19th century when he used it in what is still one of the funniest, most fiery long poems in the language, Don Juan. The stanza has been used by other great poets to different, and generally shorter, ends since then. Perhaps the most famous are by William Butler Yeats, in the 20th century, in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children.” It is worthwhile to consider what happens when we move from the Venus and Adonis stanza through rhyme royal to ottava rima. Once again, the addition of a single line changes everything, pushing the asymmetrical seven-line stanza into a more regular 8-line form. Consider: ababbcc becomes abababcc. The addition of the

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_14

239

240

14

Ottava Rima

single “a” rhyme in the middle of the stanza transforms the whole thing. It now no longer has the bifurcated structure that allows one to see it as either a tercet linked to two couplets, or a quatrain linked to a lopsided tercet. There is far less ambiguity in ottava rima: it presents three rhyme-tied couplets followed by a separate heroic couplet. One is not better or easier than the other; it is the fascinating differences caused by the simple change that are noteworthy. And for those who enjoy the numbers, we will simply point out that there are exactly three times as many possibilities of how one might organize an eight-line stanza with three rhymes as there are for a seven-line stanza with three rhymes, so 486
3 = 1,464. Why, then, this one? We leave it to you. The great challenge of ottava rima for poets writing in English is to come up with two strong sets of three rhymes in each stanza; this may be what has led most poets who use it in long forms into comic or even intentional doggerel rhyming, of which Byron was one of the great masters in the history of the language. His rhymes are so inventive that they created a musical verse style, widely imitated but rarely if ever equaled. In fact, Byron’s life, good looks and bad-boy rock-star behavior, coupled with a tremendous creative gift, swashbuckling charisma and radical politics made him one of the most famous artists in the world during the 19th century, though he is less well-known today, which is a shame. In America at that time, he was one of most widely imitated of English poets, along with Sir Walter Scott and a few others, such as Milton. After reading the passage below, it is not hard to see why. For Byron, rhyme was no stricture, but something that liberated his imagination. Every stanza exudes insouciance, as if the poet threw them off while playing darts, swimming the Hellespont, and drinking sack, which perhaps he did. In his hands rhyme is a joyous provocation to invention, a wise approach. He achieved what few ever have, a sly, self-conscious acknowledgment that many of the rhymes are a stretch, which he conveys by their obvious extravagance, along with a story and characters so compellingly drawn that the excesses of the rhyme and metrical play only make the story that much more delightful. A more technical way to observe this is to suggest that at the same time as Byron follows the metrical strictures of this highly regular form, he plays against it lexically and syntactically, endlessly defeating expectations of how sentences and rhymes should work to create variation, tension and surprise. Below we provide a substantial excerpt from the first Canto of Byron’s great poem, which is many books long, and Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” For further study of the ottava rima stanza as it continues to be used in long narrative poems, see Anthony Burgess’s last work, Byrne, published in 1995, which is a full novel in this stanza. Poems of the Past Lord Byron wrote Don Juan in seventeen lengthy cantos, all in stanzas of perfectly finessed ottava rima. The narrative chronicles the escapades of Don Juan, a rapscallion. Upon publication it was considered risqué yet was tremendously popular.

14

Ottava Rima

241

In this justly celebrated passage, the 16-year-old Don Juan and the older (midtwenties) married woman Dona Inez enjoy a stimulating conversation. Don Juan / George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) Canto the First (stanzas 102–117)

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | It was upon a day, a summer’s day;— / / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - u | Summer’s indeed a very dangerous season, / / / / / u -|u - |u -|u - |u - | And so is spring about the end of May; / \ / / / u - || u - || u - | u - | u - u | The sun, no doubt, is the prevailing reason; \ / / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u || - | u - | But whatsoe’er the cause is, one may say, / / \ / / u - | u -|u -| u - | u - u| And stand convicted of more truth than treason, / / / / \ / u - | u | u -|u - | u u | That there are months which nature grows more merry in,— / / / \ / / u - | u - || u |u - | u - u | March has its hares, and May must have its heroine.

/ / / / / u -|u - | u - || u - | u - | ‘Twas on a summer’s day—the sixth of June:— / / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | I like to be particular in dates,

242

14

/ / / / u - | u - | u - || u - || u - | Not only of the age, and year, but moon; / / / \ / u - |u - |u - | u || - | u - | They are a sort of post-house, where the Fates \ / / / / / u - | u || - | u - | u - | u - | Change horses, making history change its tune, / / / / u - | u -| u - | u - | u | Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states, / / \ / / / u - |u - | u - |u - | u - u u | Leaving at last not much besides chronology, / \ / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - u u | Excepting the post-obits of theology.

‘Twas on the sixth of June, about the hour

Of half-past six–perhaps still nearer seven–

When Julia sate within as pretty a bower

As e’er held hour in that heathenish heaven

Described by Mahomet, and Anacreon Moore,

To whom the lyre and laurels have been given,

With all the trophies of triumphant song–

Ottava Rima

14

Ottava Rima

He won them well, and may he wear them long!

She sate, but not alone; I know not well

How this same interview had taken place,

And even if I knew, I should not tell–

People should hold their tongues in any case;

No matter how or why the thing befell,

But there were she and Juan, face to face–

When two such faces are so, ‘t would be wise,

But very difficult, to shut their eyes.

How beautiful she look’d! her conscious heart

Glow’d in her cheek, and yet she felt no wrong.

O Love! how perfect is thy mystic art,

Strengthening the weak, and trampling on the strong,

How self-deceitful is the sagest part

243

244

Of mortals whom thy lure hath led along–

The precipice she stood on was immense,

So was her creed in her own innocence.

She thought of her own strength, and Juan’s youth,

And of the folly of all prudish fears,

Victorious virtue, and domestic truth,

And then of Don Alfonso’s fifty years:

I wish these last had not occurr’d, in sooth,

Because that number rarely much endears,

And through all climes, the snowy and the sunny,

Sounds ill in love, whate’er it may in money.

When people say, ‘I’ve told you fifty times,’

They mean to scold, and very often do;

When poets say, ‘I’ve written fifty rhymes,’

14

Ottava Rima

14

Ottava Rima

They make you dread that they’ll recite them too; In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes;

At fifty love for love is rare, ‘tis true,

But then, no doubt, it equally as true is,

A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

Julia had honour, virtue, truth, and love,

For Don Alfonso; and she inly swore,

By all the vows below to powers above,

She never would disgrace the ring she wore,

Nor leave a wish which wisdom might reprove;

And while she ponder’d this, besides much more,

One hand on Juan’s carelessly was thrown,

Quite by mistake–she thought it was her own;

245

246

Unconsciously she lean’d upon the other,

Which play’d within the tangles of her hair:

And to contend with thoughts she could not smother

She seem’d by the distraction of her air.

‘Twas surely very wrong in Juan’s mother

To leave together this imprudent pair,

She who for many years had watch’d her son so–

I’m very certain mine would not have done so.

The hand which still held Juan’s, by degrees

Gently, but palpably confirm’d its grasp,

As if it said, ‘Detain me, if you please;’

Yet there’s no doubt she only meant to clasp

His fingers with a pure Platonic squeeze:

14

Ottava Rima

14

Ottava Rima

She would have shrunk as from a toad, or asp,

Had she imagined such a thing could rouse

A feeling dangerous to a prudent spouse.

I cannot know what Juan thought of this,

But what he did, is much what you would do;

His young lip thank’d it with a grateful kiss,

And then, abash’d at its own joy, withdrew

In deep despair, lest he had done amiss,–

Love is so very timid when ‘tis new:

She blush’d, and frown’d not, but she strove to speak,

And held her tongue, her voice was grown so weak.

The sun set, and up rose the yellow moon:

The devil’s in the moon for mischief; they

Who call’d her CHASTE, methinks, began too soon

247

248

Their nomenclature; there is not a day,

The longest, not the twenty-first of June,

Sees half the business in a wicked way

On which three single hours of moonshine smile–

And then she looks so modest all the while.

There is a dangerous silence in that hour,

A stillness, which leaves room for the full soul

To open all itself, without the power

Of calling wholly back its self-control;

The silver light which, hallowing tree and tower,

Sheds beauty and deep softness o’er the whole,

Breathes also to the heart, and o’er it throws

A loving languor, which is not repose.

And Julia sate with Juan, half embraced

14

Ottava Rima

14

Ottava Rima

And half retiring from the glowing arm,

Which trembled like the bosom where ‘twas placed;

Yet still she must have thought there was no harm,

Or else ‘twere easy to withdraw her waist;

But then the situation had its charm,

And then–God knows what next–I can’t go on;

I’m almost sorry that I e’er begun.

O Plato! Plato! you have paved the way,

With your confounded fantasies, to more

Immoral conduct by the fancied sway

Your system feigns o’er the controulless core

Of human hearts, than all the long array

Of poets and romancers:–You’re a bore,

A charlatan, a coxcomb–and have been,

249

250

14

Ottava Rima

At best, no better than a go-between.

And Julia’s voice was lost, except in sighs,

Until too late for useful conversation;

The tears were gushing from her gentle eyes,

I wish indeed they had not had occasion,

But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?

Not that remorse did not oppose temptation;

A little still she strove, and much repented,

And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’–consented. Byron’s verse is regular, yet filled with cunning surprises, especially in his rhymes, which are virtuosic. Consider stanza one, lines seven and eight: they end with “merry in” and “heroine,” setting up a mis-matched set of glides (the first a y-glide, the second a w-glide) that nonetheless work. This kind of humor requires perfect timing, and therefore perfect measuring. Throughout the poem, Byron manipulates all sorts of pronunciations in this way. When most people do this, it fails miserably. But when Byron does it, it feels obviously and clearly intentional, and always seems to work. Of course, your ottava rima stanzas do not have to achieve this level of sophistication. If they do, you may stop reading this book and proceed directly to Parnassus. But we encourage you to work hard at your rhymes while drafting several of these eight-line stanzas. And do not skip scanning Byron on your own. His meter is as rich and fluid as his wordplay. Scansion is how we learn the rhythms of English poetry and incorporate them into our consciousness.

14

Ottava Rima

251

Sailing to Byzantium / W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) I

/ \ / \ / / u - | u - | u - | u - || u | That is no country for old men. The young / / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | In one another's arms, birds in the trees, / / / u - | u - |u - | u || - | u - | —Those dying generations—at their song, / \ / \ / u -| u - || u - |u - |u - | The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, / / / / \ / / u || - | u - || u - | u - | u - | Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long / / / / / u -| u - | u - | u || - || u - | Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. / / / / / u -| u - |u - |u - | u -| Caught in that sensual music all neglect / / / u - |u -|u - | u -|u - | Monuments of unageing intellect. II

/ / / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | u - | An aged man is but a paltry thing, / / / / / u-| u - | u - | u - || u - | A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Reversal in foot four possible after the caesura.

Elision on “mack’rel”.

Two strong stresses in foot one alliteration increases the stress.

252

14

Ottava Rima

\ / / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / / / / u -| u - | u - | u - | u - | For every tatter in its mortal dress, / / / / u -| u - | u - | u -|u- | Nor is there singing school but studying / / / u -| u - | u - | u - |u - | Monuments of its own magnificence;

reversal in foot one

/ / / / / u - | u -| u - |u - | u - | And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / / / u u -|u -|u -|u -|u - | To the holy city of Byzantium.

III O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

trisyllabic substitution (or elision) in foot one

14

Ottava Rima

253

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come. Yeats’ poem opens with a line now recognizable as the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Notice the richness of description and the music of the alliteration. Yeats includes several trisyllabic substitutions, though they always also appear in places where an elision of speech, even if not marked in the text, is easily possible, e.g. “ev’ry” or “to th’holy.” He also uses all sorts of off-balance rhymes, e.g. rhyming on unstressed syllables or at a bit of a slant.

254

14

Ottava Rima

Student Poem Untitled / Kate Lewis

/ / / \ / u - |u - |u || - | u - | u - | In Alabama, cotton was the king / / \ / / u-| u-| u - | u -| u - | Until a letter turned Birmingham Jail / / / / / u -|u -|u - | u - | u - | From silent prison walls to hearts that sing. / / \ / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Despite a Ku Klux Klan, justice prevails,

No stress on “Al-”.

“turned” should be primary. Powerful.

Compelling reversal in foot four, but it is not scanned correctly.

\ / / / / \ / u - | u -| u -| u || - | u - | All men created equal: words that ring.

No stress on “that”.

/ / / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | Against oppression, broken souls set sail,

“set” needs a secondary.

/ \ / / / u - | u - | u -| u - | u - | A world in which all colors form the team,

“all” needs a secondary.

/ \ / / \ / / u - | u - || u - |u - |u | The true king speaks, “Today I have a dream.” Although ottava rima has been used in the past for longer narrative poems, you do not need to do so. Kate Lewis wrote this fine lyric tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in one stanza of ottava rima, which lends a tone of dignity to the poem. We delight in the seriousness and ambition of this poem, especially the double meaning of the word “king” in the final line. The meter works almost all the way through, though the scansion needs some work. The one line that is a bit weak is “A world in which all colors form the team,” as the rhyme is driven by the understandable desire to end the poem with the phrase “I have a dream.” Imagine how much better it will be after revision.

14

Ottava Rima

255

The Exercise Scan two stanzas of Byron or Yeats, and then write three scanned stanzas of your own. Remember that this is just a taste; these forms generally appear in groups, if not full narratives. Long, Strong English Poems in Ottava Rima Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas” Keats, “Isabella” Byron, Don Juan Emma Lazarus, “An Epistle” Anthony Burgess, Byrne

Spenserian Stanzas

15

Like all the more complex stanza forms, the nine-line Spenserian stanza begins with a heroic quatrain but then expands on the form, in this case by adding a second, linked quatrain and a concluding couplet which in turn links to the second quatrain, making the stanza look and feel like a super-charged rhyme royal. This means that the stanza is nine lines long, rhyming ababbcbcc, all iambic pentameter except for the final line of each stanza, which is a hexameter. One of the great difficulties here, obviously, is the necessity of finding three c rhymes and no fewer than four b rhymes for each stanza. This is difficult, if not impossible to sustain, unless, like Spenser, one chooses to appropriate a self-consciously archaic diction and syntax. In English, the next jump up in stanza length from the Spenserian stanza has traditionally been to the sonnet, which has a very different structure and history as a fixed lyrical form (though see our coda on the Eugene Onegin stanza). As a result, it is worth pausing to place Venus and Adonis stanzas, rhyme royal, ottava rima, and the Spenserian stanza next to each other to see how these stanza forms vary as they become more and more complex. They all have similar sources, mostly in Italian, and are closely associated in a number of ways; they constitute a group. If we lay out the patterns of the longer repeating stanza forms as a matrix, we can see all the structures of English stanzas as an intriguing set of patterns:

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9_15

257

258

15

V&A RR

OR

SS

a

a

a

a

b

b

b

b

a

a

a

a

b

b

b

b

c

b

a

b

c

c

b

c

c

c

b

c

c

Spenserian Stanzas

c There are many ways to think about the increasing complexity of these stanzas, but here are a few observations to provoke you to further thought: Each opens with a heroic quatrain. Each concludes with a couplet based on a third rhyme. Each uses only three rhymes. Each creates greater rhyming complexity as the number of lines increases by inserting new lines between the opening quatrain (abab) and the final couplet (cc). So, the rhyme royal introduces an extra “b” rhyme after the quatrain (ababbcc), and the ottava rima introduces a new ab couplet (abababcc), and the Spenserian stanza, most cunning, challenging and complex of all, inserts a new linked quatrain after the first quatrain that itself links to the final couplet (ababbcbcc). In each case, the material after the quatrain always builds on the three-rhyme set (a, b, c), and one could keep going here, as do many of the fixed lyrical forms (ballade, triolet, rondeau and so on). There are good reasons for all this development in these forms. After all, there are many, many other possible and interesting rhyme patterns which might have followed similar rules for the generation of six-, seven-, eight- and nine-line stanzas and yet looked rather different (e.g. abcbcc, abbccb, ababbcb, abcbbcc and so on). The list is finite but large, yet these are the ones that the strongest poets used for the major works of such stanza lengths. Why? Do these forms possess an inherent strength that the other possibilities do not? A good question in every case.

15

Spenserian Stanzas

259

Spenserian stanzas were invented by one of the first great English poets, the one whom Saintsbury believes to have hung the prosodical moon, Sir Edmund Spenser, towards the end of the 16th century. He used this stanza form to write The Faerie Queene, which remains one of the most influential long poems in English. But, who has read it all? It appears that Spenser invented this form himself, but he was surely imitating the Italian ottava rima, and perhaps trying to do the Italians one better, demonstrating once again how English poets felt they needed to adapt ancient metrics and genres, and Italian and French stanzaic and lyrical forms to their own ends. The form is not used much these days, but many English poets did imitate it in the centuries after Spenser’s death, including Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and Adonais, Sir Walter Scott in The Vision of Don Roderick, Burns in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” Wordsworth in “The Female Vagrant” and others. Below is an excerpt from the opening of The Faerie Queene, to give a sense of what can be done with such a form. Among other things you will notice that Spenser uses intentionally archaic terms and spelling, such as ending some of his lines in a Chaucerian style, with an apparent small extra syllable where we would not put one, e.g. “plaine” and “shielde.” It seems unlikely that Spenser would have pronounced these smaller syllables, which appear mostly at his line endings, although Chaucer would have done so. They appear to be an affectation, of the sort we still see now when fantasy novelists use archaic diction such as George R.R. Martin. It is always an interesting question to ask if this works. Spenser was one of the first to do it, and in his case, it almost always seems to succeed. Poems of the Past The Faerie Queene, Canto I (stanzas I-VI) I

/ / / / u -|u - | u -| u - | u - | A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u | Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, \ \ / / \ / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

260

15

/ / / / / u - |u - |u - | u - |u - | The cruel markes of many'a bloudy fielde;

Spenserian Stanzas

Y-glide from foot 3 to 4

/ / \ / / / u - | u -| u -| u - |u - | Yet armes till that time did he never wield: / / / / / u -| u - | u - | u - |u - | His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, / / / / u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: \ / / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, / / / / / / u - | u - |u - | u - |u - | u - | As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. II

\ / / / / u - | u - |u - |u - | u - | And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, / / / / u - |u - | u -| u -|u - | The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, / \ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u - | u - | For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, / / / / / u - | u - | u - |u - | u - | And dead as living ever him ador'd:

y-glide in foot four

15

Spenserian Stanzas

261

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - | u -| u - | Upon his shield the like was also scor'd, / / \ / / u - |u - || u - | u - | u - | For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had:

elision in foot two “sov’raine”

\ / / \ / / u - |u - |u - | u - | u | Right faithfull true he was in deede and word, / / \ / / u -| u - | u - | u - | u - | But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; / \ / / \ / u - | u - | u - || u -| u - | u - | Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

“Ydrad” is a strong example of how Spenser uses archaic diction. Like us, he probably would have said “dreaded” in his own ordinary speech.

III

/ / / / u - |u - |u -| u - | u - | Upon a great adventure he was bond,

/ / / u - | u - |u- |u - | u - | That greatest Gloriana to him gave, / / / / / u - |u - | u |u - |u - | That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,

y-glide in “Glorious”

/ / / / u - | u - | u || - | u - | u - | To winne him worship, and her grace to have, / \ / / / \ / u -|u - |u - | u - | u | Which of all earthly things he most did crave;

reversal in foot one

262

15

/ \ / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | And ever as he rode, his hart did earne / / / / u - | u -|u - | u - | u - | To prove his puissance in battell brave / / \ / / u - | u - || u - | u - |u | Upon his foe, and his new force to learne; / / / / / u - | u - || u - | u - | u - | u | Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. IV

A lovely Ladie rode him faire beside,

Upon a lowly Asse more white then snow,

Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide

Under a vele, that wimpled was full low,

And over all a blacke stole she did throw,

As one that inly mournd: so was she sad,

And heavie sat upon her palfrey slow;

Seemed in heart some hidden care she had,

And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad.

Spenserian Stanzas

15

Spenserian Stanzas

V

So pure and innocent, as that same lambe,

She was in life and every vertuous lore,

And by descent from Royall lynage came

Of ancient Kings and Queenes, that had of yore

Their scepters stretcht from East to Westerne shore,

And all the world in their subjection held;

Till that infernall feend with foule uprore

Forwasted all their land, and them expeld:

Whom to avenge, she had this Knight from far compeld.

VI

Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag,

That lasie seemd in being ever last,

263

264

15

Spenserian Stanzas

Or wearied with bearing of her bag Of needments at his backe. Thus as they past,

The day with cloudes was suddeine overcast,

And angry Jove an hideous storme of raine

Did poure into his Lemans lap so fast,

That everie wight to shrowd it did constrain,

And this faire couple eke to shroud themselves were fain. Although Spenser (1552–1599) and Shakespeare (1564–1616) lived at roughly the same time, their metrical styles differ. While Shakespeare often uses reversals, headless lines, feminine endings and frequent strong secondary stresses, Spenser’s lines align more closely to the metrical pattern. In the stanzas above, there are y-glides and elisions but few secondary stresses which could add variety to the lines. Nevertheless, Spenser’s opening stanzas of The Faerie Queene are beautiful and musical. He lays down the exposition for his lengthy narrative in nine-line stanzas using only three rhymes and ending with a hexameter line. He does this thousands of times over, creating the model in English for all modern fantasy romance.

15

Spenserian Stanzas

265

Student Poem Struggle for Originality / Nick Bergh

/ / / / / | u - | u - | u - || u - | u You are the light in life, and more clichés / / / / / | u - || u - | u - | u - | u Like that; and can express deep feelings in / \ \ / / / u -|u - | u || - | u - | u Original ways. Over here I’m glazed

|

\ / \ / / | u -| u - |u-| u - | u With inability to create spin / \ / / / u - || u - | u - | u - | u - | That’s fresh, and that has never had a twin.

No secondary over “-nal”; primary over “ways.”

No secondary on “in-” and “-y”; “create” is mis-scanned

/ / / / / u - || u - | u -| u - | u | I’d rave of ways you always lift my mood,

/ / \ / / u - | u - | u - | u - |u - | Or keep my path away from deadly sins.

“-ay” is primary

/ / / / / u - | u - | u - || u - | u - | But that’s been said before. I must conclude: / / \ / / / u - |u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | The greatest love is shown by when you share your food. Primary on “shown”

266

15

Spenserian Stanzas

Nick Bergh has used just one Spenserian stanza to write a lyric poem that humorously concludes that one of the greatest delights in life is having a lover who will share her lunch. Like every student poem in this book, this is a draft written over several days, which makes it a strong draft but not without problems. For example, in line one, the context would be stronger if Bergh had written “you are the light in my life.” That, however, would not have been metrical. This is the battle between sound and sense, and this battle is worth fighting. Perhaps: “You are my life’s light” or “You are the light in my dim life.” Almost always, there is a surprisingly simple and elegant solution. In line two, the poet uses a semi-colon improperly, as it does not join two independent clauses. Do not forget the rules of grammar and mechanics when writing verse. “Glazed” at the end of line three seems a convenient rhyme with “clichés.” In fact, it is, but it does not tie in with the rest of the poem. Perhaps compound the humor when the lovers share a doughnut? In that case, the word “glazed” would be a sweet, pun intended, foreshadowing. “Twin” likewise is too convenient a rhyme with “sins.” Could the poet revise and make the meaning more intentional? Finally, the passive voice in the final line is weak.

/ / \ / / / u - |u - |u - | u - | u - | u - | The greatest love is shown by when you share your food. The passive verb phrase “is shown by when you” buries the true subject, “you,” in a prepositional phrase. Active voice could make this line much stronger. “You love me best when….” “I love you most when you….” Active voice opens the door to livelier concluding lines. The poet skillfully uses all the syllables in “original” in line three and “inability” in line four. For a poet with this strong an understanding of meter and a witty theme, the suggested revisions are worth the word-wrangling. Exercise Scan a few stanzas from any of the major poems in Spensarian stanzas, and write a few, scanned, yourself. This might also be a good place to meditate for a paragraph or two on your own experience of reading and writing the 6/7/8/9-line stanza forms. Long, Strong English Poems in Spenserian Stanzas Spenser, The Faerie Queene Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” Shelley, Revolt of Islam and Adonais Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters” William Cullen Bryant, “The Ages”

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning

The Eugene Onegin Stanza Until recently, the Spenserian stanza would have been considered the longest standard stanza form used in any long narrative poem in English. This is now changing, because of the success of Vikram Seth’s 1986 novel in verse The Golden Gate. Seth’s novel, which was in part inspired by Charles Johnston’s 1977 translation of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, is a tour de force in the 14-line Russian stanza form that Pushkin used, which is generally iambic tetrameter, rhyming aBaBccDDeFFeGG. In this case the capital letters indicate “feminine” or hypermetrical endings, which include one unstressed syllable after the stressed rhyme (e.g. winter / splinter, water / otter, happy / sappy), and the lower-case letters indicate “masculine” endings. It is worth noting here that the terms “masculine” and “feminine,” which we have been using in this book, come from French, where they indicate linguistic gender and have nothing whatsoever to do with sex. All French nouns have gender, and all adjectives are modified to agree with those nouns, usually by the addition of a very small extra syllable at the end of the word, generally a schwa, or final “e” with minimal pronunciation but still nevertheless extending the word by a single syllable. So, for example, the noun “chapeau,” which means “hat” is masculine, so a green hat would be “un chapeau vert.” But “maison,” the word for house, is feminine, so if we want to say “a green house,” we must modify both the article “un” to “une,” and the adjective “vert” to “verte”: “Une maison verte.” That little, almost unspoken “e” at the end of “verte” is the extra syllable required by the feminine inflection. Transferred into English, like the terms of classical meter, the term “feminine ending” makes no sense, as English has no such required inflections. Green is green. But in a language like French, these gender inflections are necessary to make the language construe. Hence the term “feminine ending” in English has no meaningful tie to English grammar or prosody and has nothing to do with male or female qualities; it is a linguistic construction.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9

267

268

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning

Even a single stanza well-executed in the Eugene Onegin stanza is complex, and Seth does an extraordinary job of telling a convincing tale in the form, with fully realized plot and characters, all set in contemporary California. Here is but one stanza: How ugly babies are! How heedless Of all else than their bulging selves— Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless Kneadable flesh—like mutant elves, Plump and vindictively nocturnal, With lungs determined and infernal (A pity that the blubbering blobs Come unequipped with volume knobs), And so intrinsically conservative, A change of breast will make them squall With no restraint or qualm at all. Some think them cuddly, cute, and curative. Keep them, I say. Good luck to you; No doubt you need to be one too. Note that Seth follows the form right down to the types of rhymes in each line. Since the publication of Seth’s book, a number of other authors in America, England and Australia have taken up the form for full-length narratives, with surprising success in some cases. These include Jack the Lady Killer (1999) by HRF Keating; Ghost Writer (2007) and 1948 (2012) by Andy Croft; Unholyland (2016) by Aidan Andrew Dun; and Richard Burgin (2017) by Diana Burgin. While it is too early yet to say whether this spate of books constitutes more than a trend, it does seem safe to say that Modernism has not killed the long narrative poem in rhyme and meter. This is hardly surprising, as it has been a staple of poetry in English for well over six hundred years, since rhyme established itself in the language, and it seems unlikely to go away simply because some poets or academics feel that it should. It satisfies too many basic human needs, bringing together all the resources that the language has to help us tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Further, poets who want to tell such long stories in verse in English seem determined to seek out interesting, innovative, compelling ways to do so in rhyming stanzas and continue to import new resources into the language to that end. This story is far from over. Perhaps you will be part of it. The Nonce Stanza The growing popularity of the Eugene Onegin stanza reminds us just how malleable and changeable the tradition of versecraft is. Far from being a static, fixed entity, it is always developing, something we can see if we step back from thinking our own moment is the only moment. As we hope is now obvious, literary history makes it clear that the only thing required to modify the tradition is being a strong enough poet to get away with it. While the origins of many stanza forms and meters are

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning

269

collective, and while it always takes the work of many thousands of writers and readers to make a lasting change, even the names of many of the now-canonical stanza forms we have studied demonstrate that individual poets invented many of them. From syllabics, invented by Elizabeth Daryush, to blank verse, invented by the Earl of Surrey, to terza rima, invented by Dante, to the Sapphic, to Tennyson’s In Memoriam stanza, the Spenserian stanza, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin stanza and many more, that which was at first a nonce meter or stanza—dreamed up for the occasion at hand—eventually changed the literary landscape permanently. We have seen other nonce stanzas in previous chapters that were not widely imitated but are tremendously successful in the poems where they appear, including the complex five-line stanza Shelley used in “To a Skylark,” which we mentioned above but did not quote. Here are the first several stanzas. See if you can figure out Shelley’s extraordinarily inventive meter and stanza form: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O’er which clouds are bright’ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. While Shelley’s stanza never caught on as a major form, it certainly works in this poem, and was far from the only such innovation he pursued. Another example we have used is Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” a wonderfully inventive rhyming free-verse stanza. In fact, many if not most strong poets pursue innovative meters and stanzas at one time or another. The history of poetry is full of them. Among other things, Surrey not only developed the English sonnet and blank verse, but he and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt tried out scores of inventive metrical and stanzas forms, some adapted from other languages, others principled innovations in English. The work of the Provençal troubadours presents an endless array of complex and delightful nonce forms, as does every other period of intense creativity, in every language. Almost every Romantic-era ode has its own distinctive stanza structure, Keats’s being exemplary.

270

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning

Innovation with stanza forms has continued up to and into the present. Recent virtuosic examples would include Donald Hall’s poem “Baseball,” a poem of nine stanzas, each of which has nine lines, with each line exactly nine syllables long, and John Hollander’s book Powers of Thirteen, in which all the lines have 13 syllables, all the stanzas are thirteen lines, and there are 169 such stanzas (13
13 = 169). The gifted poet, critic, librettist and teacher Ernest Hilbert has developed a sonnet now widely called “The Hilbertian Sonnet.” As he writes of his own invention: The Hilbertian sonnet is the name sardonically given by Daniel Nester to a type of sonnet I devised for my book Sixty Sonnets. As a departure, or, as some have suggested, an “Americanization,” of the traditional sonnet forms (Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian), it employs the rhyme scheme ABCABC DEFDEF GG. This allows me to dust off the Italian “little song” and modernize the Elizabethan love poem. The creation of double sestets owes merely and only to my affection for the number six. However, the spreading of the rhymes allows me to develop more internal rhyme than a traditional sonnet might successfully sustain. Other authors who have used the form include novelist Dave King, poet and playwright David Yezzi, translator (from the Swedish) Bill Coyle, scholar James Matthew Wilson, and poet Amy Lemmon, who teaches at the Fashion Institute in Manhattan. Lemmon wrote “Asymptotic” as a response to my poem “Symmetries.” Hey, why not write one of your own? The student Kate Lewis, whose nonce-meter poem “Kaleidoscope” we discussed above in Chapter Eight, “Nonce Meters,” also fashioned that poem as a nonce stanza, and a well-executed one at that. In doing so, she is joining an ancient conversation and extending a tradition that goes back to the very beginning, long before English even existed. The trick to understanding how to create nonce meters, stanza forms and lyrical forms, which we do not discuss here, though the same holds true, is that you do have to know what came before, so that your innovation is actually an innovation. If you want to join a conversation, you must understand what people have been saying before you came on the scene. Hilbert’s brief comment above makes this as clear as glass. But if you have worked your way through this book to this point, you now have a substantial piece of that knowledge. So, get on with it and create a repeating nonce-stanza. What rhyme scheme appeals to you that you have never seen before? What lengths of lines would you like to use? What meter, or meters, or free verse form? Lay it out, and then see if you can do it at least three times in a row, in one poem. As Hilbert writes, “Hey, why not write one of your own?”

Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning

271

A Conclusion and a Beginning You have now studied and practiced every major meter in English and every major repeating stanza form that appears in our major long narrative poems and in many fine lyrical poems as well. This is a rare body of knowledge and practice that gives you access as a reader and as a writer to some of the great traditions across the entire history of English poetry. What you make of this skill and knowledge is now up to you. We have written this book in the hope that it will survive us, and we hope you will practice what it has to offer and pass it on. There is much more to learn about fixed lyrical forms, about translation, about the history of the English language and of prosody in English and in every other language, about verse drama, and narrative poetry, and ultimately of the life you might lead if you make this art a meaningful part of it. But this is enough for now. Begin.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English1

The following essay and bibliography may be of use to advanced students and teachers. While not complete, it is thorough, and covers the territory more fully than any other such bibliography. Indeed, it could form the basis of a serious study of how poetry has been taught in English for hundreds of years. Perhaps that will be our next book. Few fields have ever been transformed by bibliographical work in the way that literary prosody was changed by the publication of T. V. F. Brogan’s English Versification, 1570–1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix (or “EVRG” to its admirers).2 It is no exaggeration to say that what Brogan accomplished is comparable to what Samuel Johnson did when he wrote his dictionary. Over the course of three years, Brogan read, organized, indexed, cross-indexed and pithily critiqued over 6,000 works of literary prosody in 15 categories, recording his observations on index cards! This is a feat never accomplished or even undertaken in the history of a field that stretches back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Although Brogan focuses on English, he also includes more than 2,000 entries that discuss more than thirty other languages as well. Anyone remotely interested in the study of literary prosody—indeed, of poetry—should own this book. It is a completely original study, one of the indisputable works of genius in the field of literary study over the last fifty years. Brogan’s organizational intelligence is so accurate and graceful that he created entire realms of new knowledge simply by describing and collating what already existed.3

Earlier versions of this essay and bibliography were first presented at the 15th Annual West Chester Poetry Conference in June, 2009, in a panel titled “Poetry Handbooks: A Guide to the Perplexed, then reprinted in Contemporary Poetry Review.” Rothman wishes to thank Mike Peich for accepting this panel, and to thank the other panelists, Dave Mason, Marilyn Taylor and Kathrine Varnes, for their contributions to the panel and to the bibliography.

1

2

English Versification, 1570–1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

3

The entire text of EVRG can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/englishversifica0000brog.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. J. Rothman and S. D. Spear, Learning the Secrets of English Verse, Springer Texts in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53096-9

273

274

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Much has happened in the more than forty years since Brogan published his book, including the 1993 publication of the third edition The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which Brogan edited and which still stands as the single best general reference work of its kind. Among other things, “explosion” is not too strong a term to use when describing the proliferation of poetry handbooks, manuals, dictionaries and encyclopedias since Brogan’s bibliography appeared. The bibliography presented here includes 200 such works, of which Brogan discusses only a score or so, as most have appeared since 1980. Of these works, more than 80 were published or appeared in new editions in the 1990s and more than 80 have been published or appeared in new editions since 2000. The pace hardly seems to be slowing. I would like to think that if Brogan had lived to produce a new edition of EVRG, he would have considered including the craft handbook as a category in its own right. Most of the works in this bibliography not currently in print are readily available through the on-line used-book market; and all of this doesn’t even begin to take account of the bewildering and ever-shifting resources available on-line, some of which are quite strong.4 The foregoing leads to several observations. The first is that despite the well-documented and endlessly discouraging news about declining rates of literacy (as documented in the NEA’s Reading at Risk, in Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, in the work of Sandy Stotsky and elsewhere), and despite the commotion that electronic communication is causing in the publishing industry, there is nonetheless a viable, complex, diverse market for books that teachers and students can use to learn how to write poetry. This could be the result of Brogan’s influence in and of itself, even if that influence is a few degrees separated from the source in most of the books included here. It might also reflect the influence of the New Formalism, not only its poetry, but its criticism, publishing organs, teaching influence, conferences and so on. At least 18 people who attended the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference in its early years, a major conference for poets interested in versecraft, authored or co-authored books in this bibliography. The third might be the tremendous growth since the 1970s of undergraduate and graduate programs in creative writing, which now number well over 400. Whatever the quality and effects of the MFA programs, they have contributed to a growing market of readers and teachers who want works with which to teach poetry and study its craft.

4

On-line resources also include bibliographies. Notable among these, in addition to EVRG, is Jeffrey Woodward’s “An Annotated Checklist of English Versification,” which appeared in issue 5 of The Barefoot Muse. He presents about 40 essential introductory works with clear commentary. His category IV, “Versification Manuals,” includes nine entries which also appear here, and in other categories he includes another six entries which also appear in the bibliography appended to this essay.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

275

The number of books on this bibliography does surprise. When I began this project, I expected there would be thirty or forty new volumes over the last several decades and it would make sense to organize them chronologically. As the project grew, the chronological system became unwieldy, and it began to make more sense to group like with like. Of the 200 entries, I have so far been able to take a close look at about half, including most of the major works in the more technically oriented categories. The K-12 books are the most difficult to track down. A number of others were easy to categorize because they are explicitly oriented towards particular audiences and because their tables of contents, excerpts and responses are available on the web. A full critical bibliography, which would be a tremendous resource for poets and teachers, remains to be written. There are several things which this bibliography is, and several which it is not. The primary criterion for inclusion is rhetorical. Either an author invokes the rhetoric of a reference work (common terms in such titles include “encyclopedia,” “dictionary,” “handbook,” or “manual”); or offers a more discursive but nevertheless practical guide for those who would like to write poetry (common terms include “guide” or “introduction” or the phrases “how to” and “writing poetry”); or the work is clearly marketed as a textbook that emphasizes poetic forms and compositional process, almost always rhetorically conveyed via layout and organization; or is a collection of exercises or examples; or identifies itself as a comprehensive and wide-ranging pedagogical guide for teachers and, in the case of poetry therapy, for psychologists, therapists and social workers. Few if any of the books purport to offer original research or new knowledge, although some do provide excellent critical and scholarly work in passing; few, if any, are primarily theoretical or critical in terms of their approaches to the reading of poems. Virtually all are in some sense pedagogical, and as a result all exude a bracing optimism even when they are contentious or wrong-headed. They are books written by believers; almost all the writers describe themselves as poets and/or teachers, and many are quite well-known. Their purpose is everywhere heuristic. The bibliography’s focus is on English and American poetry, though there are some books that treat other languages as well. In fact, the verse handbook seems to be a universal phenomenon in all societies that have a literary culture. In Europe, one could argue that this tradition begins as early as Book X of Plato's Republic, and includes figures as diverse as St. Augustine and Thomas Jefferson. The categories into which the books have been placed are meant to be practical and useful for anyone who teaches poetry in English at any level or who wishes to study it on his or her own. The bibliography should also be of some use to scholars of literary prosody in English and to those interested in trends in literary education. The categories are not absolute. Reasonable people could disagree about where to place some of the works, or even about how to structure the categories in the first place, for while I hope the core of each category is clear, they blend into each other at the boundaries. Again, the point is to be useful, not definitive.

276

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Another way to think about the bibliography is to consider the sometimesdifficult choice of what to exclude. To begin with, it might have made sense to consider only works that were judged to foreground metrical concerns and verse forms, but in practice that boundary became quite difficult to draw and instead it seems useful to include as full a range as possible. As a result, I chose to include every book-length work whose author presents it as a comprehensive reference, manual, handbook or teacher’s guide. One boundary therefore occurs where an author would talk more generally about all the arts, leaving any sense of technical instruction behind. Therefore, the bibliography does not include general studies of creativity in the arts even if they touch on poetry, as the list would then lose its practical and critical utility. With the exception of Claude Lancelot’s influential 1663 treatise in French, it does not include works in or about languages other than English, although many of the works discuss other languages, as they must in order to discuss English. It does not include historical studies, textual criticism, or scholarship about poetry in English, even if this work may have powerful implications for writing poetry. Also excluded are works that may be pedagogical but focus explicitly on the reading and appreciation of poems rather than the writing of them. There are no general introductions, no appendices on craft, no familiar essays, or informal and impressionistic discussions about poetics. There are no interviews or essays and articles from journals. With a few important exceptions, generally because of foundational influence, e.g. Gascoigne, there are no chapters or sections from larger books, no matter how good they may be. There are no works that focus on single forms or smaller groups of forms.5 I also excluded certain kinds of reference works, such as rhyming dictionaries, that have limited use. In short, the works are bound together by their structure and rhetoric: almost all are book-length works that focus closely on what the author sees as a comprehensive or at least broadly gauged practice and pedagogy of poetry composition, whether that pedagogy addresses the reader directly or is supposed to be mediated by another teacher. This bibliography should therefore be of interest not only to poets and scholars of literary prosody, but also to creative writing teachers and to anyone interested in rhetoric and composition generally, as the teaching of how to write poetry should bear a strong relation to the teaching of writing generally, a relation often obscured by the departmental inertia of educational institutions. Indeed, one book included here, Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry (1999) is by 5

This does mean that some excellent and useful books are not included in this bibliography. I am grateful to David Sanders of Ohio University Press for pointing out that Robert Shaw’s Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007) was commissioned as a heuristic work. Shaw’s book is probably the best introduction to the subject, but it is narrower in scope than the works included here, all of which strive to make broad statements about the craft generally. An excellent—and large—project would be to expand Brogan’s second bibliography, Verseform: A Comparative Bibliography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), which updates and reorganizes material from his first and includes 1,494 entries (55 on “iambic pentameter” alone) organized into two broad categories, “Structures, Devices, Forms” and “Verse Systems.” Brogan’s book is essential for scholars but is not meant for students or teachers seeking handbooks, references or teaching guides.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

277

Wendy Bishop, who was an influential figure in the development of Rhetoric and Composition studies in higher education.6 Despite the restraints outlined above, there is still tremendous variety among the works, both in terms of approach and quality. Works range from introductory workbooks for primary school students up to Mary Kinzie’s 560-page A Poet’s Guide to Poetry and the doorstop-sized New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. There are many different levels of discursiveness. There are books that consist almost entirely of examples, books with frequent examples, and those without any. There are widely varying systems of organization. There are radically different rhetorical approaches to different kinds of audiences and there is a huge range in quality, from splendid to stupid, some instances of which will be described below. No work has been excluded from the list based on critical judgment, for the aim is to be as comprehensive as possible. There are, however, some major assumptions that inform the organization of the list, the first having to do with subject matter, the second with rhetoric. The assumption about subject matter is that the craft of verse is essential to the art of poetry. Attention to formal matters of meter and verseform is therefore one important axis of the categories in the bibliography. The rhetorical assumption has to do with audience, which is why the works have been separated into groups which have different pedagogical purposes, e.g., the general public, K-12, higher education, and poetry therapy. Part 1, “Precursors,” is the only one organized chronologically and is divided into two sections, “England” (16 entries) and “America” (20 entries).7 Most of these works appear in EVRG, and there are surely some worthy books left off this list, but those included do suggest the continuity of major handbooks and manuals produced in English since the 16th century. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, as the emphasis in this essay is on works that are currently in print; still, it is important to note that poets and educators who write poetry handbooks are working in a tradition that stretches back quite far and this list includes many of the major titles since the mid-sixteenth century. If we went back far enough we would even have to include works like St. Augustine’s De Musica, which is itself organized somewhat like a handbook of meters, but the only non-English work included here is, as noted above, Claude Lancelot’s 1663 work in French, Quatre Traitez de Pöesies, because of its uncontested and direct influence on Bysshe and Poole, an influence which survives through them to this day.8 Perhaps most important to note here is the publication of an affordable critical edition of Puttenham’s 1589 The Art of English 6

Bishop published widely in composition studies and served as an officer not only of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) but also of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition in the world.

7

Some books did appear in both countries as the bibliography indicates.

8

A multilingual and multicultural project accounting for the entire history of such transmission in the European languages would make a fascinating scholarly study. I hereby invite graduate students to throw themselves on this grenade.

278

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Poesy, the mother of all major poetry handbooks in English, far more extensive than Gascoigne, and a volume that still contains many worthwhile and fascinating passages for the scholar, the historian and the working poet. Every poet writing in English who has an interest in the development of the craft should read this book,9 and, on the American side, also take a look at Untermeyer’s books and at Hillyer’s important work. Anne Hamilton’s How to Revise Your Own Poems: A Primer for Poets, which was first published in 1936, remains surprisingly readable and wise. Perhaps the most impressive on this side of the Atlantic is Clement Wood’s 466-page Poets’ Hand Book of 1940. Wood published a wide range of such reference works, revising throughout his life and working with a number of collaborators. While one may object to much of his rigidly classicist terminology and scansion, the thoroughness and intelligence of this work still impress. Wood’s chapter V, “Stanza Patterns,” is filled with fascinating examples rarely read now and very helpful for readers of our own book who want to go further. Any serious student of poetry could still read this entire book with profit. Part 2, “Handbooks and Reference Guides that Foreground Meter and Verse Forms,” includes 33 books published since the 1960s that could be characterized as the most rigorous and thorough attempts to anatomize versecraft in English. The authors, mostly poets, would probably second Michael Bugeja’s comment in his 1994 volume The Art and Craft of Poetry, published, it is worth noting, by Reader’s

9

Indeed, serious scholars of the subject of how poets have understood their art and chosen to convey it to others should read all the books in this section, following Brogan’s cogent genealogy. Because I cannot imagine how it could be improved upon, it is worth quoting at some length Brogan’s entry in EVRG on Dwight A. Culler’s commentary on Bysshe (which Brogan describes as “very likely the most influential handbook ever written” [242]) to get a sense of this: With immense erudition Culler traces the sources, nature and influences of Bysshe’s enormously influential handbook; indeed, it is not too much to say that Bysshe is the most important prosodic work produced between 1589 (Puttenham) and 1775 (Steele). Culler shows convincingly that Bysshe was heavily indebted to Joshua Poole’s work, and also that virtually every other poetic handbook, grammar, dictionary, rhyming dictionary and commonplace book of the eighteenth century is derived, usually nearly entirely, from Bysshe. And through Walker’s later rhyming dictionary, which also is Bysshe’s progeny, he remained a standard source well into the twentieth century. If we remember that Bysshe meant his book as a reference and a handbook, not a prosodical treatise, we can obtain a rare glimpse of what the poets of the age took as an authority on versification, as opposed to the pronouncements of the scholars, the two being scarcely reconcilable at best. In terms of prosodic theory, however, Bysshe’s influence was wholly pernicious, and quite extended. His system is entirely syllabic, basing meter on count of syllables instead of accents or feet. He obtained this system by lifting it wholesale from Claude Lancelot’s 1663 French treatise Quatre Traitez de Pöesies Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole. Thus, Bysshe simply attempted to force-fit the template of Romance prosody onto the English language, ignoring the fact that it did not—never could—fit, thereby perpetrating a misconception that would hold sway until the Romantic era (esp. Christabel). The Classical system would not fit the verse native to England, nor would the French, even though Bysshe could make men believe it for nearly a century. (243)

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

279

Digest Press and therefore marketed to a wide audience, that “I fell in love with poetry because of meter” (188). All of these books treat meter and verseform in great detail, although there is a wide range of approaches. If publication history is any indicator, Babette Deutsche’s Poetry Handbook, first published in 1957, may still be the most widely read, perhaps in a tie with Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, which first appeared in 1965 and Lewis Turco’s Book of Forms, which was first published in 1968 and which has appeared in many expanded and revised editions since then. Other indispensable books from this section are the Brogan edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and John Hollander’s witty Rhyme’s Reason. Brogan’s own favorite in 1980 was Beum and Shapiro’s Prosody Handbook of 1965, which was republished in 2006. A number of West Chester conference regulars also made important contributions, including William Baer, David Caplan and Alfred Corn. Some other works that are not as well-known, but deserve to be, are Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled and O. E. Parrott’s humorous How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry, a collection of poems by many hands, all of which, like Hollander’s in Rhyme’s Reason, discuss the forms in which they are written. There are also obscure gems, such as Leonardo Malcovati’s Prosody in England and Elsewhere (2005), which is deliciously feisty. Malcovati describes the modern cinquain as: …a poem of five unrhymed lines, the first of which has two syllables, the second four, the third six, the fourth eight, and the last, again, two, as in: My friend, there’s no saying which sort of children’s games, or choices of line breaks is verse today. Serious students of poetic form and poetry pedagogy should consider reading every book in this category. Committed students of craft should also probably read everything in Part 3, “Discursive Introductions that Foreground Meter and/or Verse Forms.” These twelve works, many authored by West Chester conference attendees, including Derek Attridge, Tom Carper, Annie Finch, Charles Hartman, Kathrine Varnes and Tim Steele, are not set up as handbooks, textbooks or manuals per se, but do have indices and tables of contents that allow them to be used more or less in that way. Particularly noteworthy is the collection of essays edited by Finch and Varnes, An Exaltation of Forms; while not every essay in the book is as strong as every other, as a whole it practically provides a curriculum of meter and fixed lyrical forms in English. Taken together, the works in Parts 1, 2 and 3 constitute a fairly definitive corpus of introductory overview works on English meter and verse forms currently available. Most of these excellent books have appeared in Brogan’s wake, transforming the field. Part 4, “Handbooks in which Discussions of Meter and Verse Forms Are Secondary,” was the most difficult to organize. It is divided into two sections, “(A) Handbooks that include substantial sections on Meter and/or Verse Forms” (12

280

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

entries) and the highly contentious “(B) Handbooks with less emphasis on Meter and/or Verse Forms” (44 entries). Somewhere in this work is the fuzzy line where the books cross over from paying close attention to meter and verseform to either benign neglect or dismissal, and then, of course, gross mischaracterization and outright warfare against the study of metrics and verseforms for aspiring poets. At the same time, including a book in this part of the bibliography should emphatically not be construed as a judgment of quality. Many of the books in Part 4, a number of which have been written by West Chester attendees such as Robert McDowell, Diane Thiel and Kim Addonizio, are outstanding books that say some wise things about metrics and verse, but instead focus on more comprehensive questions of poetic composition, such as strategies for generating content, the process of writing, questions of imagery, tone, the spiritual and emotional functions of art and so on. Further, there are a number of surprisingly good books in both categories that deserve more attention. For example, here is a passage from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry by Nikki Moustaki (2001): Meter is an ordering and unifying element in poetry that mimics and heightens the rhythms of our speech and the rhythms of the natural world around us. Certainly, you can use other ways to organize poems: repetition, stanza forms, other musical elements, and syntactical structure. However, meter is closer to us as human beings; it’s available inside our language, inside the words we use to create poems, and is one of the most fundamental tools poets have to “make sense” of their verse. (102) This passage echoes John Thompson’s elegant formulation of English metrics in The Founding of English Metre. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry is a far better work than its title suggests. One of Mary Oliver’s books also appears in Part 4A, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (1994). Those who only know Oliver’s poetry may be surprised at the forceful way in which she advocates the study of metrics: Acquaintance with the main body of English poetry is absolutely essential – it is clearly the whole cake, while what has been written in the last hundred years or so, without meter, is no more than an icing. And, indeed, I do not really mean an acquaintanceship – I mean an engrossed and able affinity with metrical verse. To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be. (15) The middle terrain might be characterized by a book like Jeff Mock’s You Can Write Poetry, a sensible work that treats meter and verse form thoughtfully, but in a relatively brief section that doesn’t begin until his sixth chapter (out of eleven). His Chap. 8, “Form and Free Verse” is brief (16 pages) and all the rest of the chapters, like many of those in the books that typify Part 4B, are about process, inspiration, pursuing publication and so on. This is not meant as a criticism of Mock’s book,

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

281

which has its charms, but it is to point out that treatment of the nuts and bolts of poetic language is secondary. Tania Runyan’s How to Write a Form Poem, on the other hand, discusses meter but is weak. Of iambic trimeter, she writes “so, an iambic trimeter goes: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM...that’s it! That’s the whole line!” No, it isn’t. While there are other strong works in 4B, notably all the books by the West Chester writers mentioned above, along with well-made studies of poetic inspiration and compositional process by poets such as Ted Kooser, Kenneth Koch and W. D. Snodgrass, there are many other books in this part that either eschew any sustained discussion of metrics, are misleading, or even display spiky hostility to any study of metrics and verseform. Many of these works take an organicist and ultra-romantic approach to poetic composition, which presumably derives in its longest view from weak misreadings of Emerson by way of Wordsworth and Rousseau. While most of the authors do have compelling things to say about the sources of inspiration and strategies for composition and the generation of content, there is generally a strong underlying polemic in many such works against the teaching, study and use of traditional metrics and verseform as restrictive and spiritually debilitating. A few examples: in The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry (2008), Kevin Clark writes that “Most poets believe that the imagination can catalyze magically surprising language without the presence of predetermined structures” (121–22). Note the ancient canard that metrical forms have “predetermined structures,” whereas free verse poems do not. While Clark claims to be even-handed, writing that “skilled formal poets can use the demands of form to innovate” (122), he devotes only about 20 pages out of 250 to any discussion of traditional forms. Other chapters deal with subject matter and more general notions of writing process and have titles such as “Conflict and Transformation,” “Do Poems Have Plot?” “Empathy and Creativity,” “Poetry and Eros” and so on. These subject headings are typical of a wide range of similar guides. Other writers are even more blunt than Clark about their criticisms of metrics and verse form. In Creating Poetry (1991), John Drury does review a number of metrical forms for about 30 pages but concludes “The problem with many ‘fixed forms’ is that they are so rigid they don’t give the poetic imagination much freedom or provocation. They are more for the puzzle-maker, the ingenious turner of phrases” (134). In The Poetry Reader’s Toolkit: A Guide to Reading and Understanding Poetry (1998), Marc Polonsky offers only a few pages on metrics and verseforms and concludes that “It is unnecessary to study or memorize… different meters to appreciate poetry. What is important is to notice rhythms” (125). In response to this, it is hard to resist asking how, exactly, one is to discuss such rhythms if one doesn’t know their names. In In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (1995), Steve Kowit tautologically proclaims that “Freed of its formal conventions, poetry in English today permits the greatest possible freedom” (139), which makes one wonder why one might not take the next logical step and avoid art altogether, thereby becoming even more free. In Poetry: Tools & Techniques (2011), John C. Goodman defines New Formalism as follows:

282

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

A movement that rose in the U.S. in the 1980s advocating a return to metrical, rhyming formal verse. New Formal verse is predominantly decorative, concerned with the clever use of language and rarely delving into deep emotion or the existential concerns of life. (129) We disagree. There are some authors who seem to take Kowit’s advice and move even a further step away from metrics and versecraft, such as Sandford Lyne. His Writing Poetry from the Inside Out (2007), subtitled “finding your voice through the craft of poetry,” weighs in at 276 pages, yet in this work supposedly about craft there is absolutely no discussion of metrics or traditional verseforms (not even a dismissal!) which seems odd in a book about poetry by a man named “Lyne.” Like many other writers in this vein, Lyne instead focuses on the organicist notion that “the free verse poem must search out its form.” That may be true for an advanced poet, but one would like to give some of the authors in 4B some of the work from parts 1 through 3, such as John Whitworth’s Writing Poetry (2001), where he sensibly writes: The…Movement For Getting Rid Of Metre is…falling out of fashion, and a good thing too. You can write a poem and know nothing of metrics, just as you can play a piano and be unable to read music. But why choose ignorance? Knowledge of metrics may not make a poet out of you – but it will teach you to versify and that is a skill worth having. (67) Indeed the organicist fallacy of verse as pure rhythm was addressed long ago. As Robert Bridges famously pointed out in the 1921 edition of his study Milton’s Prosody, when responding to Skeat’s’ edition of Chaucer: The fact that rhythm is so much more evident than prosody, and is felt to lie so much nearer to the poetic effects, inclines people to think that prosody is pedantic rubbish, which can only hamper the natural expression of free thought and so on. But in all arts the part that can be taught is the dry detail of the material which has to be conquered; and it is no honour to an art to despise its grammar. (111)10 As all of this suggests, part 4B of the bibliography brings together the widest variety of approaches and is an arena where formalists and organicists stand uneasily side by side. It could be further subdivided for clarity, perhaps into 4B, “Guides that Treat Meter in Passing”; 4C, “Guides by Authors Who Despise Metrics”; and 4D, “Guides by Authors who Refuse to Acknowledge that Meter Exists.” Part 5, “Textbooks, Workbooks and Teacher Guides,” again has two parts: “K-12” (38 entries), and “Advanced High School/College” (11 entries). This section is perhaps less thorough than some of the others, as there are many works, especially in K-12, published by small educational houses that are generally not

10

Robert Bridges, Milton's Prosody, with a Chapter on Accentual Verse, & Notes. Revised Final Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

283

available in libraries and therefore difficult to track down. Still, a number of trends are clear. Many of the major college texts listed in part 5B, again with strong representation by West Chester faculty and speakers such as Dave Mason, X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, are well-known, useful and thorough. Behn and Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (1992), offers a wide range of exercises (again with a number of West Chester faculty) although most do not focus on metrical forms. The K-12 category is more complex. The books range from small pamphlets for primary school students, up to longer works for older students and their teachers. Many of the books take an enthusiastically organicist approach and, despite their enthusiasm, therefore do children a disservice by failing to channel their natural impulse to acquire specific skills and to create orderly things. In this they suggest a dance class where dances are named, but not steps; or an art class where subjects are named, but not colors; or a music class where songs are named, but not notes. Typical of this is Ralph Fletcher’s Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out (2002), an ambitious and in many ways charming book which does not address meter and verseform directly until Chap. 11, where Fletcher writes “This book focuses more on the ‘inside’ of poetry (ideas, images, feelings) than on the ‘outside’ (appearance, form). For this reason, I have decided not to delve deeply into poetic forms” (111). One would hope that most serious poets and serious teachers of poetry would bristle at the notion that words, which is what poems and therefore poetic forms are made out of, are not inside poems, let alone inside the poets themselves, right there with the ideas, images and feelings. It is hard to resist suggesting to Fletcher that his argument will be accepted as true as soon as he can in fact make it without using any words. On the other hand, there are a number of authors in 5A who do aspire to teach even the youngest students metrical forms and to help teachers work with them, showing how gracefully this can be done. Greta Barclay Lipson’s Poetry Writing Handbook: Definitions, Examples, Lessons (1998), designed for grades 4–6, offers many succinct and accessible exercises based around both verseforms and tropes such as “personification,” “metaphor,” “definition,” and is a strong example of what can be achieved with great charm and technical accuracy in conveying this material to young children. And do not be misled by the deceptively simple cheerleading title of Glenna Davis Sloan’s Give Them Poetry! A Guide for Sharing Poetry with Children K-8, which is an engaging and sophisticated teacher guide that foregrounds language and language skills clearly and thoughtfully, including accurate and accessible discussion of dozens of traditional and nonce verse forms. Sloan is a highly respected scholar of K-12 education and was a student of Northrop Frye’s. In her first chapter, she quotes Frye on the centrality of poetry in literary education: The greatest fallacy in the current conception of literary education is the notion that prose is the normal language of ordinary speech, and should form the center and staple of literary teaching…the root of the fallacy is the assumption that prose represents the only valid form of thought, and that poetry, considered as

284

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

thought, is essentially decorated or distorted prose…The main principles of a coherently organized curriculum are simple enough…Poetry should be at the center of all literary training, and literary prose forms the periphery. Sloan’s book fulfills this promise for teachers of young children, and both she and Frye affirm the premise that prosody and versification belong at the heart of literary study and pedagogy. There are several other authors in 5A, such as Paul Janeczko, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Jack Prelutzky and Shelley Tucker, who have published widely in the field and much of their work is quite strong even if their focus is not on formal matters. There are also certain houses, such as Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Good Year Books, Scholastic, NCTE and a few others that have made a significant commitment to the field, often tied to one of the specific authors mentioned above. The K-12 field is a crucial part of this bibliography that deserves more sustained attention from the larger literary world. With more than 25 of the K-12 titles on the current list published since 1990, the interest is evident. More of those in the larger literary world and higher education who claim to care about the future of reading and writing poetry should perhaps be paying closer attention to this material and how it is working its way into the classroom, especially in K-8. Works that deserve particular praise here include those by Kennedy and Gioia, Nims and Mason, and Turco. Part 6 of the bibliography, “Poetry Therapy Guides” (7 entries), is an important afterthought and merely scratches the surface of what is available, as this field has also developed tremendously in the last several decades, although there is relatively little commerce between it and the mainstream literary world. Unlike some of the authors in Part 4B, who use an organicist literary language that can at times fade into a pseudo-therapeutic rhetoric of self-discovery and spiritual actualization, the authors of the rigorous poetry therapy volumes are generally working psychotherapists and social workers who use creative writing with their clients as a form of professional treatment. As a result, their guides tend to focus closely on content and process, as their first concern is for patients rather than poetry as literature per se. They generally work within psychological contexts such as how to address suicidal adolescents, the elderly, or battered women. A few of the more popular and better-known of these works appear in this bibliography because of the seriousness of the attempts to use art to heal others. As the emphasis is unabashedly therapeutic, there is a complete absence of literary pretense in the best of these works, such as Nicholas Mazza’s Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice (2003), a rigorous yet accessible book that itself includes a literary and psychological bibliography of over 300 entries. Mazza is a strong organicist but also a scholar, citing Brogan’s entry “Verse and Prose” and V. P. Nemoianu’s entry on “Romanticism” from Brogan’s edition of the New Princeton Encyclopedia to justify his own emphasis on content: “…in poetry, form does not supersede content or function. Heightened emotions and compressed meaning are central to poetry… Consistent with the romantic tradition, a verse form is not required to produce poetry” (3). This is obviously a highly contentious point, but the unapologetically

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

285

formal application of Mazza’s own discipline as a social worker and scholar in explicitly therapeutic settings nevertheless gives his work significant force. It would be fascinating to be party to a conversation among the stronger writers in the various camps represented in this diverse bibliography. It would be interesting to hear someone like Mazza discuss his work with people like Tim Steele and Terry Brogan, Jack Prelutzky and Shelley Tucker, Mary Kinzie, Mary Oliver and Robert Pinsky, for all of them care quite deeply about the craft of poetry, about teaching others how to write poetry, and even training others to be able to teach it as well. Such a conversation would be a powerful way to counter the disciplinary balkanization of poetic craft and pedagogy that this bibliography depicts. It is easy for a teacher or writer to become discouraged if one places any stock whatsoever in recent studies of literacy rates, reading habits, and the state of the literature curriculum. At the same time, the surprising number and diversity of works in print that address the practical craft of making poems suggest that there are still many, many readers, writers, students and teachers who hunger for the rewards that only poetry can provide. The proliferation of handbooks and manuals over the last several decades is proof positive that rumors of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated and that many still hunger to study the art of poetry. Some of them even seek to understand its craft. 1. Precursors / Chronological by Country (A) England Gascoigne, George. “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English…” In The Posies of George Gascoigne. London: Richard Smith, 1575.11 Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. 1589. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Lancelot, Claude. Quatre Traitez de Pöesies Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole. 1663. Poole, Joshua. The English Parnassus: Or, a Helpe to English Poesie. London: 1657; 2nd ed. 1677. Bysshe, Edward. The Art of English Poetry. Containing I. Rules for making VERSES. II. A Collection of the most Natural, Agreeable, and Sublime THOUGHTS, viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions and Characters, of Persons and Things, that are to be found in the best ENGLISH POETS. III. A Dictionary of RHYMES. London, 1702, 1705, 1708, etc.12 Steele, Sir Joshua. Prosodia Rationalis: or an Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols. 1775. London: T. Payne & Son, 1779.13

11

A number of entries in this part of the bibliography, such as this one, are copied from or based directly on Brogan’s EVRG. Brogan: “The second and third editions were successively revised and expanded, but no substantive changes were made thereafter…” (EVRG 242).

12

13

Not strictly a handbook, but too influential on poets and subsequent handbooks to be left out of this genealogy.

286

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Carey, John. Practical English Prosody and Versification; or Descriptions of the Different Species of English Verse, with Exercises in Scanning and Versification, Gradually accommodated to the various Capacities of youth at Different Ages, and calculated to produce Correctness of Ear and Taste in reading and writing Poetry: the whole interspersed with occasional Remarks on Etymology, Syntax, and Pronunciation. London: Baldwin, Cracock, and Joy, 1816. Hood, Tom. A Practical Guide to English Versification. London: 1869; new and enlarged edition, “to which are added Bysshe’s ‘Rules for Making English verse’ etc.” London: John Hogg, 1877. Reprinted as The Rhymester: or The Rules of Rhyme, A Guide to English Versification. Ed. Arthur Penn. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1911. Brewer, R. F. Orthometry: A Manual of English Prosody: Being an Introduction to the Study of Poetry. 1869. Many later editions and reprints up to 1950.14 Gayley, Charles Mills, and Clement C. Young. English Poetry: Its Principles and Progress. 1904. London, England: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1910. Bright, James Wilson and Raymond Durbin Miller. The Elements of Versification. Boston and London: Ginn and Company, 1910. Saintsbury, George. Historical Manual of English Prosody. 1910. New York, NY: Shocken Books, 1966. Kaluza, Max. A Short History of English Versification from the Earliest Times to the Present Day: A Handbook for Teachers and Students. Trans. A. C. Dunstan. London: George Allen & Company, Ltd., 1911. Also New York, NY: The MacMillan Company, 1911. Grew, Sydney. A Book of English Prosody. London: Grant Richards, 1924.15 Felkin, F. W. The Poet’s Craft: An Outline of English Verse Composition for Schools. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919. New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1926. Smith, Egerton. The Principles of English Metre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.

(B) America Everett, Erastus. A System of English Versification; containing rules for the structure of the different kinds of verse. New York, NY: D. Appleton & Company, 1848. Gummere, Francis B. A Handbook of Poetics, for Students of English Verse. Boston, MA: Ginn & Company, 1885. 2nd ed. 1886; 3rd ed. 1890; 1902.16 Parson, James C. English Versification for the Use of Students. Boston, MA: Leach, Shewell & Sanborn, 1891. Johnson, Charles Frederick. Forms of English Poetry. New York: American Book Co., 1904. Lewis, Charlton Miner. The Principles of English Verse. 1906. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. Matthews, Brander. A Study of Versification. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1911. Esenwein, J. Berg and Mary Eleanor Roberts. The Art of Versification: A Practical Handbook of the Structure of Verse Together with Chapters on the Origin, Nature and Forms of Poetry. 1913. Revised Edition. Springfield, MA: The Home Correspondence School, 1916, 1920. Andrews, C. E. The Writing and Reading of Verse. New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1918. 14

Brogan on the 1912 edition, titled Orthometry: The Art of Versification the Technicalities of Poetry: “For all its enormous length and pretentious title, the book is a mere handbook of forms” (EVRG 238).

15

Brogan argues that in this book, which he admires, one begins to see the emergence of modern metrics, where meter is understood as an abstract pattern and the specific language imposed on it manifests particular rhythms (EVRG 252). Brogan characterizes this handbook as “the most influential in America around the turn of the century” and still “well worth perusal” (EVRG 253). There are still hundreds of copies for sale on the Advanced Book Exchange.

16

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

287

Untermeyer, Louis. The Forms of Poetry : A Pocket Dictionary of Verse. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926. Pyre, J. F. A. A Short Introduction to English Versification. New York, NY: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1929. Stewart, George R., Jr. The Technique of English Verse. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1930. Gordon, Ralph. The Technique of Verse. New York, NY: The City College Cooperative Store, n.d. (1933?). Hamilton, Anne. How to Revise Your Own Poems: A Primer for Poets. Los Angeles, CA: Abbey San Encino Press, 1936. Woods, George B. Versification in English Poetry. 1936. Revised Edition. Chicago, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1958. Untermeyer, Louis. Doorways to Poetry. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1938. Wood, Clement. Poets’ Handbook. New York: Greenberg, 1940. Armour, Richard. Writing Light Verse. Boston, MA: The Writer, Inc., 1947. Drew, Elizabeth. Poetic Patterns: A Note on Versification. Northampton, MA: The Kraushar Press. Reprinted from Major British Writers, ed. G. B. Harrison, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1956. Hillyer, Robert. First Principles of Verse. 1950. Revised Edition. Boston, MA: The Writer, Inc., 1962. Hungerford, Edward B. Recovering the Rhythms of English Poetry: The Elements of Versification. Chicago, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1964, 1966.

2. Handbooks and Reference Guides that Foreground Meter and Verse Forms Adams, Stephen. Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms and Figures of Speech. Peterborough, Ontario, CA: Broadview Press Ltd., 1997. Baer, William.17 Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest books, 2006. Beum, Robert, and Karl Shapiro. The Prosody Handbook: A Guide to Poetic Form. 1965. Expanded Edition. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006. [Brogan’s favorite…] Bishop, Wendy. Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry. New York, NY: Longman, 1999. Boland, Eavan, and Mark Strand, eds. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2000. Bugeja, Michael J. The Art and Craft of Poetry. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1994. Caplan, David.* Poetic Form: An Introduction. New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007. Corn, Alfred.* The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1997. Dessner, Lawrence Jay. How to Write a Poem. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1979. Deutsche, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. 1957. Fourth Edition. New York, NY: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 1974. Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Cincinnati, OH: Readers Digest Books, 2005. Eldridge, William Terry. The Anatomy of Poetry: A Handbook on the Mechanics and Craft of Poetry. NP: Exeter Press, 1961. Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2006.

17*

Has attended West Chester Conference.

288

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. 1965. Revised Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1979. Hollander, John. Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse. 1981. New, Enlarged Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Jerome, Judson. The Poet's Handbook. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 1980. Johnson, Burges. New Rhyming Dictionary and Poets’ Handbook. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1957. Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook. Second Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Lyon, Travis. Forms of Poetry. Pittsburgh, PA: TeaLemon Books, 2003. McAuley, James. Versification: A Short Introduction. Detroit, MI: The Michigan State University Press, 1966. Malcovati, Leonardo. Prosody in England and Elsewhere: A Comparative Approach. Arlington, Virginia: Givald Press, 2005. Malof, Joseph. A Manual of English Meters. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970. Myers, Jack Elliott and Michael Simms. Longman Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry. New York: Longman, 1985. Updated edition published as Dictionary of Poetic Terms, by Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2003. Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. Packard, William. The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994. Parrott, E.O., ed. How To Be Well-Versed in Poetry. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1991. Powell, Joseph and Mark Halperin. Accent on Meter: A Handbook for Readers of Poetry. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2004. Preminger, Otto, T. V. F. Brogan,* et al. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 1974. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. [NB: This volume has spawned several abridged volumes, including The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Term and The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries.] Skelton, Robin. The Shapes of Our Singing: A Guide to the Metres and Set Forms of Verse from Around the World. Spokane, WA: Eastern Washington University Press, 2002. Turco, Lewis.* The Book of Forms. 1968. Third Edition. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. Untermeyer, Louis. The Pursuit of Poetry: A Guide to its Understanding and Appreciation with an Explanation of its Forms and a Dictionary of Poetic Terms. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969. Williams, Miller. Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Whitworth, John. Writing Poetry. London: A & C Black, 2001.

3. Discursive Introductions that Foreground Meter and / or Verse Forms Attridge, Derek.* Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Carper, Thomas* and Derek Attridge.* Meter and Meaning: Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. DeFord, Sara and Clarinda Harriss Lott. Forms of Verse: British and American. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971. Dobyns, Stephen. Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2011. Finch, Annie* and Kathrine Varnes.* An Exaltation of Forms. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

289

Hartman, Charles O.* Verse: An Introduction to Prosody. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2015. Hass, Robert. A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. New York, NY: Ecco, 2017. Hobsbaum, Philip. Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1996. Kinzie, Mary. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Steele, Tim.* All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999. Tanburn, N. P. Unheard Melodies: Essays in English Verse Prosody. London: 2007.

4. Handbooks in which Discussions of Meter and Verse Forms Are Secondary (A) Handbooks that Include Substantial Sections on Meter and / or Verse Forms Altenbernd, Lynn and Leslie L. Lewis. 1963. A Handbook for the Study of Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1966. A revised and expanded version of Part One of Introduction to Literature: Poems. Bogen, Nancy. How to Write Poetry. 1991. Third Edition. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1998. Eliopulos, Tina D. and Todd Scott Moffett. The Everything Writing Poetry Book: A Practical Guide to Style, Structure, Form, and Expression. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2005. Fenton, James. An Introduction to English Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996. Livingstone, Dinah. Poetry Handbook for Readers and Writers. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993. McDowell, Robert.* Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions. New York: Free Press, 2008. Moustaki, Nikki. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry. New York, NY: Penguin, 2001. Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994. Riccio, Ottone M. The Intimate Art of Writing Poetry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980. Runyan, Tania. How to Write a Form Poem. New York, NY: T. S. Poetry Press, 2021. Thiel, Diane.* Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2005.

(B) Handbooks with Less Emphasis on Meter and / or Verse Forms Addonizio, Kim.* Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009. Addonizio, Kim,* and Dorianne Laux. The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997. Agodon, Kelli Russell and Martha Silano. The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Kingston, WA: Two Sylvias Press, 2013. Alderson, Daniel. Talking Back to Poems: A Working Guide for the Aspiring Poet. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1996. Blehert, Dean. Please, Lord, Make Me a Famous Poet or at Least Less Fat. Reston, VA: Words & Pictures East Coast LLC, 1999. Clark, Kevin. The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry. New York, NY: Pearson Education, 2008. Cohen, Sage. Writing the Life Poetic: An Initiation to Read and Write Poetry. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2009.

290

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

Davidson, Chad and Gregory Fraser. Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Drury, John. Creating Poetry. Cincinnati, OH: Reader’s Digest Books, 1991. Fiske, Robert Hartwell, and Laura Cherry, eds. Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions. Portland, OR: Marion Street Press, 2008. Fowler, Gene. Waking the Poet: Acquiring the Deep Seated Crafts Usually Called ‘Talents’ Berkeley, CA: The Re-Geniusing Project, 1981. Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories. Toronto, ON: Guernica Editions, Inc., 2013. Goodman, John C. Poetry: Tools & Techniques: A Practical Guide to Writing Engaging Poetry. BC, Canada: Gneiss Press, 2011. Grimm, Susan, ed. Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Press, 2006. Holmes, John. Writing Poetry. Boston, MA: Writer, Inc., 1960. Hunley, Tom C. The Poetry Gymnasium: 94 Proven Exercises to Shape Your Best Verse. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012. Jason, Philip K. and Allan B. Lefcowitz. 1994. Creative Writer's Handbook. Fifth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2009. Kirby, David. Writing Poetry: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. The Writer, Inc., 1989. Koch, Kenneth. Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. 1998. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone), 1999. Kooser, T, ed. The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Kowit, Steve. In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House, Publishers, 1995. Lockward, Diane. The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2013. Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008. Lyne, Sandford. Writing Poetry from the Inside Out. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007. Marra, Reggie. Living Poems, Writing Lives: Spirit, Self, and the Art of Poetry. New Milford, CT: Xlibris, 2004. Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2001. Mock, Jeff. You Can Write Poetry. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1998. Morrison, Carol. How to Build a Long-Lasting Fire: Writing Poems from Your Life. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company, 1997. Myers, Jack. The Portable Poetry Workshop. Florence, KY: Wadsworth Publishing, 2004. Pinsky, Robert. Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Polonsky, Marc. The Poetry Reader’s Toolkit: A Guide to Reading and Understanding Poetry. Chicago, IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1998. Roberts, Phil. How Poetry Works. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Second Edition 2000. Sampson, Fiona. Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide. London: Robert Hale Limited, 2009. Sansom, Peter. Writing Poems. 1994. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2007. Scott, Wilbur. Skills of the Poet. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1977. Skinner, Jeffrey. The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets: A Self-Help Memoir. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2012. Smith, Michael C. Writing Dangerous Poetry. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Snodgrass, W. D. De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2001. Statman, Mark. Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

291

Sweeney Matthew. Teach Yourself Writing Poetry. 1995. New Edition. With John Hartley Williams. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Thiel, Diane.* Writing Your Rhythm. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2001. Timpane, John and Maureen Watts. Poetry for Dummies. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco State University Poetry Center, 2001. Wiggerman, Scott and David Meischen, eds. Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry. Austin, TX: Dos Gatos Press, 2011. Wooldridge, Susan Goldsmith. Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1996.

5. Textbooks, Workbooks and Teacher Guides (A) K-12 Agostino, Paul. Created Writing: Poetry from New Angles. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. Ambrosini, Michelle and Teresa M. Morretta. Poetry Workshop for Middle School: Activities That Inspire Meaningful Language Learning. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, Inc., 2003. Appelt, Kathi. Poems from Homeroom. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002. Applegate, Mauree. When the Teacher Says, “Write a Poem.” Evanston, IL: Harper & Row, 1965. Baldwin, Neil. The Poetry Writing Handbook. New York, NY: Scholastic Book Services, 1981. Collom, Jack. Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1985. Collom, Jack, and Sheryl Noethe. Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1994. Dressman, Mark. Let’s Poem: The Essential Guide to Teaching Poetry in a High-Stakes, Multimodal World. Foreword by Nikki Giovanni. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2010. Dunning, Stephen and William Stafford. Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1992. Elizabeth, Mary. Painless Poetry. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., 2001. Finn, Louise. Your Turn: 33 Lessons in Poetry. Portland, ME: Walch Education, 1998. Fletcher, Ralph. Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2002. Gedalof, Allen J. Teaching Poetry: A Handbook of Exercises for Large and Small Classes. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. Goldberg, Shari. Poetry and Prose Handbook. Grades 9–12. Portland, ME: Walch Publishing, 2003. Green, Benjamin and Anita Punla. Beyond Roses Are Red Violets Are Blue: A Practical Guide for Helping Students Write Free Verse. Fort Collins, CO: Cottonwood Press, Inc., 1996. Heard, Georgia. Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998. Hewitt, Geof. Today You Are My Favorite Poet: Writing Poems with Teenagers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998. Janeczko, Paul. Teaching 10 Fabulous Forms of Poetry. Grades 4-8. New York, NY: Scholastic Publishers, 2000. —-. How To Write Poetry. New York, NY: Scholastic Reference, 2001. —-. Seeing the Blue Between: Advice and Inspiration for Young Writers. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002. —-. A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms. Grades 3–6. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2009. Koch, Kenneth. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children. 1970. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990.

292

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

—- and Ron Padgett. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry. 1970. New York, NY: Harper, 1999. Lies, Betty Bonham. The Poet’s Pen: Writing Poetry with Middle and High School Students. Portsmouth, NH: Teacher Ideas Press, 1993. Lipson, Greta Barclay. Poetry Writing Handbook: Definitions, Examples, Lessons. Grades 4–6. Dayton, OH: Teaching & Learning Company, 1998. Livingstone, Dinah. Poetry Handbook for Readers and Writers. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993. Lown, Fredric and Judith W. Steinbergh. Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers. Portland, ME: Walch Education, 1996. Michaels, Judith Rowe. Risking Intensity: Reading and Writing Poetry with High School Students. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Moon, Brian. Studying Poetry: Activities, Resources and Texts. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. Moore, Jo Ellen. Writing Poetry With Children. Monterey, CA: Evan-Moor Corp., 1999. Morice, Dave. The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom and the Community. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1995. O’Connor, John S. Wordplaygrounds. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2004. Orndorf, Eleanor. Poetry Patterns and Themes. Monterey, CA: Evan-Moor Educational Publishers, 1999. Perfect, Kathy A. Poetry Lessons- Everything You Need : A Mentor Teacher's Lessons and Select Poems That Help You Meet the Standards Across the Curriculum and Teach Poetry with Confidence and Joy. New York, NY: Scholastic Publishers, 2005. Prelutzky, Jack. Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry: How to Write a Poem. Grades 3–7. New York, NY: HarperCollins (Greenwillow Books), 2008. Riccio, Ottone M. and Ellen Beth Siegel. Unlocking the Poem. New York, NY: iUniverse, Inc., 2009. Ruurs, Margriet. The Power of Poems: Teaching the Joy of Writing Poetry. Gainesville, FL: Maupin House, 2000. Sloan, Glenna Davis. Give Them Poetry! A Guide for Sharing Poetry, K-8. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2003. Somers, Albert B. Teaching Poetry in High School. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Statman, Mark. Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000. Tucker, Shelley. Kindle The Fire: Writing Poetry with Middle School Students. Tucson, AZ: Good Year Books, 2001. —-. Painting the Sky: Writing Poetry with Children. Tucson, AZ: Good Year Books, 2004. —-. Writing Poetry. Tucson, AZ: Good Year Books, 1992. —-. Word Weavings: Writing Poetry with Young Children. Tucson, AZ: Good Year Books, 1997. Walter, Nina Willis. Let Them Write Poetry. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962.

(B) Advanced High School / College and Other Classroom Settings Behn, Robin and Chase Twichell, eds. The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., 1992. Drake, Barbara. Writing Poetry. 1983. Second Edition. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. Kennedy, X. J.* and Dana Gioia.* An Introduction to Poetry. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1966. Twelfth Edition. New York, NY, Longman, 2006. Koch, Kenneth. I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People. 1977. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007.

Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English

293

Minot, Stephen. Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction, Poetry and Drama. 1965. Eighth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2006. Nims, John Frederick and David Mason.* Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. 1974. Fifth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Padgett, Ron, ed. The Teacher’s and Writer’s Handbook of Poetic Forms. 1987. Second Edition. New York, NY: Thomson-Shore, Inc., 2000. Perrine, Laurence. Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956. Twelfth Edition, as Perrine’s Sound and Sense, by Thomas P. Arp and Greg Johnson. Florence, KY: Thomas & Wadsworth (Cengage), 2007. Turco, Lewis. Poetry: An Introduction through Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, Inc., 1973. Wallace Robert. Writing Poems. 1982. Seventh Edition, with Michelle Boisseau and Randall Mann. New York, NY: Longman, 2007. Wormser, Baron and David Cappella. Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. —-. A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day. Portsmouth, NJ: Heinemann, 2004.

6. Poetry Therapy Guides Fox, John. Finding What You Didn’t Lose. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1995. —-. Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1997. Harrower, M. The Therapy of Poetry. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1972. Hynes, Arleen McCarty and Mary Hunes-Berry. 1986. Biblio/Poetry Therapy–The Interactive Process: A Handbook. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1994. Mazza, Nicholas. Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. Welch, J. G. Topics for Getting In Touch: A Poetry Therapy Sourcebook. Columbus, OH: Pudding Magazine, 1982. Weisberger, Chavis. The Healing Fountain: Poetry Therapy for Life’s Journey. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., 2003.