~ ·.~°:"'1e..6e..... K.-.. ..{,,~1 Editors Emeriti Tke Norton Antho ogy_5"'-J!-= .... .· .• .· ., Alexa:r1der Allison · ...... , LATE OF T HE UNIVERSITI OF MICHIGAN o[P oetry c;L,.: I ] • ·. l .
Herbert Barrows PROFESSOR EMERffl/S,. UNIVERSITIO F '.M)CHIGAN ... , FT·F T H ·j 'E' D'I TIO N ~s-, : : .. .· ·.···; .•: i::·' :· Caesar R. Blake ., ' .. ·; .:,J ·;. ·:: . ,, ·' .. UNIVERSITI 01' TORONTO ,. ; .. :•.. \ :- . . · , .:'· Iylargar~t,J,i'erg1.,1~9n: ,: : UNIVERSITY 0~ Ci1.I.'.ii:0RNIA, DA.vis '': ·~1 Arthur J. Carr ·:. • ' '1 i/. ~-. . : : i . . LAT E OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE .., ,,;-_.1vr' · ,: · s ··1 · · · ;_...... ,.,..... aryJ<;> ~}er MotlNT HoLYOICE COLLEGE . ,, ::' ·.:. .•. Arthur M. Eastman I ' .. 1 LATE OF VIRGINIA P OLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY. i, .' ..: ::···, •; :- . . • '1\ -. ·, ":.· . • . . : ,\ :: : , ·, .;, Hubert M. English, Jr. ··':•,·:: -;··· 1·:· . ,, OXFORD UN~~~I~. ' . .. \ . ·• . .· ': :",i' '! · .·1J ,' , •• '• UNlVERSITI OF MICHIGAN jl: r I \ ff. D..c:,J..:J--- 2.6s'>t- :. I . .. . •. i.~ ; :: . . 1"· '•'· 1:!!;- : ··: 1··. i• . :·, l ,, .; ~ •,, ', 'I •' ' 'l: . it• :· ·...... ,. ,:··-...• ··:. · ,· :. :.'·,'/ ;•,,:,\·,nr,J ,J•:-; :-:" · -.. ~.1 .~.;\. .,:···:, ...... f>tt' . . W • W • NORTON & COMPANY • New York • London .... .;;.J::, ,,. I . • · ·V ersiiication A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice. What your eye sees on the page is the composer's verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it alive as you read it aloud or hear it in youx; mind's ear. U11like your reading·of a newspaper, the b_est reading~that is to say, the most' sat isfying reading-of a poem involves a simultaneous engagement of eye and ear: the eye atterif?ve not only to the ·meaning cif words, but to their grouping and sp'acirig as li~es cin apage; the ear attuned to the grouping and spacing _, ·of s_ounds: The more you understand. ~f iny_sical no.tation ana' th~ pririciples of musical composition, the more you will understand _and appreciate a com po~er's score. Similarly, the mon; you understand of versificati~n (the prin ciples and practice· of writing verse), the more you are likely to understand and appreciate poetry and, in particular, the intimate relationship between its form and its content. What a poem says or means is the result of haw it is said, a fact that poets are-often at pains to emphasize: "All my,life," said W. H . Auden, "I ha'[e been more interested in technique than anything else." And T.·S. Eliot claimed that "the conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are· more those of a ·quasi-musical nature, in the -arrangement of metric and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas."· Fortunately; the principles of versification are easier to explain than .those of musical composition. · The oldest classification of poetry into three broad categories still holds: 1. Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several ."books" (sec tions of several hundred lines), on a great and serious subject. See, for exam ple, Spenser's Th~ Faerie Queene (p. 165), Milton's Paradise Lost (p. 420), Wordsworth's.Th~ Prelude_(p. 781), and Barrett Browning's Ai,rorn Leigh (p. 948). With one notable ~xception, Merrill's The Changing Light at San dover (p. 1725), the few poems of comparable length to ht1ve been written in . the _twentieth century-for example, William.s's Paterson and Pound's .Cant~s. (p. 1_306).:.._have _a freer, less formal structure. 2. Dramatic: poetry, monologue or dialogue, written in th~ voice of a·cha:r~ acter assumed by the poet. . Space does not permit the inclusion in this anthology of speeches from 'the many ·great verse dramas of English litera ture, but see such dramatic monologues as Tennyson's "Ulysses" (p. 992), Browning's "My Last Duchess" ·(p. 1012), and Howard's response to that poem, "Nikolaus Mardruz to his Master Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol, 1565" (p. 1778). 2027 202 8 / VERSIFICATION -METER / -2029 3. Lyric: originally, a song performed in ancient Greece to the accompani ·analysts use the sign ' to indicate a stress falling between _heavy an'd light. ment of a small harplike instrument called a lyre. The term is now used for Most people pay little or no attention to the sequence of stressed and any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, although that speaker unstressed syllables in their speaking and writing, but to a poet there may may sometimes quote others, The reader should be wary of-identifying the be .no more important element of a poem. · lyric speaker with the poet, since the "I" of a poem will frequently be that of a fictional character invented by the poet. The majority of poems in this book are lyrics, and the principal types of lyric will be found set out under "Forms" (p. 2039). Meter If a poem's rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular-'-that is, approximately equal-units, we call it meter (from the Greek word for'"mea "Rhythm - . •: .. ··. sui-e"). For many centuries after its origins were lost in the mists of antiquity, meter was the principal feature distinguishing poetry' from priise. There arel -Poeti-y is the most c:ompress~ A po~m i~ ~ compositi~n written for performance by the_ He aerest sceop II aelda beamum . ' human voice. ' . · [He first created · for men's sons] ' he~fon to hrofe II halig Scypp~nd We call such an analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables scansion (the '' [heaven as ·a· roof 'holy crea'tor] ·action or art of scanning a-line to determine its division into metrical feet); and a simple. system of signs .has been evolved to· ·denote stressed and . .' unstressed syllables and any significant pause -between .them. Adding .such Here, as in most Old 'English poetry, each line is organized by stress and by scansion marks will produce the following: alliteration (the repetition of speech sounds-vowels or, more usually, con sonants-in a sequence· of nearby words). In a line structured by accentual meter, one and generally both of the stressed syllables in the first half-line A poem lS a com.posi"tion II written for performance by alliterate,with'the fir.st stressed syllable in 'the second,half-line. . . the human voi"ce. '·•. · Accentual 'meter-continued to be used into the late fou·rteenth century, as in Langland's Piers Plo,.vman·(p. 71); which begins: . The double bar, Imo~ as· a · t: ae_s~mi. (froin the· Latin y.,ord f~; '.'cut"); indi~ cates a natural pause 'in the spealdrig voice, which may be shoi-t (as here) ·or In a Somer seson, II whan soft was the sonne, long (as"between sentences); the~ sign indicates ah.unstressed syllab_le; arid 1 [In a summer season_ _when mild was the sun,]. the' ~signfodicatesonethatisstressed. . ' ' · :. . :---··· .• . Y shop me in shrouds, 11 as fa shepe were.. . . , - · ' Tlje pattern ·of emphasis; stress, or accent can vary from -speaker to· speake~ [I clad myself in clothes as if I'd become a sheep··... ]-. and situation to situation.: If ~-omeone were to contradict my de'fi.nition '· df a poem, I might reply: However, following the Saxons' conquest by the ·Normans in· 1066, Saxon native meter was increasingly supplanted by the metrical patterns of Old X:roem com.pofitio~ ..· . IS i French poetry brought to England in the wake ofWilliam ·the Conqueror, · although the nonalliterative four-stress· line would have a long. an'd lively with a heavier stress on is than on. any other syllable in the sentence. The continuing life-structuring, for example, section 2 of Eliot's "The Dry Sal signs ~ and ~ make no distinction between varying levels of stress and vages." The Old English. metrical system has been occasionally ·revived in unstress-it being left to the reader to supply such variations-but'· some more recent-times, as for Heaney's translation of Beoi.vulf (p, •2), or the four- RE e·· V · 2030 I VERSIFICATION METER / 2031 stress lines of Coleridge's "Christabel" and Wilbur's "Junk" (p. 1638);· and s llable) foot, the anapest, has a naturally energetic movement, makin~y'it many English poets from Spenser onward have used alliteration in ways that s~itable for poems with vigorous subjects, though not these only. See Har _ s recall the character of Old· and Middle English verse. , "The Voice" (p. ·1160), which begins: · · Accentual-syllabic meter provided the metrical structure of the new poetry to emerge in the fourteenth century, and its basic unit was the foot, a combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables. 111e four Woman much I missed, how you I call to nie, I call to me . .. most common metrical feet in English poetry are: Iambs and anapests, which have a strong stress on ..the last sylla~le, ar: said I. Iambic (the noun is iamb): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, to constitute a rising meter, 'whereas trochees and ~a.ctyls, enclmg with an as in "New York._" Between the Renaissance .and the- rise of free verse unstresse cl sy11 a bl e, Constitute. a falling meter. In addition) f to theseh four stan-l (p. 2048) . in the last century, iambic_meter was the dominant .rhythm of dard metrical units, there are two other (two-syllable eet t at occur on y English poetry, considered by ~any writers in English as well as classical as ~ccasional variants of the others: · Latin the ml'!ter c;losest to that of ordinary speech. For this reason, iambi~ 1 · (the noun is spondee): two successive syllables with approxi meter is also to be foimd occasionally in the work of prose writers. Dickens's 5 . S pone ate b k" · h d f novel A Tale of Two Cities, for example, begins: mately equal strong stresses, as on the words "draw ac m t_ e secon o' ) ...... these lines from Arnold's "Dover Beach" (p. 1101): · · · , . Yt was I the best I of times, 11 Tt was I the worst I of times ..• Listen! I you he~r I the grat Ling ro:r , u . • , .. • 2. Trochaic (the noun is troc1,ee): a stressed followed by an ·unstressed syl of peb I bles which I the waves I draw back, I and flmg : ." . lable, as in the word London or the· line from the nursery rhyme, 6 p l · (the· noun is also pyrrhic): two successive unstressed or lightly London I bridge is I falling I clown . : . s~re=d~;Ilables, as in the seconc). foot of the s_econd line ~bove, where the succession of light syllables seems to mimic the rattle of light pebbles _that Here, as in many other tro'chaic lines, the final unstressed syllable has been the heil.vy wave ·slowly draws back. dropped. This shortening, which gives prominence t_o the stressed syllable necessary for rhyme (p. 2036), ~s called a catalectic;: l_ine end. Poets, who consciously or instinctively wiII sel~ct _a :meter t~ suit their The word London may be a trochee, but it does not have to appear in a subject, h~ve also a variety of line lengths fro~ which to choose. · _ trochaic lfoe. Provided its natural stress is preserved; it can take its place comfortably in _an iambic line, like that from Eliot's Tlie Waste Lancl: • , ' • ' I • ! L ~o-no~et;r._ (one _foot):. see the fifth and- sbct:h_ li~es of each stanza of H~rbert's "Easter Wings" (p. 368), which reflect, 1_n turn, the p~v~rty and A cro~d I fl~wed ov I er Lon I don bridge·... :d:i . ' . ' . . thinness ~£.the. speaker. Herrick's _"Upon His Departure. Hen~e 1s ~ ;-~re . ..• . . . l • . .• , example of~ complete poem in iambic monometer.1:he f~ct_t at eil.C me Whe'reas iambic. meter has ·a certain gravity, making it a natural choice fcir is a solitary foot (u,) suggests to the eye ~he narro:,v mscnption of a grave poems on_ sole_mn: subje~ts·, the trochaic foot ha~ a lighter, quicker, m~r'e stone, and to the ear the brevity ancl lonelmess of Jife. · buciyan·t mov·ement. Hence, for exa.mple, _its use in Milton's "L'Allegro"_(lin«'!s 25~29, for example, on p. 403) and Blake's "Introduction" to Songs of Inno- Thus I cence (p. 733). ' Pass by And die, 3. Anapestic (the noun is anapest): two unstressed syllables followed by a A~ one, stres_sed syllable, as in Tennessee or the opening of Byron's "The Destruction ' · unlmown; of Sennacherib" (p. 834). And,gone: "I'm made The Assfr I ian came clown ! like the wolf I on the fold .. . A'shade, And laid l'th grave, The last three letters of the word Assyrian should be heard-as one syllable, a form of contraction known as elision. There have My cave.· Where-tell 4'. Dactylic (the -noun is . dactyl):. a stressed syllable followed by two -I-dwell, unstressed syllables, as in Leningrad. This, like the previous "triple''._(three- Farewell. V 2032 / VERSIFICATION METER / 2033 2. Dimeter (two feet): iambic dimeter alternates with iambic pentameter in d'Alexarzclre). A single alexandrine is often used to provide a resonant ter Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping" (p. 300); and dactylic dimeter ( ~. u u I mination to a stanza of shorter lines., as, for example, the Spenserian stanza ~ u u) gives Tennyson's ''The Charge of the Light Brigade" (p. 1005) its (p. 2042) or Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" (p. 1156), in which galloping momentum: the shape of the stanza suggests the iceberg that is the poem's subject. Swin burne's "The Last Ora'de" is written in trochaic hexameter: Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, 'Day by day thy shado"'.' shines in heaven be holden,... Cannon ·in front' of them I I r I I Voll~yed and .thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, 7. He'ptameter (seven feet): Kipli~g's "Tommy" (p. 1181).is written iri iambic Boldly they rode and well, heptameter· (cir fourteeners, as they are often called, from the number of Into the jaws of Death, their' syllables), with an added initial syllable in three of the four lines' that Into the mouth of hell mak~ up the secon~ half of each stanza. · · Rode the six hundred. 8. O~tameter _(eight feet): Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's"· (p. l 017) is ; i ' . ! Lines 4 and 9, each lacking a final unstressed syllable, are catalectic, a com- ·the_most farriims example of the rare trochaic octarrieter. mon feature of dactylic as of trochaic poems. -- · ··· - · Poets who :write . in strict conformity to a single metrical pattern will 3. Trimeter. (three feet): Ralegh's "The .Lie" (p. 154) -and Roethke's "My achieve the music of a metronome arid soon drive. .th~ir listeners away. Var Papa's Waltz" (p. 1494) are written in i'ambic trimeter; and all but the last iation, surpl,i.se, is 'th~_very essence of every art;ist's trade; and one qf the most line of eachstanzJ of Shelley's. "To a Skylark" (p. 87 6) in trochaic, trimeter. important scmrces of metrical power and pleasµre is the perpe,tual tension b~t:ween the reiilar and' the 'irregular, betwee;,.;_ the expected and the unex- 4. Tetrameter (four feet): Marvell's "ToHis ·coy Mistress" (p. 4 78) is writt~n pected, the base rhythm and the variation. . in iambic·tetrameter; arid Shakespeare's "Fear No Mor:e the Heat o' th;e ·su'n" John Hollander has ·spoken of the "metrical contrac~" that poets enter into (p. 276) in trochaic tetrameter. · · · · .. ' .' with their readers from the first few words of a poem. When Frost begins "The Gift Outright"- 5. Pentameter (five feet).: the most popular metrical line in English poetry, the iambic pentameter provides the basic rhythmical· framework, or hase The land I was oU:rs I before I we were I the land's rhythm, of countless poems from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first, from. Chaucer's· "General Prologue". to The Canterbury Tales ·(p. 19) and -we expect what follows to have an iambic base meter, but the irregularity Shakespeare's sonnets (p. 257) to Hill's "Lachrimae" (p. 1834) andSchriack or variation in the fourth foot tells us that we are hearing not robot ~peech enberg's "Supernatural Love" (p. 2003). ·It even contri~utes ·to"· the· stately but human speech. The stress on "we" makes it, appropriately, one of the prose of the Declaration of Independence: · · · ' . · , , ·, · two most important words in the line, "we" being the most important pres- . . ence in the "land."· . we hold I these truths I to be I self-~v Iident. . . ·' Frost's poem will serve as an example of ~ays in which skillful poets will vary their base meter: Anapestic pentameter is to be found in Browning's "Saul": 1. The land I was ours I before I we were I the land's. Af thy love I is dtscov I ere 1, . 13. C111e cleed I of gift I was man I y deeds I of war) called a first paeon (- - - -). His lines will, on occasion, admit other 14. To the land I vaguely I real I izing I westward, unstressed syllables, as in the sonnet "Felix Randal" (p. 1168): 15. But still I unstor J fed, 11 art J less, 11 iin J enhanced, 16. Such as I she was, II such as I she would I become. Felix I Randal, 11 the J farrier, 11 6 is he J dead theU:? 11 my I duty all J ended, The iambic pentameter gives the poem a stately movementappropriate to . Who have J watched h'i's I mould of man, 11 big- J honed the unfolding history of the Uniterl States. In the trochaic "reversed feet" at and J hardy-I handsome . · · the start of lines 2, 10, 12, and 16, the stress is advanced to lend emphasis Pining, 11 pining, 11 fill J t:fme when I reason I rainbled in 'i't I to a key word or, in the case of line 8, an important syllable,.Sporidees in and son1e . lines: 2 ("our°land") and 3 ("her people") bring into equal balance the two Fatal J four dis J orders, 11 fleshed there,. II all con I tended? partners whose union is the theme of the ·poem. '_Su~h additional heavy stresses are counterbalanced by the 'ight pyrrhic feet at the end of lines 4 A poetry structured on the principle that strength is stress is particularly well and 5, in the middle of line 10, and toward the end of line 14. The.multiple suited to stressful subjects, and the sprung rhythm of what Hopkins called irregularities of that line give _a wonderfi.11 impression of. the land stretching his "terrible. sonnets" (pp. ·1167- 72), for. example, gives them a dramatic westward into space,just as the variations ofline 16 give a sense of the nation nrgency, a sense of anguished struggle that few poets have equalled in surging toward its ·destiny in time. . accentual-syllabic meter. · Frost's reading of this poem at President Kennedy'~· inaug1ira'tion differe ~-:'":_;(__._;,·t .;··.~. .;~_··:··:· ·,:·. ··:· :_. '_·_ •.•·• • · J. · .Th 'e world is charged.with the· grandei.i; ·of God.' Gunn-have written notable poems in syllabics; their efforts to capttire:the ,: _ 2. · It will flame·otit, like shining from shook foil; spirit-if not the letter-of a foreign linguistic and pci'etic lTadition may be ·3. It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil compared with:-those of many· poets since the. Renaissance who -have . [\i' '4.' ·crushed. Why do men then now not reek his rod? attempted to render Greek and Latin meters into English verse, 'using the r: 5. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; fourth metrical system;to be considered here. {!:• ' 6. And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; Quantitative meter, which structures most Greek, Sanslait, and later :_r._:,:.:_i;:,; ·_.. · 7. And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:·the soil . Latin poetry, is based on notions of-a syllahle's "quantity," its duratfon in 8. Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. . time (or its length). This is determined by various conventions of spelling as N . well as by the type of. vowel sound it contains. Complexities arise because .ij ~' i' •, I. ' , . Latin has more word-stress than does ancient Greek, and hence there is often }( The grand statement of the first line is. illustrated not by the. grand exam an alignment of stress and quantity in foot-patterns of later Latin verse.This f:,; p}es that the opening of lines 2 and 3 seem·to promise, but by the surprising is ironic in light of the efforts, on the part of some• Renaissance English ~,:; similes of shaken. tin foil .and olive oil oozing from its press. The .down-to poets, to "!!nnoble" the· vernacular English tradition_by following classical ·.l;:'. earthiness that these objects .have in common is stressed by the foil I oil metrical models. Although poets like Spenser and Sidney devised elaborate ff.rhyme that will be confirmed by the toil I soil of lines 6 and 7. At the other rules for determining the "length" of English syllables a_ccording to ancient .r end of the cosmic scale, "The grandeur of God" no.less appropriately rhymes rules, the theoretical prescriptions often ·generated poems in which "long" ~f with "his rod." But what of the implicit coupling of grand God and industrial syllables are in fact stressed syllables. Indeed, one defender of quantitative It hu\"flanity'in the ensuing trod I shod rhymes of lines 5 and 8? These rhymes meter in English, Thomas Campion, explicitly recommended a metrical sys t remind Hopkins's reader that Christ, too, was a worker, a walker 9f hard tem aligning stress with quantity; he illustrated his theory with some highly f. roads, and that "the grandeur of God" i_s manife'st in the world through which successful poems such as "Rose-cheeked Laura" (-p . 280). Although: scinie t .the weary generations treaq.. :· . . .. · .- · . Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter produced poems distinctly ::t: .. Rhymes appearing like these.at the. end of a line are lmown as end rhymes, less-pleasing to the ear than to.the (highly educated) eye, others,, such as ~: but poets frequently make use of internal rhyme ~uch as the then I men of those in Sidney's Arcadia, work well and remind us that experiments in cul (:, Hopldns's line 4, the seared I blear!ld./ smeared of line 6, or the wears I shares tural translation-.-:-some more successful than others-have been an endur \f of line 7. Assonance (the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds) is ing part ·of .the English poetic tradition from the Anglo-Saxon era to the ;f present in the not I rod of line 4._This sonnet also contains two examples of present. .({ a r~lated sound effect, onomatopo_eia, sometimes called echoism, a combi- ~(;,, nat1on of words whose-sound-seems to resemble the sound it denotes. So, U in lines 3 and 4, the long, slow, alliterative vowels-"ooze of oil"-seem %: squeezed out by' the crushing pressure of. the heavily stressed verb that fol ,;,. Rhyme t·· lows. So, too, the triple repetition of "have trod" in line 5 seems to echo the tl' thudding boots of the laboring generations. Ever since the poetry of Chaucer sprang from the fortunate marriage of t;: .. All the rhymes so far discussed have been what is known as masculine Old French and Old English, rhyme (the concurrence, in two or more lines, t rhymes in that they consist of a single stressed syllable. Rhyme words in of the last stressed vowel and of all speech sounds following that vowel) has ~. which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable-chiming/ been closely associated with rhythm in English poetry. It is to ):ie found in b\ rhyming- are !mown as feminine rhymes. Single (one-syllable) and double the early poems and songs of many languages. Most English speakers meet ;r\ -(two-syllable) rhymes are the most common, but· triple and even quadruple :f rhymes are also to be found, usually in a comic context like that of Gilbert's it first in nursery rhymes, m any of which involve numbers ("One, ·two,/ ~ . i.F [j 1 203 8 / VERSIFICATION , <:?'.~:1()t:i ::, , FORMS / 2039 "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" (p. 1144) or Byron',s'Doit ,·,, .• ,, _i, extreme stands the monorhyme, a poem of no predetermined meter, line Juan (p. 837): , , " ,•i · i,,, .~\ '.· length, or number of lines; the sole requirement being its one rhyme. The ,,,i · · , ]·/ greater the length of a monorhyme, the greater the difficulty of achieving ~~}~,..;'~; ;:u\;:t:! ':h:;~::;e~;~c;::L you o!ll · ,; /:(: ··. .(·.~,· ;_~·:.,:·'_:~,: ,:,_:..•.~' ..::., ··.·. ·. ~:o:~~'~ersational fluency and ease of Dick Davis's "Monorhyme for the If the correspondence of rhyming sounds is exact, it: is called 'P~rfect ~. Lifting her arms to soap her hair rhyme or else fiill or true rhyme. For many centuries, almost all E'nglish ·. Her pretty breasts respond-and there writers of.serious poems confined themselves to rhymes of this sort,' except , t , . The movement of that buoyant pair ,: for an occasional poetic license (or violation of the rules of versification) . ~'~,i.·.·.'.,::··_1::....·, ;·.. ..' ·.: •. •.· · ~~~~etya :x~lyl~~r:n~:~~n;~~:~a;o air·, such as eye rhymes, words whose endings are spelled· alike, and in ,n\osl ,_ d I"] l l · th f · Now she's the girl I didn't dare instances were pronounce a Ice/ , 1ut 1ave 1n . e course o time acquired a {-'ii Approach, ask out, much less declare different pronunciation: prove 1ave; ,1 aug 1iter 11aiighter. Since. the nine: ·it·.·, d teenth century, however; an increasing.number of poets.have felt the. cons ·· My love to, mired in young espair. fident chimes of perfect ~hymes inappropriate for poems . of doubt; ~/ Childbearing, rows, domestic care frustration, and, grief, ~nd have used various forms of. imperfect rhyme, J .·_.t .···: including: ) · .. . ,,, ,. , . All the prosaic.wear and tear ,. Off-rhyme (:).lso ]mown as half rhyme,.near rhyme, or slant rhyme) differs That constitute the life we share Slip from her beautiful and bare from perfect rhyme in changing the vowel sound and/or the concluding con Bright body as, made half aware sonants expected of perfect rhyme. See Byron's gone I alone rhyme in the Of my quick surreptitious stare, second stanza of "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year" (p. 862), She wrings the water from her hair or Dickinson's rhyming of Room I Storm;firm I Room; and be I Fly in "I heard And turning smiles to see me there. a Fly buzz - when I died -" (p. 1121). · ' · Vowel rhyme goes beyond off0 thyme to the point at which rhyme words At the other end of the spectrum of rhym~ stands Paul Muldoon\ use of-the have only their vowel sound in common. See, for ·example, the muted ·hut same (or virti.ially the same) rhymes of the ninety-line poem, "Third Epistle musically ,effective rhymes of Dylan Thomas's "Fem Hill" (p. 1571)': t: 'to Timothy'' (p. ·19a1), in tbe same order, in four ~ther ninety-line poems: boughs I towns; green I leaves; starry I barley; climb I eyes I light. , I, &; "Yarrow," "lncantata," "The Mud Room," and "The Bangle (Slight Return)." · Pararhyme·, in' which the stressed vowel sounds differ but are flanked ·by iji, · Orily marginally less remarkable is Dylan .Thomas's "Author's Prologue," a identical or similar consonants, · is a term coined by Edmund Illunden 'tci .!·-~..•'i.'. ::· .:.,· poem of 102 lines, in which line 1 rhyme's with line 102·, line 2 with 101, describe Wilfred Owen's pioneering use of such rhymes. Although theyhaci . 1 and so oft, do~ to the central ~ouplet of lines 51-52. Rhyme schemes, occurred ori occasion before-see trod I trade in lines 5 and 6 of "God's Gran' t,;.).. ·..· : · howe;er, are seldom so taxing for poets (or their readers) and, as with their deur"-Owen was the first to employpararhyme consistently. In a poem such ~. choice of meter, are likely to be determined consciously ·or subconsciously as "Strange Meeting" (p. 1389), the second rhyme· is usually lower in pitch i. by their lmoVl'.ledge of earlier poems written in t.his or that form. (has a deeper vfuowe1 soundh) thanbthe firsft, producin~ ehffects Tofhdi ssornihce,' .~;_!.·'._':_: _ ::·.·.,_. ·. failure, and un 1611 ment t at su t1 yrein orce 0 wens t eme. e 1ast stanza '.'- of his "Miners" shows a further refinement: , i: ::: ff. Forms The centuries will burn rich loads g: With which we groaned, 'l\' Basic Forms Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, •·;,; t While songs are crooned. F Having looked at-a.nd listened to-the ways in which metrical feet com r: But they will not dream of us poor lads, , '''; ·: ,,,. bine in a p'o'etic line, one can move on ·to see-and hear-how such lines Left in the ground. ,,i •d'. ~!_·:_;:;····:··. . ~:::~~e in the larger patterns of the dance, what are known as the forms of H ere, the pitch of the pararhyme rises to reflect the dream of a happier 1 future-loads I !-ids-before plunging to the desolate reality of lads, a rise arid 7.> · 1. Blank verse, at one end of the scale, consists of unrhymed (hence ''blank") fall repeated in groaned I crooned I gr01.mcl. ,: '.' II . iambic pentameters. Introduced to England by Surrey in his translations ' TI1e effect of rhyming-whether the chime is loud or muted-is to a large )V from the Aeneid (1554), it soon became.the standard·meter for Elizabethan extent dictated by one rhyme's distance from another, a factor frequently ,'.'.\!o,I,_ ··,:.·, poetic drama. No verse form is closer to the natural rhythms of spoken dictated by the rhyme scheme of the poet's chosen stanza form. At one English or more adaptive to different levehof speech.-Following the example I"l ,,., 1 :•, '.~( 2040 / VsnsmcATWN -,:ecgz11 of Shakespeare, whose kings, clowns, and countryfolk have each. their ,0Jn·,.· ·,·' ·!I,( poetry is more closely identified with its inventor than is terza rima with voice whe1: speal?ng blank v:rse, it ~as b::n used.by dra~atists from)l\1ai-c··. :h : ¥i ' .u .µ I ~ 8 c ) : ' {i i,;\ :1 Ottava rima and the Spenserian stanza each open \J\llth a quatrain;'and 'i!t':rr I close \J\llth a couplet. These and other of the shorter stanzaic units similarl:r recur as component parts of certain lyrics \J\llth a.fixed form. , .·,, 1, .) . .. 1;; , ,q.1 l 8. The ·sonnet, traditionally a poem of fourteen iambic pentameters linke~l, i{·( ...., I C1l I by an intricate rhyme scheme, is one of the oldest verse .forms in English., <11..0 <11..C CJ 'tJ CJ re, ([) 4-1 Hanel trembling towards hand; the amazing lights tercet 1: A1 B A2 Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme h eights. 2: A B A' 3: A Il A2 The three quatrains that folio~ record the ensuing anticlimax of suburban 4: A Il A' 5: A B A2 married life. Meredith in "Modern Love" (p. · l 107) stretched the sonnet t quatrain:_A Il A' A2 sixteen lines; Hopldns cut it short in-what he termed his curtal (a curtaile~ form of "curtailed") soimet,"Pied Beauty". (p. 116 7); while-Shalcespeare con cealed a sonnet _in nomeo ancl Jiiliet (l.5:90-103). Shakespeare's 154 better The art of writing complicated forms like the villanelle and sestina (see kno=. sonnets _form a carefully organized pro·gre'ssion, or sonnet seqiience, below) is to give them th~ graceful.momentum of good ·dancing, ~nd the followmg the precedent of earlier sonneteers such as Sidney with his "Astro vitality of the dance informs triumphant examples such as Roethke's "The p~il an_d Stella" (p. 213) and Spenser with his "Amoretti" (p. 190). In the Waking" (p. 1500), Bishop's "One Art''. (p. 1527), arid Thomas's "Do Not Go nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets from th~ Portu Gentle into That Good Night" (p. 1572). guese" (p. 947) continued a tradition in which the author of "Ilerryman's Sonnets" has since, . with' that title, audaciously challenged the aiithor of 10. The sestina, the most complicated of the verse forms initiated by the Shakespeare's sonnets. twelfth-century wandering singers !mown as troubadours, is composed of six stanzas of six lines each; .followed by an envoy, or concluding stanza, that The twentieth century saw the introduction to English poetry cif a Russian incorporates lines or words used before: in this case the words (instead of sonnet, the sta~za form of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, Eugene Onegin rhymes) end each line in the following pattern: (182_3- 3 l ). Tins was suc~essfully translated-preserving its original form by Sir Charles Johnston m 1977; but it was not i.mtil 1986 that the Pnsh stanza 1: A B C D E F ldnian stanza first entered English poetry, in its own right, in Vikram Seth's -2: F A E B DC verse n~vel, The Gol1en Cat~ (p. 1994). Arguably the most technically 3: CF DA B E demandmg of all English poetic forms, the Pushldnian stanza is composed 4: E CB F AD of fourteen tetrameter (not pentameter) lines rhyming as follows: 5: D E A C F Il 6: B D F E CA a feminine rhyme (p. 2037) envoy: E C A or A C E [these lines should contain the remaining three b masctiline rhyme (p. 2037) end words] a feminine · b mas·culine The earliest example in this anthology is, in fact a cloiibie sestina: Sidney's C feminine "Ye Goatherd Gods" (p. 208). Perhaps daunted by the intricate brilliance of C feminine this, few poets attempted the form for the next three ·centuries. It was re cl masculine introduced by Swinburne and Pound, who prepared the way for notable 0 :::,::po:,::::::::~ :uch as Bishop', "Sestin," (p. 1520), Hecht', ,"Ob " th, demand, of , pa,ticul" subj,ct Th, mliest syst,mat~c :n:' ,~c:,:: Book ofYolek" (p. 1566), and Ashhery's "The Painter" (p. 1736). , e ri,;t_ pioneer of such variation was John Skelton, who gave his name to what has ,t come to be called Skeltonic verse. His poems typically~see, for example, 11. The canzone_, another ver~e form initiated by the twelfth-century ~ou· Wthe extract from "Colin Clout" (p. ·92)-have short Jines of anything from badours, has a history of varymg lengths and patterns. It often consists of ;'J.· three to seven syllables containing two or three stresses (though more of five twelve-line stanzas and a five-line envoy, all employing the same· five ~l. both are· common), and exploit a single rhyme until inspiration, and ·the line-end words. A common pattern of repetition is that followed (with m.inor :f resources of-the language run.m .1t, The breathle.ss urgency of this form has variations) by Agha Shahid Ali's "Lenox Hill" (p. 1959): abaaeaad;ee/ if:. intrigued·and influenced modern poets such as Graves and Auden. eaeebeeccec/cl I deddadclbbee I edcceeeaacbb I bcbbclbbeebaa I abecle. · .• i ..: · i< Another early composite form employed longer lines: iambic hexameter . . . . -p; ,·,, f~ (twelve syllables) alternating. with iambic heptameter (fourteen syllables). 12. !he pantoum, a Malayan form in origin, ent~_red Engli'sh poetry by wa~: i ::·Th is form, !mown as '!poulter's measure''-from the poultryman's practice of of nmeteenth-century French poetry. It may consist of any number cif qu~t'' .t.:.' giving twelve eggs for the first dozen and fourteen for the second-was used rains, ·lines 2 and 4 of which are repeated as lines 1 arid 3 of the next qi.iatrairl_l t,f by sixteenth-century poets such as' Wyatt (p. 126), Queen· Elizabeth I The p_oem rhymes abab I hebe,· and so on; arid gerierally ends with a qu'atr~iii ·K (p . 142), and Sidney (p. 208), but has .not proved popular since. whose ren_etons (re;peated lines) are lines 1 and 3 of' the fii-st stiiriza · in' ·t The element of the unexpected often accounts for much of the success of reversed order, or in a repeton couplet consisting of lines 1 arid 3 ofd-ie' J· poems in a composite form such as-Donne's "The .Sun Rising" (p. 295). His first stanza in reversed order. See Donald Justice's "Pant.oum of the· Gre~'t' 1( stanza might be described as a combination of two quatrains (the first rhym-. Depression" (p. 1687) and Greg Williamson's "New Year's: A Short .Pan ~i.- ing abba, the second cdcd), and a couplet (ee) . That description would be toum" (p. 2024). }. accurate but in.adequate in that.it takes no account of the variation in line ~I/ length, which is a-crucial feature of.the poem's structure. It opens explosively 13. The limerick (to end this section on the first of two lighter notes) is a i;!:i with the outrage of the interrupted lover: .:~·.. five-line stanza thought to take its name from an old custom at convivial ~v• p arties whereby each person was required to sing an extemporized "nonsense Busy.old fool, unruly sun, .·~t' Why dost thou thus verse," which was followed by a chorus containing the words 'Will you come t};.. up to Limerick?" The acknowledged Old Master of the limerick is Edward Through windows and through curtains call on us? Lear (p. 1041'), who required that the frrst and fifth lines end with the same' ·tl word (usually a place-name}; a restriction abandoned by many Modern Mas-i {(;:' Short lines, tetrameter followed by dimeter, suggest the speaker's initial ters, though triumphantly retained by the anonymous author of this: , ,d ,, I,, it shock and give place, as he begins _to recover his composure, to the steadier \ : pentameters that complete the first quatrain. Continuing irritation propels There once was a m an from Nantu'i::ket-· .. q:; the brisk tetrameters that _form the first half of the second quatrain: This, Who kept all his cash in a hucket; k again, is completed by calmer pentameters, and. the stanza -rounded off like But his daughter riamed Nan ./1 .! jt, an English sonnet, with a .summary pentameter couplet: Ran away.with a man, '( · And as for the bucket, Nant11cket. fa · Love, .all alike, no se<1.son knows nor clime : ~ ..: 1r'. I:':)'."! i tt _Nor hours, days, months, which are. the rags of time. . . 14. The clerihew, named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew· Bent!·~)'· (1875-1956), is a short comic or nonsensical poem about a famous person, } , This variation in line length achieves a diffe~ent effect in .the third stanza, consisting of two rhymed couplets with lines of unequal length. Some of.the, ).f where the brief trimeter suggests an absence contrasting with the royal pres- best are to he found in W . H. Auden's "Academic Graffiti"-this, for exa~- ·\{ ences· in the preceding tetrameter: ·· · . . ·. . ple: ' ttI '· John MiJton 1r .. . ~~:1i~~ :~:!et/nd all princes, I, . . ·. . Never stayed in a Hilton · Hotel,·· ·:::1 [t. And these lines prepare, both rhetorically and.visually, for the contraction Which was just as well. ,tf: and e1qiansion so brilliantly developed in the poem's triumphant close. Sim-, ,,t ·. ilar structural considerations account for the composite -stanza -forms, of ,,ff Arnold's "The Scholar-Gypsy" (p. 1089) and Lowell's "SkunkHour" (p. 1601), Composite Forms J, 'i ·;·; ·' :q:·. though variations of line length and rhyme scheme between the six-line stan Just as good poets h~ve ·~lways varied.their base rhythm, there have always: lf zas of Lowell's poem bring it close. to the line that divides .composite form been those ready to bend, stretch, or in some way morlify a fixe . Irregular Forms ,\;, ·· ,c:1 1 Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him : . . . · : .. -·, ·:·ini , according to his excellent greatness. · A poet writing in irregular form will use rhyme and meter but follow. no.1 Pr:iise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise fixed. pattern. A dassic· example is Milton's "Lyciclas" (p. 410), which.,is him with the psaltery and harp. written in iambic pentameters interspersed with an occasional trimeter, prob-i ably modeled on the occasional half-lines that intersperse the hexameters:oE These rhythms and rhetorical repetitions, audible also in Blake's prophetic Virgil's Aeneid. Milton's rhyming in this elegy (a formal lament for a dead· books, resurfaced in the work of the nineteenth-century founder of American person) is similarly varied, and a few lines _are unrhymecl. The·mo'.st exten-' poetry, as we !mow it today. Whitman's elegy for an unlmown· soldier, "Vi~il sive use of irregular form is to be found in one of the three types of ode, Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" (p. 1071 ), may encl with a traditional Long lyric-poems of elevated style and elaborate stanzaic structurej· the: image of the rising sun, like Milton's "Lyciclas" (p. 410), but its cadences are original odes of the Greek poet Pindar .were mocl,eled on songs sung by the those of the Hebrew Scriptures he read as a boy: chorus in Greek drama. The three-part structure of the regular Pinclaricode: has been attempted once or 'twice in English, but more common ,.ind more; And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in successful has been the irregular Pinclaric. ode, which has ·no . three-par_t his rude-dug grave I deposited, structure bu_t sections of varying length, varying line length, and ·varying Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim, rhyme scheme, Each of Pindar's odes was written to celebrate someone . and Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,), · · celebration ·has been the theme of many English Pindaric odes, among ;hem· Vigil for comrade swiftly slain; vigil I never forget, how as day Dryden's "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (p. 524), Tate's "Ocie to the Confed-. . · brighten'cl, . . . · erate Dead" (p. 1417), and Lowell's· "TI1e QuakerGraveyard in Nantucket'.'. I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, (p. 1592). The desire to celebrate someone or something has also prompted' And hwied him where he fell. most English odes of the third type, those modeled on the subject matter; tone, and form of the Roman poet Horace. More meditative and restrained Whitman's breakaway from the prevailing poetic forms of his time was truly than the boldly irregular Pinclaric__ ocle, the Horatian: ode is umally written revolutionary, . but certain traditional. techniques he would use for special in a repeated stanza form-Marvell's "An Horatian Ocie (Upon Cromwell's effect: the coI1cealecl. well / jell-rhyme that gives his elegy its closipg chord, Return from· Ireland)" (p. 486) in quatrains, for 'example, ·and Keats's '.'.To for exampl.e, or the bounding anapests of at\ earlier line: Autumn" (p. 939) i!1 a comp9site eleven-line stanza. ·-· .. \!.· On~ lo~l- I !bu~ gave I wh'i'ch your dear I eyes rel:l;;;.,d I · ~th a look ·shall nev er forget, . • · Qpen Forms OT Fr_ee Verse .. j.:': .. I,, I Y I . . ; ·······• ,,r · At the ~pposite end of the formal scale from the .fi.xecl forms (or;' adhey· The poetic revolution that Whitman initiated.was continued by Pound, who are sometimes called, closed forms) of-sonnet, villanelle, and -sestina;;we wrote of his predecessor: · come to what was long· lmown as free-verse, poetry that -makes· little·ni:i n·o use of traditional rhyme and-meter. The term is misleading, however, sug It was you that broke the new wood, gesting to some less thoughtful' champions of open forms (as free-verse Now is.a time for carving. struchires are now increasingly called) a false analogy with political freedom as opposed to slavery, and suggesting to traditionalist opponents the disorder Pound, the carver, unlike Whitman, the pioneer; came to open forms pyway or anarchy implied by Frost's in/famous· remark that "writing free verse•1S of closed forms, a progression reflected in the first four sections of Pound's like·playing.tennis with the net down." There was much unprofitable debate partly autobiographical portrait of the artist, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" in the last century over the relative merits ·and "relevance" of' closed ·and· (p. 1298). Each section is less "literary/' less formal than the last, quatrains open forms, unprofitable because, as will be clear to any re;der of this anthol with two rhymes yielding to quatrains with one rhyme and; in section 4, to ogy, good poems continue to be ·written in both. It would be foolish to wish Wpitmanian free verse. A similar progression from the :mastery of clo·secl that Larkin wrote like Whitman, or Atwood like Dickinson. Poets mmt find forms to the 'mastery of'opef\ forms can be seen in the development of poets forms and rhythms appropriate to their voices. When, around 1760, Smart such as. Lawrence, Eliot, Auden, Lowell, Rich, and Plath (pp .. 1284, 1340; chose an open form for "Jubilate Agno" (p. 678), that incantatory catalog.of 1465, 1592, 1791; 1836,respectively). the attributes of his: cat Jeoffry proclaimed its descent from the King Jarhes, Pound may have called himself·a carver, but ·he, too, proved a pioneer, translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and, specifically, such parallel cadences; opening ·up· terrain that has .been more profitably mined by his successors as those of Psalm 150: u,. 1·,,- than the highlands, the rolling.cadences explored by Smart, Blake, and Whit ;_:: 1.::. .J 1 man. Pound recovered for poets territory then inhabited only by novelists, Praise ye the Lord. Praise ·God in his sanctuary: . ·· ··:· ,: .'. the low ground of everyday speech; a priv(lte rather than.a public language. ·.. :·i 11 ! .',i··, praise him in the firmament of his power. He was airled hy Williams, who"; in a poem such'as "The Reel Wheelbarrow," 2050 / VERSIFICATION ·· ····:.·.·:f· .~:?;f~~w ;~1·.: SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING / 2051 .,.· 'c ·~ used the simplest cadences of common speech to reveal the extraord' . •'.:: .·\: . , .1.~f.'. more dramatically engaged than in the reading of shaped poems such as nature o f II ord' mary II th' mgs: · · · · Jnatr ···' .' 'f~tf Herbert's · "Easter Wings" (p. 368), Hollander's "Swan · and Shadow" (p . 1775), and Corn's "A Conch from Sicily" (p.· 1930). I .. ;\!' • so much depends tt:· t ! ) :i . '. ·ir. upon ..1i( .. 4. Concrete poetry is an exception to the generalization at the start·of this ·: ,": :, ,\l';;;"l· . : '~ :. essay: "A poem ·,is a· composition'written for performance by the human · a reel wheel voice." (All generalizations are' false, as the French say, including this one.) barrow tf The term concrete poetry was coined by a group of Brazilian poets in 19 52 .. :: ,·.in f'.·~ · ". ·i)'t·'. ··:· ,· to cover a loose category of verbal explorations by_avant-garde artists and glazed with rain • i :. : -~... ~11 ::.. x· 1L · poets around the world. These.range from ingenious typographic structures water .: ·i, , ,, .·,l\ it ·.1l: that, unlike · the shaped ·poems · mentioned above, cannot be "voiced"~ Mahon's "The Window" (p .. 1923), for example-to Jonathan Williams's beside the white . ., \'; 1. ; ,;:,. .. ·....• f.~.~.: .·•·· "Three ripples in Tuckasegee River," which can: ., . chickens. ··. r,i 1 TSI KSI TSI Each line depends upon the next to complete it, indicating the inte;~~~·:~~~ ·. · .: ~::: KSI TSI KSI ence of-things in the poem and, by extension, in the world. "The Re·d Whe'e!- · }f . TSI KSI TSI b arrow" bears out the truth of Auden's statement that in free verse "yoh need · ... .'·i·.;;;~.-.••·.r. :.;::·. ··.·. an infallible ear to detennine where· the lines should end." · ( .. ,,c:· ,. \ · • The poet's note to this says: "Tsilcsitsi is a Cherokee onomatopoeia for the : ! . :~v·. sound of running water." Other .Forms of Poetry .ff: 5. Sound poetry, extending the latter, more abstract form of concrete poetry - Probably rio century of the sixty since people .began wnting ·sav JoN STALLWORTH¥ \fi answer, or at least one answer, is that Pope is using poetic syntax to ·mi~ic -~,:.;,f : the h1~rried confusion that soldier~ experience in ; battle. Describing a moment w]1en_two pairs of Greek gods are arming themselves to fight each ).).': other, as related in Homer's Jliad, Pope adapts a classic syntactic pattern E· · with a Greek name-zeugma-for his own poetic purposes. Zeugma occurs ({ when a single Vl'!rb governs several parallel words or clauses (verbal ~n:its, discussed below· on p. 2056); Using a pattern that some. but not all of his English-speaking readers would have recognized, Pope inak<';s a densely com pressed lipe that siows any reader down, impeding easy.comprehension. But perhaps that is part of Pope's.aim, as he constructs a linguistic analogue for ' J.~ : certain aspects of the imagined batde scene. In so doing, Pope uses syntax 1:.~··· not only to communicate ideas but also to create Cl'!rtain dramatic and mean- ~:~: ingfuleffects by the very stmcture of his lines. . . . •"!f: .::;· , t~ •) (1, What ls' Syntax? ·k:-f · + Syntax has been defined in many ways; we can begin our own inquiry into \ the theory and various historical practices of poetic syntax by saying that it If.: concerns transactions between poets and their audiences:__readers and lis ,· ,, teners---'about the ·meanings ·of certain sequences of words .. The meanings ,n·: emerge as words unroll in time and also~if.we are reading the poem-in -.:,r space. But meaning is also a function of how words and groups of.words ·)J. · hark back to .earlier ones·, sometimes with the effect of suspending-or even , , . 1 contesting time's forward motion. H . The word syntax, from.the Greek words ryn (together) and tax (to arrange), ~: denotes the "orderly or systematic arrangements of parts or elements." At ,.. , the most general level; these ~lements involve symbols, including mathe i\- matical ones,. that -are arranged to create propositions or statements.- The J symbols that matter .most for poetic syntax are words and groups of words; .1, .., .~ _;,i: but· punctuation marks, :line shapes, stanza forms, metrical schemes, and ·. .: -... H , f, rhyme· patterns are also important for understanding -poeti_c syntax as . an : )! ;1. arrangement Of Words that generates meaningful statements. J'