WILLIAM S. WILSON FOCUS, METER, AND OPERATIONS IN POETRY l. focus and meter Anything written 0n a page has two focal of poetry; so when Chaucer goes t0 wrap up planes-one of them distant and conceptual, be' Troilus and Creseida, he says good'bye to his yond the words in the meaning as it could be little book, dedicates it, misinterprets it, and con- abstracted from the materiality of the signs it as a verbal artifact to posterity. But he words-and the other close and physical: the alio invoks Christ and Mary at the last moment. paper,'color, texture, ink, typeface, and margins. Since they cannot be asimilated to the poem as the This doubie focus .is'inherent'in literature: how a thing of words, focusing on them shrinks as within the drily curious vvhen a beautiful story is read in a scale and scope of the'poem, even seen fr-om abwe drhb volume; how difficult for Wallace Stevens t0 poem the world shrinks ndren focus is beyond the get his .books designed and bound in a style by Troilus. Chaucer's final wftich is the reciprocal of the contents; how page, on God. ideas, there pleasiag Ohinese calligraphy is t0 one vuho cannot So while words are designating within even read Chinese. When Monkey, in the remains some undesignated materialitv poetry has always used this-for sixteenth+entury Ghinese nove! of that name, the words, and good luck of a rhyme-al' opens the scroll and finds it blank, he says t0 example the irrational there have been attempts t0 Buddha, ". .what is the good of that?" Buddha though for a century part words the primary replfes, "As a mattsr of fact, it is sqch blank make this 'physical of plane. instead of an imposed and scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I focal So too as the local embodiment quite see that the people of China are too foolish metronomic regularity; has been on and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing of a distant ideal order, the emphasis thought, it but to gitve them copies with some writing the rhythms immanent in emotion, for 'breathing. on." A work of art typically lets attention go speech, and The iambic foot comple- of back and forth, occasionally fixing it in the mented ages in which the world consisted space materiality of the materials, often letting it float solid bodies in motion within an absolute syllables freely beyond the visual or aural surfaces. and rtime. The necesary succesion of as a regular When there is writing on a page. there is fric' went with a piiture of the universe his poet tion between the physical expresivbnms of the and measurable succesion. Nabokov has words and their conceptual or referential John Shade write in Pale Fire, meaning. This fiiction hetween two planes of attention has been used as one of the resources And if my priYate universe scans right, 378 statement: The frage for Chaos, "Consider this the verse of galaxies divine So does Milton's Paradise l'osr is iambic I suspect is an iambic line' uri*e tot* of Which five pentameter. This means that it consists of foot by a of tvvo syllables, and that in eaeh The opposite of this order which is shared feet, each in is stressed'' " He then scans *un, ih* universe, and iambic verse, is shown the second syllable six lines in ordet to disprove that state' lines which the editor inserts in a footnote: the first ment. Here is the first: I must not forget to say something Ah, I That my friend told me of a certain king' x I I I xlx x x x Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit merely Here the unconvincing exclamation "Ah" an for several reasons' First' the fills out the iamb, and "something" receives This is nonsense the mad' disobedience conlains a consonantal aiien stress on thing. These lines reflect word define y: dis o hed yence' The line is not" ittr, it self-serving, ego of Kinbote' and sounded like a Peckham uses the mme inr Uitt*t*ntes between him and John Shade' hypermetric.'Second, Pitt' on Mans Firct Drs as though the stress were lambic has been so pervasive that William stress 0n shades stress is entirely relative to the tris OeattrUeU in 1778, could say, "What absolute. But the syllables, so that all *, ,rr, what shadows we pursue," which resolves preceeding and succeeding in the second syllable receive u tif, brurt than the words of a Mr' Coombe itrat is required is that what shadows than the first' The third 1780, "!Vhu, shadows we are, and relatively more stress receive more stress than the we pursue." syllable can even still more dimpty scanning verse is growing more second, as long as the fourth receives a Dis, 0f Mans ior several reasons' chiefty because than the third' So in 0f Mans First Oittitufi more has been withdrawn from the is a perfect iamb, and First can receive ro**iirt., unstressed relative ;t-itt ,t galaxies divine'" So Marianne Moore's stress than Mans, and still be not scanned: is entitled to emphasis since syllables can be counted but to D is. Ois "Proserpin gathring flours/ Her self a fairer (lV' 269)' At all events there is in BrooklYn Ftoure by gloomie Dis/ Was gathered" me feel at home' sometning that makes Muse' Peckham then scans "Sing Heav'nly gets three syllables pattern of iambs that on the secret top" and Wallace Stevi while a And in 'ts, another hypermetric line' word like something will oui of Heav'nly, for ,igt t t.unt a line, a is g,ut Hnv'nly is disyllabic' What has happened not support an iambic pattern: the that in a book called Man's frage for Chaos' overseas the commitment t0 order had been real' lt was something author has withdrawn It earlier ri"i-r t"."tnbered, sometnt"n t?:;'"r*,-o itquitrO by earlier art; and reinforced. by perfectly metrical .O ,.4 has made chaos out of stood in an external world' theory' Overseas, that verse. This is useful propaganda for a perhaps, but it bears no relation to the truth' the rhythms of The problem of describing A similar way of thinking about earli€r intrinsic metric can *oOrrn verse which lacks an poetry-withdrawing commitme.nt to.iu iambic U, ,*prru,rd from the problem of scanning puiirtn, and thln watching things fall .rrfi*r'work. Morse Peckham writes' in Man's 379 apart-appears in Bavid Antin's "Notes for an Yit make hyt sumwhat agreable, Thougtr som vers fayle in a sillable; Ultimate Prosody," in Stony Brook 112, p. 173. (House of Fame lll, 1096) Antin is notable as an editor of a magazine called Some/Thing, and as a poet with a knowledge of And in Troilus and Creseide, he prays that no linguistics. He finds irregularities almost as easily one mismeter the poem: as Peckham does. But consider the hypermetric line from Wordsworth, 'lJ\lent hurrying o'er the So prey I god that non myswrite the, V. 1795 illimitable waste," where Antin scans "the Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. illimitable" as six syllables the il lim it a ble. point is that if y0u are not committed t0 But the pronunciation is "th'illimitable" if you The a higher and informing order, then you fragment are committed to the regularity. "Even Milton, mutilate that order. may be that modern whose blank verse in Paradise lost is clearly and lt must destroy or fragment old orders. This decasyllabic, has lines which can only be resolved artists purposes, like using by some accent-counting convention," Antin is easy to do and serves many holes. But it writes. But there are not ten hypermetric lines in stones from the Parthenon t0 fill up preserve as frag' Paradise Lost, and not five outside of speeches is difficult to the fragments where they are part of the characterization, as ments, they keep being recombined in a specious when Adam overflows with indulgent sentimen' unity. What has to be sorted out are the rights of poets past.to style which is the tality in an easy Paradox: in the find a correlative of their moral, philosophic, or reli- gious order, and the rights of poets today to societie, For solitude somtimes is best write without intrinsic metric, and to focus on And short retirement urges sweet returne' (1x,249) the hitherto subsidiary planes of materials, tools, and operations. The point is not t0 debate Peckham and Antin ll. concrete operations in poetry 0n every foot of English poetry. The disagree- ment is not on the level of facts; it is that I see When there are scarce any poets who "speak and hea' Chaucer and Milton and Wordsrvorth the tongue/ That Shakespeare spake, the faith distantly focused on an ideal order which some' and morals hold/ Which Milton held," and penta' times coincides with the nearer focus of the im- accordingly not much reason for iambic perfect words. Antin quotes Gascoigne on meter, there are many alternatives, among them art Chaucer, but Gascoigne did not know that the use of well-defined operations. This is an acts which Chaucer was writing iambic verse, and thought not made by mysteri0us mental impose a on emotions, but made by, and that he vrms writing a four'stress line. So also form mental opera- Spenser in his imitation of Chaucer in the illustrating, acts that can be called is an abstract act which uses February eclogue.