My Losing Battle with Meter
Timothy Steele, all the fun’s in how you say a thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)
Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1990)
In his book Missing Measures, Timothy Steele argues that, despite the “free-verse” revolution in poetic form heralded in at the turn of the twentieth century by T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, poetic metrics is still an essential component of all poetry. These innovators, however, who made their claim for change by scoffing at the Victorian meter, were wrong about their call for poetry without meter. Steele goes on to say, “the fluid character of language insures that conventional meters are continually renewed. Though metrical forms are, in the abstract, constant over time, as speech habits alter, the sound of specific poems written in metrical forms likewise alter.” (Missing Measures, 288) But to contend, as Eliot and his peers did, that a poet could somehow dismiss meter and replace it with “free-verse” in their composing of a poem, is to fail to understand the nature of meter and the nature of our language. “Metrical conventions,” Steele contends,” get established, generally speaking, because they suit, to varying degrees, patterns of speech. It is right to insist that a poet must be inventive in using his medium. It would seem folly, however, to insist that he invent his medium.” (Ibid, 288) The medium for those of us writing in English is metrical by its nature. What the “free-verse” revolution was doing wasn’t getting rid of the meter in poetry as much as it was changing what poetry had as its subject and the idiomatic language, much more aligned with a contemporary, scientific world view, was used in poetry.
For me, Steele’s arguments blew a hole in my assumptions about free-verse and about the status of meter in free-verse. I have struggled with meter. I have studied it. I have scanned my poems to see if and when I was using it. I’ve tried to scan other poet’s poems and never entirely understood how they were using meter. After writing for twenty years, I’d given up ever understanding how to use meter in my own writing. If meter is, indeed, embedded in our language, in the very manner of our speech and intonation, then how can I, as a poet, be more aware of it as I write a poem, and, as he argues, use it more effectively in my writing? Steele didn’t answer that question in his first book about the misplaced revolt against meter. But in his next book dealing with the use and practice of writing in meter, even in a free-verse form, he takes on how a poet can be attentive to the rhythms of meter.
In his book all the fun’s in how you say a thing, Steele shows how to measure out a poem in meter, conscious of how the natural iambic foot can add to a poem, and how, by using meter, a poem can gain more momentum and rhythm. He has helped me better understand how to use it in my poetry, and, if I can explain to you what he says, perhaps it can help you to use it more consciously in your poetry. He contends that, “versification involves a continual reconciliation of two apparently opposed elements. One is rhythm, in the sense of the fluid and shifting movements of speech. The other is meter, in the sense of a fixed abstract pattern according to which those movements are organized. And this steady and ongoing reconciliation between meter and rhythm is almost like a loving relationship between two people.” ( all the fun’s in how you say a thing, 27)
Timothy Steele has argued in his books that no matter how hard we run away from metered poetry we can never escape the reality that our language is at its heart metered. By meter, he means “organized rhythm.” (Ibid,3) He emphasizes that “the adjective (“organized”) in this definition is as important as the noun. . . .Meter is rhythm ordered in a conscious, specific manner. The metrical unit repeats, and once we feel or recognize, in reading a poem, this scheme of repetition, we can anticipate its continuation as a kind of pulse in the verse.” (Ibid.) What he strives to prove is that, even if modern innovators of free-verse have rebelled against metered poems, even if they claim that one should—or, at least, need— not write a poem using meter, poems are by their nature metered. He’s almost saying that to propose poems can be not metered is like saying that fish can live without water. Meter is in the DNA of a poem. Indeed, it’s built into the nature of our language. It’s the creeks, streams, and rivers of our language.
Three factors influence how meter works in our normal speech that, when leveraged into a poem, make a poem flow. It can also modulate the pace and tone of a poem. But first we need to understand how meter works in our everyday speech. We need to become more conscious of how it shapes not only what we say but how we say it. By the nature of his medium, which is language, a poet needs to be even more conscious of meter than others because it’s the one tool he can be manipulate to gives his poetry form and substance. It’s foundational. Without it, the poet is a fish out of water. To understand how it works it’s necessary to put a microscope up to our language, the range of our vocabulary, and the intonations used to pronounce words.
The essential units of stress in our language are broken down into feet. The foot is “the fundamental rhythmic unit in a poetic line. In English poetry, feet consist of two or three syllables, one and only one of which bears the metrical accent. . .the exception being the “Amphimacer,” (a trisyllable foot whose sequence is unaccented-accented-unaccented) the “Spondee,” (two accented syllables) the “Pyrrhic,”(a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables) and “Ionic”(a four-syllable foot whose sequence is long-long-short or short-short-long) foot.” (Ibid, 117) Steele ignores these last three, arguing that, in fact, most variation in feet, if not trochee (two syllables with accented-unaccented) or iambic (unaccented-accented), comes from two most common substitutes, one being anapestic trisyllabic foot with unaccented-unaccented-accented sequence that is often characteristic of a preposition phrase or the dactyl, a trisyllable with accented-unaccented, unaccented sequence. For the most part, the most common feet and meters in English are the iambic, trochee, and anapest foot with the spondee being questionable in Steele’s mind since one word or syllable in the pair is often stressed more heavily. These terms can be baffling. But they are the basis for scanning a line, determining where the stress falls and if the line follows or doesn’t follow a pattern.
Steele goes on to explain how meter works as it falls into feet. He notes that we tend, when speaking, “to space stresses at roughly equal intervals and to distinguish, for purposes of clear articulation, between a light syllable—give it slightly greater emphasis than we would otherwise—when it is flanked, fore and aft, by other light syllables. When we speak a run of three light syllables, their intelligibility increases if we raise the middle one a bit.” (Ibid, 8) We don’t speak in a monotone as do GPS recorded voices on cars that often mispronounce street addresses. We promote certain words to inflect them more clearly. “Conversely, we “demote” a weighty syllable sandwiched between other weighty syllables. An obstructive effect results if we try to say several consecutive syllables with the same degree of heavy stress.” (Ibid,9)
Along with this natural use of promotion and demotion in stress, the nature of words, their morphology is another factor that reveals how the use of meter is hardwired into our words. English has words with varying syllable lengths—from monosyllables, to disyllables, to trisyllables and to polysyllable. With those words with more than one syllable, English tends to have alternating stress, one syllable inflected lighter, the other stronger, having louder pitch. This inflection can literally influence the meaning of a word. For example, if you stress the first syllable of the word “dessert,” it means an arid landscape, but, if the last syllable is stressed, it is someone who has abandoned a group. (Ibid,28)
The last factor is “the comparatively uninflected or “analytical” character of the language. In more compressed, “synthetic” languages, inflectional suffixes are frequently added to the stems of words to indicate their grammatical functions and relationships.” (Ibid, 10) Anyone who learns one of the Romance languages must learn how verbs as well as nouns can change in meaning by simply looking at the suffix of the word. Having taken Latin, French, and Spanish classes in my undergraduate and graduate years, I remember learning to conjugate verbs, to identify masculine and feminine endings on nouns, that, after I got used to them, made the language easier to speak. I also could see how the common endings of verbs and nouns facilitated, if I wanted to write a poem, to making rhymes.
In contrast, English uses particles—pronouns, conjunctions, articles, prepositions, and the like—“to indicate grammatical connections between different words, phrases, and clauses. Particles and pronominals are usually weakly stressed, and many of the most common. . .are monosyllabic.” (Ibid,10)
These three factors make English distinctive and make meter, the natural rising and falling of stress, a natural part of our speech pattern. What this means to a poet is that you can’t get away from meter. You can, however, learn to use it and to notice how stress effects the meaning of a word or line.
The stress of any word depends not just what syllable is emphasized but where it is located in a sentence. Steele explains that there are three types of stress. One is simply the word stress. “In words with two or more syllables, one of the syllables usually takes the primary stress.” (ibid, 28) For instance, in a Latinate word with a prefix, the second syllable tends to get the stress, since it’s doing the most work if it is a verb. We say “reDO,” “unLOCK,” “disRUPT”with the stress on the second syllable.
Another type of stress is the “sentence stress,” or “lexical stress” in which, “information-carrying words, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs usually receive more stress than do words or syllables whose function is merely relational, such as articles, conjunctions, prepositions, an affixes.” (Ibid) In contemporary poetry, William Carlos Williams poked fun at this notion by sticking a “the” at the end of a line to promote its importance that, in a normal context, it would not.
The last type of stress is “contrastive stress” in which “stress derives not from the intrinsic property of a word or syllable, but rather from the rhetorical context that requires us to emphasize a word or syllable that does not normally receive such stress.” (ibid, 29) When we ask a question, sometimes the preposition get more emphasis than a noun, “You’re going on that plane?”
By understanding that our language uses stress and inflection to highlight certain words and sounds, and by knowing that, even if we’re unaware of it, we’re using a language that is metered and that has stresses built into its fabric, we can better look at how the rise and fall of words can create mood, tone, emotion, and meaning in a poem. This awareness is often subtle. We often sense a word and its placement in a line doesn’t work. Yet, if we look at the stress patterns, if we become more conscious of how it works, it isn’t as mysterious as it may seem.
When I’m in my poetry group, reading other poems, and wanting to give the poet advice about what works or doesn’t work in a poem, I’m often aware that a word doesn’t quite fit or a line doesn’t work. I’m not better at naming what is going on than anyone else. It’s just a feeling that something sounds bad like hearing a plate falling in a restaurant. The word or phrase just doesn’t work. It makes noise. If I pay attention, what’s missing is the beat, the energy of a line—the way a line sags because of the syntax as well as word choice doesn’t work—I can often explain to the poet why I find the word not working. The texture of the poetic line isn’t woven tightly enough. The meter is off. I tell the other poet what doesn’t work for me and, by talking, if I’m lucky, can explain what I mean by it. I wish I was a good as Steele in making clear what gives a poem good texture and what meter does to smooth out problems in the poetic line and how the basic units, the feet, play out phrase by phrase, line by line.
Steele mentions three factors that, if used in concert, enhance a poem’s overall texture. They relate to the meter of a poem. They are factors that, if applied to your own writing, enhance your ability to get a poetic line right and to have the feet create a rhythmic pattern. But, as I say this, let me be cautious because he isn’t badgering us about keeping strictly to an iambic beat of a foot—the ta-trum, ta-trum—because he’s more sophisticated than that. He recognizes that a good line, and stanza, must vary the meter, sometimes stringing strong stresses along, sometimes muting the stresses, sometimes adding new variations in stress, all depending on what the poem is trying to do.
The three factors, for him, “that contribute to the texture of a poem are often interrelated and cooperative. Frequently we will notice effects produced not simply by variation in caesural pauses or from the use of enjambment or from the blending of words of different length, but rather by a combination of two or even three of these.”(Ibid,112) We may not use all of them at once. We may only use one or two. But if we combine them, weaving them into the texture of a poem, we will have better control of the meter.
Steele explains how each of these three works. “The first involves grammatical pauses within lines. These are customarily called “caesuras,” from ceasura, the Latin word for “Cutting.””(Ibid, 98) He suggests that by using different pauses or breaks in a line, varying them, the poem can be carefully paced, slowing down and speeding up as it needs to. If a sentence is carried over four lines and the lines have natural pauses at the end of a subordinate clause or a phrase, the caesuras can be placed at the beginning of the lines, the middle, or end. The more variety in the placement of the caesura, the better the levering of momentum in a poem. This cutting the lines in different places not only effects the meter but it also highlights the visual appearance of the poem on the page. He quotes Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” to show the pauses arranged in each line “rarely occur in the same spot in successive verses.” (Ibid) The # notes the caesuras.
Sir# t’was all one.# My favor at her breast
The dropping# of the daylight# in the West
The bough of cherries# some officious fool
Broke# in the orchard for her# the while mule . . . .
What Steele is asking poets to do is be more conscious of how a line is formed and, as such, how a sentence, strung across a number of lines, can end at different places, causing at that cutting point, a hesitation and pause, which, then, affects the pace and movement of the poem. In Browning’s example the longer sentence breaks a number of times in each line, allowing a pause, which, in turn, allows the reader to absorb what has just been said, before proceeding onto the next part of the sentence. Modulating this stop and start is part of the poetic craft, something often neglected, even ignored in poems that like in prose poems, toppled from one line to another without any sense of pacing.
Steele goes on to explain the second factor which is “the running-on of one verse into another. . .that contributes to the distinctive texture” of a poem. “This technique is called “enjambment,” a term that derives from French prosody and from the French verb, enjamber, meaning “to stride over, to span.” (Ibid, 99) Instead of creating pauses within a line, enjambment cuts the sentence at the end of the line. Instead of ending a line where it corresponds with the completion of a grammatical unit, the enjambment runs-on to the next line. By varying the use of end-stops and enjambments, a poem can vary the pace. Ideally, the enjambments not only break a sentence at an unusual place and, as such, highlight the words both at the end and the beginning of the next line, but it also does so to add dramatically to the poem. Steele cautions its overuse: “because enjambments can prove disruptive, setting as it does metrical units and grammatical units at odds, it is most effective when used. . .in coordination with sense.” (Ibid,100) 1 (see footnote at end for more detail)
For Steele, the last factor is “the poet’s vocabulary, particularly as regards the lengths of the words that comprise it. . .that can contribute to the rhythmical texture of a poem. . . .Verse composed chiefly of monosyllables and disyllables will sound different from verse that more frequently mixes with shorter and trisyllables and polysyllables. A succession of monosyllabic words tends to slow down lines or passages, whereas trisyllables and polysyllables tend to speed them up. Monosyllables, when brought into close proximity with each other, require that we articulate them carefully to maintain distinction. In contrast, no matter how long a polysyllable word is, only one syllable will carry the chief stress, and we will usually skate over the other syllables without minute discrimination. (Ibid,100-1)
For me, this was something I hadn’t considered. I knew that Latinate words tended to be longer. Anglo-Saxon tended to be shorter. But, given I was as biased as many of my contemporaries about meter, thinking it wasn’t that important, I hadn’t paid attention to word-length and how it influences that pace of a poem.2 (see Footnote for more detail)
Steele notes that varying shorter words with lengthier ones can create interesting counterpoints. What is often hidden in word choice is that the stresses fall in different places in words of different lengths and in different syntactical contexts. Steele believes poets need to pay attention to a word’s morphology—the study of the structures and shapes of words—because their shape and structure are what creates meter. By mixing varied syntax (the use of different forms of phrases and sentences) with word length variation, the poet can better control the way the poem reads. Steele goes into depth showing how the pentameter line with its five feet and five stresses is the base line for English poetry. He shows how to vary word choice and mix up syntax can generate forceful poetry.
What he says that hadn’t occurred to me about those of us who write free-verse poetry is that even if we think we’re not using meter, even if we’re not intentionally using a pentameter line, most likely, just by the way our words and our syntax works, we are implicitly working with it. His question for a contemporary poet is, “Are you going to be aware of it or not?”
Since I have struggled with meter, trying to understand it, how it is used, my answer to the question, is, “Yes, I want to be aware and better use it.” But now the question that follows is how to do it? How can I be more conscious of what, for Steele, is implicit in the poetic form, something that a poet can’t afford to ignore without losing track of what’s essentially woven into our speech patterns and into our language.
In his speaking of meter, one helpful hint is that word stress is not binary. It is not just strong and weak stressed words that comprise a line. It’s more nuanced than that. Rhythmical modulations of words, their metrical accent, can range from weak stress, to semi-weak, to semi-strong, or to strong. Accordingly, Steele says you could consider any line of poetry in terms of mountain ranges, with peaks and valleys—the peaks being strong stress, the valleys being weak. Instead of thinking about a syllable as being stressed or not stressed, it would be better to look at what level of stress that word has in relation to other words in a line. If you are reading a line of your poem, you need to see how the strongly stressed words peak and when the weak stresses fall in relation to the strong stresses. Just by speaking a line out loud, you’ll hear the up and down pattern. You can ask yourself, “Does that rise and fall mimic and reinforce what I’m saying? Does the shape mirror the content?”
Steele points out that some words get more stress not because of how they sound but because of the nature of the word. “Speech stress involves the emphasis that a syllable carries not merely in the foot in which it figures, but also in the larger phrasal or clausal environment of which it maybe part.” (Ibid, 33) In our language, as noted before, words that carry information—nouns, verbs, adjective and adverbs—tend to get more emphasis. When re-visioning a poem, if you look at word choice and shape as well as where the words fall syntactically, you will, by doing so, be working with meter, how the words modulate across the page and though the lines. What he is asking us to do is pay attention to meter. If we don’t pay attention to it, we are like a surgeon performing an operation with no surgical instrument, a musician playing a score without an awareness of notation, a dancer moving across the floor with no music. It’s built into our language. It’s our job as poets to learn how to use it successfully. We can do that by reading the masters of the craft, by looking at how the Romantic poets, even the Victorians, and many of our contemporary poets intentionally use it. But we can also learn how it works by paying close attention, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, line by line, and stanza by stanza how meter shapes our poem.
As an exercise to show how that can work, I will look at last stanzas of Shelly’s poem “Ode to the West Wind,” which uses all of the forces of meter to shape the lines.
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!
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?
What you can see, if you just look at the variation of word length, is how in the first stanza, he uses mostly monosyllabic words, varying them with five disyllabic words and one trisyllabic word. By having the variety, he can modulate when the strong stresses occur. If he only used monosyllabic words, he would need many “filler” words as space holders, which would make the poem sound inane. If you look at stress, just scanning the first line, you see immediately the use of a trochee that starts the first two lines (“make,” “what”) and, then the on and off stressed words “lyre,” “even” and “forest,” each having strong stress on the first syllable, setting up an iambic beat. Yet, if you speak it out loud, the strongest stress falls on LYre and FORest and, in the next line “LEAVES,” and “FALLing” with semi-strong on “OWN,” a more muted sound because of the initial vowel. The last line falls into a straight iambic pentameter line. What is clear in this example is that the lines have varied stresses, mostly iambic (weak, then strong stress), but equally mixed with trochee stress (one strong, one weak) and some anapestic stress (two weak, one strong).
I must confess as I was marking stress in these lines, looking at the strong stress to put in bold, I stumbled at times since, with my ear and, I think, many other contemporary ears not attuned to stress and meter, that I wasn’t sure with polysyllabic words like “incantation,” “unextinguished,” and “unawakened” where to place the stress.
Should it be on the “un” or, if not, what syllable takes a strong stress? Even saying it out loud didn’t help. I cheated and looked up the stress in a dictionary. But my ambivalence about stress only reiterates one of Steele’s points about stress: it is not fixed but reflects the context in which a word is placed. The “un” is stressed in these lines, but in another context, they may not be. So keeping faith with the general iambic line is not the issue. What’s important that you pay attention to how each line carries the rhythm, the number of strong stress compared to weak or semi-weak.
Robert Haas has spoken about what is important in any poem is that the pattern, be it lines with five strong stresses or four, or a combination of four and three, is consistent and measured.3 (see footnote for more detail) If a poem wanders from five to three to two, to six without any patterning, then it is confusing to the eye as well as the ear. He notes, particularly in some of William Carlos Williams’ poems that, whether conscious or not, Williams creates stress patterns, sometimes having two or three lines with three stresses, then a set with two, and back to three, so on, until by midway into the poem, the reader knows, even if not consciously, that there’s a pattern, some intention to the lines and, as such, to the meter.
I will pause here to clarify what he means by meter by applying what he says to a poem I’ve written and to poems that I admire, written by my favorite poets. Since looking at meter is not something I consciously do and, moreover, is not something I look at when breaking a line, I’m not sure what I will discover if I take that lens to look at a poem. It may be quite embarrassing. I may find a total mishmash of meter from line to line.
I do know, however, when I’m writing a poem, I want to find that there’s implicitly some basic rhythm to the sentences as well as the words. I might not know what that rhythm is initially. But if I keep working on the poem eventually I begin to hear what sounds are repeated, what words, and length of words create different patterns, and, eventually, I find a form that allows me to work with it to shape the poem.
Am I consciously paying attention to stresses in a line? Am I cutting, compressing, deleting, expanding with meter in mind? Not necessarily. However, the process of choosing words and sentences is essential to my sense of what makes the art of the poem. At base, even if I’m only faintly aware of it at the time, what I hope I’m doing is sculpting the meter to fit the meaning and shape of a poem. Or at least that’s what Steele says a poet must do if it’s not just prose reconfigured on a page to look like a poem. I think he is right. But here goes with a recent poem of mine, seeing if there’s a meter to it.
In this experiment, I’ve taken a poem I recently wrote and will look at it, given Steele’s ideas about expanding the texture to a poem and see if I, even if I wasn’t conscious of it, applied his ideas to this poem. Then, I will look at two poets, Mary Oliver and Tony Hoagland and look at how they vary word choice and modulate their lines, seeing if, as they break their lines, if they fall into any particular meter. I will bold the syllables that have stronger stresses to map out what pattern of accented and unaccented feet comprise the poem. Take a look at what you see. I have also looked at the meter in the title, which, I suspect, is another hint about the poem’s meter, since it’s the first thing you see before you read the poem.
I Have Not Forgotten the Others
The ones who pass by our house
walking—how strange—
alone or side by side
on a road singularly
untrafficked
this time of day
and others
some of whom I’ve loved
who are miles
even years away
by themselves
I cannot see them now
with the closing of the walkway
and the beach past midnight
what still brings me back
is my being alone
on the darkened sands far
from the lights of town
where stripped of my shorts
shirt and skivvies
I waded into the dark surge
that lifted me
could have had me
except for a man I’d passed on the walkway
who’d eyed me (as I him)
and, unbeknownst,
followed me,
came naked into the whorl after me
and held my hand
and all that was left for us
was the ever hooded, unhurried sea
My initial reaction to my poem is that I may be doing what Steele thinks is a compensation that contemporary poets use when they don’t do the hard work of measuring meter. They fuss with the shape of the poem, laying it out with indentations to create the pauses and delays that otherwise would come from careful rendering of meter.
That may be so.
But let’s look at the meter, if there is one. What I noticed right off is that the number of beats in a line are consistent in the first four lines, three strong stresses—“ones,” “pass,” “house”—which sets up a pattern. I also have woven o’s and s’s in the lines. By line six, I’ve dropped to two stresses for several lines, then one stress, then back to three. As to iambic meter, the first line has two iambic feet with an anapestic trisyllable foot. The next line starts with a trochee, then back to iambic, the next iambic all the way, and next, anapestic trisyllable with two trochees. Looking down the poem, I see a number of lines with prepositional phrases with two and three syllable nouns and adjectives, making them anapestic to start, and iambic later. That a pretty common substitution for iambic foot in most metered poems. In this poem, they appear at a place when I wanted to slow down the rhythm, pause, leaving some space to dwell. Prepositional phrases do that since you have two unaccented words, the preposition and article, and one accented noun. That’s a long pause, bum, bum and a bang. If it happens twice, it gives an even longer delay, which can be poison in prose or poetry, unless it’s there to create a hesitation. It seems to do just that in this poem. I also note that I have midway and later in the poem some spondee foots (strong stress on two words in a row), which, by its nature, stressing two words, slows down the poem, putting the focus on them, the two strong beats. It is what Gerard Manly Hopkins called sprung rhythm. It pounds out a beat, calling attention to those words, which is what I wanted to do. What keeps the poem moving, however, is that it’s one sentence that unravels, building off the main clause, adding modifiers that’s one of the factors in creating meter. The other thing that keeps it moving is that, lo and behold, it predominantly uses an iambic foot! What Steele had argued about the iambic foot, that common measure, being inherent to the English speech and written line is true. Without consciously working with it, the iambic meter rules this poem.
Now how that may shape my future work I’m not sure. But I am sure that it will be a more conscious element of my craft. Is it part of Mary Oliver’s craft? I’m sure it is since she wrote two books on craft, one on formal and metered verse, one on free-verse. Let’s look at one of her poems, a few of her stanzas, to see what we find.
Circles
In the morning the blue heron is busy
stepping, slowly around the edge of the
pond. He is tall and shining. His wings, folded
against his body, fit so neatly they
make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise
into the air, a great surprise. Also
he carries so lightly the terrible sword beak. Then
he is gone over the trees.
As you can see, the meter runs true to an iambic foot with several anapest to break it up along with a trochee foot to start several of the lines, ripping right into focus key words like “pond: and “make.” She has spondees with “blue heron” and “sword beak” interrupt the iambic beat. Within the lines, there’s her trademark echoing of sounds, playing with “also” and “so” that brings the sonic level to the forefront. She mixes monosyllabic and disyllabic words for the most part, having only one trisyllable word, which stands alone and, as such, takes on more meaning. “Terrible” is one of those emotionally loaded words that sets the gravity of the stanza firmly in place. Of course, one could ask, “Does she do this intentionally?” The answer would be, “Of course!” But that doesn’t mean she was counting feet. She mixes up lines, even sets the poor “the” at the end of the line, using a sever cutting enjambment, to highlight the noun that starts the next line. Her craft is mixing and matching, working the sound, the line breaks, the words, and the meter to give her stanza its resoluteness. Nothing is out of place unless he wants it to be.
Tony Hoagland’s poetry is always an exercise in letting loose the line, the imagery, the subject and then reigning it back in. But I’ve never looked at his lines in terms of meter. I wonder if he is consciously also of playing with the way a line fits into a set pattern and then breaks it to call attention to what he is saying? Let’s take a look at the meter in his poem “America.”
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
I imagine Tony Hoagland would be turning over in his grave if he knew some had scanned his poem. As far as I know, it wasn’t something he wrote about in his critical essays and, as such, not something he paid attention to. But, despite the irregularities of iambic foot when he, on occasion, jams three strongly accented words together, he does fall back on a regular beat to his lines. Unlike Oliver, however, he uses many polysyllabic words along with brand names which complicate the lines, but, as Steele says, move the lines along since four syllables are pronounced at once, not each syllable meted out by single words. Such lines are fun to pronounce—” RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes”—and they rip along, filled with delicious sound. When he breaks from an iambic meter, he’s usually replacing it with an anapestic foot. He sometimes disrupts the accented-unaccepted pattern by have three syllable with no stress. But these are infrequent. Most of his irregularity comes from not only the varied line length but from the number of accented syllables that range from nine to three, although a surprising number fall into the nine category with the shorter lines more often in the six to seven range.
If free-verse is allowing the line to extend to where Hoagland feels the natural break and not forcing it to happen sooner than he wants, then his poetry defies the strict pentameter line. His lines can range from seventeen syllables to seven on the short end. That flexibility in letting the line out and pulling it in depending on what each line is doing—often it is a complete syntactical unit—makes his poem sprawl in the way Whitman did with his operatic lines. It also allows him to use, as he does, vernacular, letting him speak in plain speech. Of course, his poems are rich in simile. He liked to call himself the “king of simile.” Yet even with his flair for extending the line, the meter is still there, still part of his manner of speech.
Knowing how meter works yet also knowing that poetic lines can range well beyond the pentameter line, you can experiment in how you frame your poem. It can extend to the edge of the margins or keep tightly within the margins. Whatever the choice, Steele makes his point that, despite what you do visually on the page, what you cannot avoid and what is central to the craft is meter. He said, cautioning us not to become obsessed with meter, “To be sure, poetry involves much more than meter. Good poems offer us liveliness of wit, sincerity of feeling, depth of intelligence, apt metaphor, illuminating imagery, engrossing storytelling, or some combination of these and other qualities. Yet throughout literary history, metrical practice has provided a unifying basis for the craft for the great diversity of people who composed poetry. Though the subject matter may have changed from age to age and poet to poet, the manner of presentation has retained its link with the concept of metrical arrangement. . . .meter has remained an instrument of undiminished value and been brilliantly employed by a wide range of modern and contemporary poets.” (Ibid, 1) As he has shown in his book, we cannot avoid, even if we want, meter. It’s built into our words and language. What we can do, however, is learn to use it and refine it and make it part of our craft. I may have come kicking and screaming to this realization, but I do think it’s critical to being a better writer. I hope it will help you to become one too.
Footnotes:
(Footnote 1: Since Steele is reiterating what other craftsmen have said in another context, particularly about using enjambment in lines breaks, I have inserted here a more nuanced study of three types of enjambment that Steele doesn’t cover in his analysis. The poet James Langenbach explains that not only can you use line break and enjambment but you can use them in three different ways for different effects. Longenbach addresses in his book, The Art of the Poetic Line (Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2008) three different types of line break. Line breaks determine how you break the sentences into its component parts, or, in certain circumstances, how you cut or sever the component parts, ripping them apart. Longenbach contends that “the thrill. . .of free verse prosody lies in the ability to shape the movement of a poem through the strategic use of different kinds of line endings.” (Ibid. 70)
A careful study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry will give you a short-course in how these line breaks work. She was very conscious of how line breaks can create momentum or pauses in her poems. A poem can, on the one hand, thrust forward, moving rapidly from line to line. It has a certain energy that is like driving down an interstate highway where there’s not much time to pay attention to what’s on the side of the road and to notice a boy dipping his foot in a stream. It’s all happening at once.
Some poems have this non-stop energy which use certain types of line breaks. Other poems can feel, on the other hand, more like a lazy walk in the woods, allowing plenty of time to rest by a creek and watch the river flow. Still others modulate between superhighway and the back road, the quick and slow moving, depending on what’s happening in the poem. To control the acceleration and deceleration of a poem, to modulate the shifting effects of different line endings, a poet has three tools—and two types—of line breaks for pacing the line breaks:
- End Stop lines
- Enjambment
Parsing
Annotating
The end stop line does exactly what it says. The line is “syntactically complete. A strong punctuation mark almost always occurs at the end of the line. . . .(This) drastically reduces the tension between syntax and line. . . (a) line built from a variety of smaller units of syntax, a line that privileges its self-contained rhythmic pattern over the poem’s forward movement.” (Ibid, 49-50) Walt Whitman uses this line ending in many of his poems. Here are the beginning lines of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
The long lines allow him to let the syntax unwind and conclude on one line. Each line stands on its own. Marvin Bell in his collection Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps, has each poem end with punctuation. Each line is a self-contained unit. Here is the first poem “Baby Hamlet,”
Be that as it may, it may be that it is as it will be.
His word a sword without a hiss.
Cruelly, the son obligated to sacrifice himself to a feud.
On the Feast of the Angel of Consumption and Death.
We move though time beset by indecision.
Thus, events occur while waiting the news.
Or stuck in moral neutral. (Nightworks (Port Townsend, 2000, 3)
These lines, given that they are paratactic, standing on their own, might be reordered without losing the sense of what, as a unit, they mean. But they, as a whole, insist on a pause after each line. None of the words in a line are left dangling. The fragment or sentence stands on its own. For poems that encompass large topics these self-contained lines hold up well. Like a good five course meal, each portion served and digested separately, the poem is consumed in parts, each course savored as it’s served. Bell’s poems require a leisurely read. Sometimes, as with Whitman, after a long list of observations, it’s necessary to take a break from the poem.
I’ve read “Song of Myself” a number of times, yet I haven’t read it, start to finish, in one sitting. At some point, I hear my brain cry out, “Enough. Enough.” That’s the downside of end stop lines. By their nature, if they’re syntactically complete, they pack an enormous amount of content in each line. They don’t lend themselves to a quick read. They want you to immerse yourself in them as you would a good novel.
Yet if the poet wants to ratchet up the pace in a poem, they can break these long lines and use enjambments. Longenbach describes two types, one that parses out the lines in predictable syntactical units and one that disrupts those units. The enjambment that parses the syntax honors the syntax. “While the lines are not end-stopped, they generally follow the normative turns of syntax, breaking it at predictable points rather than cutting against it. . .—the parsing line tends to emphasize the given contour of the sentence, reinforcing the way it would sound if it were written out as prose. (Ibid.55)
In a Rodney Jones poem “The Obsolescence of Thou,” his beginning lines parse out a sentence
Last heard in a country church, in a prayer
That an elderly spinster had decked out
In what manner she thought fitting
For heaven’s immoderate ears, it seemed
All Sunday, rite and benediction
(Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985-2005. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006)
The risk of having a poem entirely parsed is that a poem can feel flat, too predictable. “By placing line so utterly in service of syntax, reducing the tension between syntax and line, a poem dominated by the parsing line can made its own lineation seem increasingly unnecessary.” (Ibid, 54)
But fortunately, there’s another enjambment tool a poet can use. The annotated enjambment violates the natural syntax and jazzes up a line. “Rather than following the grammatical units,” Longenbach explains, “the lines cut against them, annotating the syntax with emphasis that the syntax itself would not other provide.” (Ibid, 53) The term “annotated” means that, as with an annotation in an essay, it highlights and calls attention to the line break. Baron Wormser in his poem “Guys” disrupts the syntax in its opening line
After work and over a beer, Steven Gozerko
Is describing the paternal black hole that is
The faint but genuine hair-shirt his soul
Wears each manly, holding-down-the-fort day.
(Scattered Chapters: New and selected poems. Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2008)
At places where two words would normally go together—“Gozerko/is”, “is/the”, “soul/wears”—there’s a disruption of order. The subject is cut off from the verb, the verb from the object, and the noun from the verb, forcing the reader to leap to the next line to grab ahold of the meaning. What Longenbach, says of William Carlos Williams who was a master of the annotated line, is true of Wormser, “his aggressively annotated lineation. . .drives not only the movement but the content of the poem.” (Ibid, 57)
(Footnote 2: Longenbach believes poems, as Coleridge said, require the best words in the best order. But its not just using the right word as it is knowing how to use the right combination of words. Longenbach notes that “a sentence dominated by highly Latinate diction will tend to sound written, while a sentence dominated by Germanic monosyllables will tend to sound spoken.” (Ibid,42) The Latinate words tend to be multisyllable, whereas the Germanic tend to be monosyllable. If a poem, or, for that matter, a line has a series of multisyllable words, it will be like traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway during rush hour. It is will be congested. But if the Latinate words are played off against the short, pithy Germanic words, it’s likely to have better word traffic. It will flow. Scientific, educational, psychological, theological, philosophical, and mathematical languages tend to be Latinate. Reading professional journals, therefore, require some familiarity with the jargon of the discipline. Trying to interject such language in a poem always puts the poem at risk from a cardiac arrest. In Yeats’ “The Tower,” for example, he uses three words derived from German (dead, ruse, dream) that abut two Latinate words (Translunar Paradise), to give a punch to the lines that, if he’d kept with the Germanic wouldn’t have as a contrast. (Ibid, 24)
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise
By paying attention to the short and long words, the words coming from Latin and those coming from the Germanic origin, you can locate moments in lines that might need a kick to get them going. Shoving out a trepidation off a line and adding a fear or terror may just get a line to move and to shift from a heady word to a gutsy one.)
Footnote 3 Robert Hass’ book, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry.
The form of a poem exists in the relation between its music and its seeing; form is not the number or kind of restrictions, conscious or unconscious, many or few, with which a piece of writing begins. . . .There are always restrictions because, as Creeley says, quoting Pound, “Verse consists of a constant and a variant.”
“One Body: Some Notes on Form”
After your get the words on paper, one of your first tasks is to notice what types of patterns you have in the writing. Since the main difference between prose and poetry is that the poet, in contrast to the prose writer, is making conscious effort to have the words, phrases, and sentence imbued with musicality that not only mirrors but resonates from what the poet is trying to say, one of your first tasks is to read the poem aloud and notice the patterns you’ve created and how, if you put it into a form, those patterns can be highlighted. The sound carries the mood and emotional trajectory of the poem so that what you hear invites you to feel whatever it is that the poet is trying to convey.
When you are, therefore, looking at a line of verse, pay attention to the patterns that evoke a certain mood by how the stress patterns like the rhythm of the heart tell how a person is feeling. Quick, rapid beats tell us that something exciting is happening. Slow, steady beats lull us into a meditative state. Inconsistent, fast and slow, beats reflect a rapid shift of feelings—intense anticipation to remorse.
Stress and Pauses: What Pattern Do You Have in Your Poem?
Let’s look at a few poems that Hass cites in his book. For example, Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” lets stresses and pauses fall differently in each line so that we’re propelled from line to line, finding some repetition but equally some variance that surprises us.
Pattern of Stressed Phrases with/without Pauses in Lines
TURNing and TURNing in the Widening GYRE. 2/2
The FALcone CANnot HEAR the FAlconcer; 4
THINGS FALL aPART; /the CENTER CANnot HOLD; 3/3
MERE ANarchy is LOOSed upon the WORLD, 4
The BLOOD-DIMmed TIDE is LOOSed, /and EVERYwhere 4/1
The CEREmony of INnocence is DROWNed; 3
The BEST LACK ALL ConVICtion, /while the WORST 4/1
Are FULL of PASSionate inTENsity. 3
You can see the patterns, how the first line has an almost hypnotic tone with a regular beat; how line two and four rushes forward with no breaks; how the third line is perfectly balance, holding together main idea of the poem; how lines five and seven have a definite pause, letting us rest before rushing to the next three-beat line. The mix of pauses that are set up the not-paused lines which have a familiar iambic (no-stress/stress syllables) pattern, how the mix of 3, 4, and 5 beat lines, create variety, yet also have repeated patterns that create consistency. Repetition offers us familiarity and structure, while variance offers freedom and excitement. The two work best when married in a poem. If it is too consistent, it’s dull and boring. If it’s too varied, it chaotic and dumbfounding.
Read your poems aloud and look for the patterns. Work to make the lines reflect the pace and mood of the poem. Hass offers different ways to listening to and seeing a poem. He goes over several poems, some formal and others free-verse. Let’s look at formal poem first.
Here is a formal poem by Yeats “When You are Old,” using meter to drum out a rhythm. But note that meter is not the same ta/tum iambic pattern. It varies depending on phrases and word order, giving it startling freshness.
Pattern of Stressed Phrases with Pauses in Lines
When you are OLD and GREY/ and FULL of SLEEP 2/2
And NODding by the FIRE, TAKE DOWN this BOOK 2/3
And SLOWly READ,/ And DREAM of the SOFT LOOK 2/3
Your EYES HAD ONCE,/ and of their SHAdows DEEP. 3/2
Hass notes “that the sense of a pattern comes in the two-and three-stress phrases. . . The three-stress phrases . . .carry the energy and urgency; the two-stress groups . . . convey balance or resignation or fatality.
How can Pattern of Stressed Phrases with/without Pauses in Lines Be Used in Free-Verse?
Here is another example from the Robert Hass essay, “Listening and Making.” After describing metered or formal poetry based on a strict form with a certain number of beats per line, he says, “It should be clear by now that free-verse rhythm is not a movement between pattern and absence of pattern, but between phrases based on odd and even number of stresses.”
Using a poem “August on Sourdough” by Gary Synder, Hass underscores how patterns evoke tone, how repeated stresses settled into our unconscious and let us feel what the poet is saying emotionally without really having him express the feelings directly. You never hear Synder speaking about the sadness of this parting from a friend, but it’s there buried in the rhythm of the phrases and pauses.
YOU HITCHED a THOUsand MILES 4
NORTH from SAN franCISco 3
HIKED up the MOUNtainside a MILE in the AIR 2/2
The LITtle CAbin—ONE ROOM— 2/2
WALLED in GLASS 2
MEAdows and SNOWfrield HUNDreds of PEAKS 2/2
Note that the patterns aren’t set at first as with a metered poem. They evolve as the poem comes into being. That’s something you’ll do as you work on your own poems, finding the pace and stresses that keep pushing the poem forward, not letting it drag.
The poem goes on:
We LAY in our SLEEPing BAGs 3
TALKing HALF the NIGHT; 3
WIND in the GUY CABLES SUMmer MOUNtain Rain. 3/3
Note a new pattern is invoked, quietly expanding the phrases as the two men take pleasure in each other’s company.
It goes on:
NEXT MORNing I WENT WITH you 4
As FAR as the CLIFFS 2
LOANEd you my PONCHo The RAIN aCROSS the SHALE 2/3
YOU DOWN the SNOWfield
FLAPping in the WIND 3/2
WAVing a LAST GoodBYE HALF-HIDden in the CLOUDS 3/3
To GO ON HITCHing CLEAR to NEW YORK 3/3
ME BACK in my MOUNtain and FAR, FAR, WEST 3/3
Hass noted how some lines have falling rhythms like nursery rhymes—how MEAdows and SNOWfield is like HUMpty DUMpty, a playful pattern buried deep in our childhood memory. Sometimes Synder uses straight iambic patterns such as the Rain aCROSS the SHALE that echoes the long-held standard meter of the English language. The last three lines, all structured the same, bring closure, a sense that, even with the separation, all is well.
By paying attention not just to the subject matter, the content of the poem, but by attending to how it is structured line by line, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, you begin the painstaking yet exciting art of crafting a poem. You begin to develop your own criteria for makes a good or bad poem and what you want and don’t want to do in a poem. It’s always evolving the more you work on it.
Bruce P. Spang 