By the winner oj the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

and the author of A POETRY HANDBOOK

Mary
Oliver
RULES /o r

the DANCE
A HANDBOOK FOR WRITING
AND READING METRICAL VERSE

A MARINER ORIGINAL
Rules for the Dance
 Other Books by Mary Oliver

POETRY
No Voyage and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
Twelve Moons
American Primitive
Dream Work
House of Light
New and Selected Poems
White Pine
West Wind

CHAPBOOKS
The Night Traveler

Sleeping in the Forest

PROSE
A Poetry Handbook
Blue Pastures
Rules for the Dance
A Handbook for Writing and
Reading Metrical Verse

Mary Oliver

A
A MARINER ORIGINAL
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK
1998
 Copyright © 1998 by Mary Oliver

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections

from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003 •

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oliver, Mary, date.

Rules for the dance : a handbook for writing and reading

metrical verse / Mary Oliver.

p. cm.

"A Mariner original."

isbn 0-395-85086-x

1 . English language — Versification. 2 . — History

English poetry

and criticism — Theory, etc. 3 . Poetry — Authorship. I. Title.

PE1505.037 1998

821.009 — dc2 98-2625 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

qum 10 987654321

Permissions acknowledgments begin on page 189

For Molly Malone Cook
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

 Foreword

I had three reasons for writing this book on metrical

poetry.
The first was to create for myself the opportunity to think
about metrical prosody, which is an endlessly fertile subject for
any working poet. By "working poet" I include those who write
the modern non-rhyming, non-metrical form of lyric (which in-
cludes myself) — for the foundation of every poem is not only
its words but its formality of motion, whether it be metrical
altogether, or only at the occasional rhapsodic moment. Which
is to say that I believe all poems are metrical to some extent,
though they follow no predetermined pattern — but more of
that later.
My second purpose was to develop an informational and
thoughtful text giving the basic rules of scansion, along with a
collection of metrical poems for immediate example and pleas-
ure, to writers who actually want to write metrical verse.
My third purpose — and this is by no means the least of the
three — was to offer to readers of poetry a text and a commen-
tary which would help them understand the metrical process:

Foreword vii
that is, not only how the metrical poem should be written, but
how it should be read, or received, by the reader. On every page
that follows, I consider the reader equal in importance to the
writer, if not more important.

Metrical poetry belongs to a certain era — a few centuries —

and with every passing year that contained time grows more
distant, its methods more estranged from our own. The reader of
modern poetry feels at ease with the cadences of conversation. To
read Chaucer's poems, now, requires a diligent and even extraor-
dinary effort; it requires, indeed, a specialized knowledge of the
language and the versification of Chaucer's time. The same thing,
in our age, is happening to metrical poetry. It is no longer a safe
bet that students will have been prepared for meter by having
heard, over and over, the rhythms of Mother Goose. In schools,
students are urged to follow their own unpatterned expressions,
and little if any memorization of metrical poems is now re-

quired.
As a result, students and other readers of Milton, of Shake-
speare, of Wordsworth, of Wilfred Owen, even of Frost, come to
the poems, frankly, with tin ears. They cannot scan. They don't
know an iamb from an anapest. They read for comprehension
and hear little if anything of the interwoven pleasures of the
sound and the pattern of the poem, which are also deeply in-
structive concerning the statement of the
poem, along with the
meanings of the words themselves. Not knowing how to listen,
they read the poem but
they do not hear it sing, or slide, or slow
down, or crush with the heel of sound, or leap off the line,
or hurry, or sob, or refuse to move from the self-pride of the
calm pentameter no matter what fire is rustling through it.

Every poem is a statement.

vin Foreword
 Every poem is music — a determined, persuasive, reliable,

enthusiastic, and crafted music.

Without an understanding of this music, Shakespeare is only
the sense we can make of him; he is the wisdom without the

shapeliness, which is one half of the poem.

So, most of all, I wrote this book to help readers of metrical

poems enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of

sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure. I hope their understand-

ing and pleasure of metric poetry will be deepened and com-

plicated, so much so that their response to the poems becomes
not only comprehension, but comprehension accompanied by a
felt experience.

Why is it important for students — for any of us, in fact —

to have this experience?
Poems speak of the mortal condition; in poems we muse (as
we say) about the tragic and glorious issues of our fragile and
brief lives: our passions, our dreams, our failures. Our wonder-
ings about heaven and hell — these too are in poems. Life, death;
mystery, and meaning. Five hundred years and more of such
labor, such choice thought within choice expression, lies within
the realm of metrical poetry. Without it, one is uneducated, and
one is mentally poor.

Following the text is a small anthology of metrical poems.

These I selected primarily as useful illustrations. I am sorry it was
not practical to include more. But the world is amazingly full of
books. They are everywhere! The great poems are easy to find,

rare and priceless though they be.

Foreword ix
 Finally, I am aware that there are among the poems very few
by women. It is a fact, though a sad one, that poets of the past
few centuries, at least published poets, were almost all men. I

wish it had not been so. It is, of course, a denial and a closure that
need never happen again.

Foreword
 Contents

part one: the rules

i. Breath 3

2. Patterns 6

3. More About Patterns 19

4. Design: Line Length 29

5. Release of Energy Along the Line 36

6. Design: Rhyme 40

7. Design: Traditional Forms 50

8 . Words on a String 57

9. Mutes and Other Sounds 60

10. The Use of Meter in Non-Metric Verse 62

11. The Ohs and the Ahs 65

12. Image-Making 67
 PART two: the dancers one by one

13. Style 79

part three: scansion, and the actual work

14. Scansion: Reading the Metrical Poem 87

15. Scansion: Writing the Metrical Poem 90

16. Yourself Dancing: The Actual Work 93

part four: a universal music

17. Then and Now 103

Envoi 104

part five: an anthology of metrical poems

109

Permissions 189

Index 190
Rules for the Dance
Part One
The Rules
 1

Breath

Metrical poetry is about: breath. Breath as an intake and a

flow. Breath as a pattern. Breath as an indicator, perhaps the
most vital one, of mood. Breath as our own personal tie with all

the rhythms of the natural world, of which we are a part, from

which we can never break apart while we live. Breath as our first

language.
A cardinal attribute of breath (or breathing) is, of course, its

The galloping footbeats of the heart,

repetition. that spell fear.
Or the slow and relaxed stretch of breath of the sleeping child.
In either case, by their repetition, they make a pattern. Truly this
pattern is as good as a language.* It reveals a great deal: the depth
of sleep, the stress or the ease of the breather. If the pattern
changes, we know it reflects something important — mood has
plunged, or health has been touched by crisis, or the inner life,

without being seen externally, has pressed upon the heart, has
tightened or loosened the lungs. It is as good as a language. We
sigh. We pant. We reveal ourselves.
All of this just said about breathing pertains also to the

Think of EKG and EEG, wave patterns which offer such personal and accurate
information about our bodies, and which physicians "read."

Breath
design of the metrical poem, which is composed of rhyme, and
line length, and a metrical pattern in a construct of repetition.

In West-Running Brook, Robert Frost included a poem called

"Bereft"; it isn't hard to gather the evidence for its title from the
text — to read the poem, that is, for comprehension. To read it in

silence. But what is this poem without the unchanging rave of its

pattern, its attempts to get out of the place it is stuck in? It is

not the poem Frost made; it is not the poem that he would have
us hear.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,

Holding open a restive door,

Looking down hill to a frothy shore?

Summer was past and day was past.

Somber clouds in the west were massed.

Out in the porch's sagging floor,

Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,

Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

The poem is only sixteen lines long. It doesn't take a lot of

time, therefore, to explain what it is saying. Anyway, design says it

better. We begin by reading it, as we would any poem, using

THE RULES
natural expression and common sense. Immediately we feel that

each line is built to be struck, heavily, four times (as indicated

here by accents). The length of each line gives us a slight edgi-

ness; there is in it something uncomfortable, some vague stric-

ture. Rhyme usually changes, easily and often; the poem throws
out a sound, and then its match, and then moves on. But not
here. Here the same rhyme persists through five lines, until it

feels like what it is: a stagnation, an inability to move forward. It

feels like the dreadful unsolvable weight of human woe.

And the heavy stress at the end of each line somehow makes
of the silence after the line a precipitous and dangerous fall. And

somehow the heavy stress at the beginning of each line bespeaks

a degree of anguish: it is such a clumsy entrance, the entrance of
a speaker so pinched and desperate he lacks all ease, all ability

simply to step into the line — he has to grab hold or fall.

Everything here, in other words, is meaningful: the left and

right edges, the shape of the poem, the inexorable repetition,
the rhyming pattern and the dolorous rhymes themselves. The
change at the end of the poem from the rhyme "known'V'alone"
to the final one, "abroad'VGod," is significantly slight, inching

toward a finality as other rhymes poems might well

in other
jump to a significantly "new" rhyming sound, at some point of
discovery. Here there is no such jump, only a holding on.
Read in this way, the poem begins to exist not only literally,

and intellectually, but palpably.

Said Frost, "For my part I should be as satisfied to play

tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set

to stay me."
Okay.
But how did he do it?

Breath
 2

Patterns

Underlying the construct of the metrical poem is the

certainty that all sound and all patterns, as well as words, are

sensible to interpretation.

To begin, then, at the beginning. The metrical poem is a

pattern made with sound just as much as it is a statement made
through sound.
The rules by which this pattern is constructed are as certain
and ongoing, though not so irreplaceably or so strictly kept, as

are the rules of linear measurement — inches, feet, yards, rods,

etc. They are less rigid because the metrical pattern of a poem is

an apparatus meant to illuminate feeling and meaning, rather

than a declaration of fact as an end in itself, the way nine inches
means nine inches, unvaryingly. Also, the allowable leniency of-
fers room for individuality — that is, style. And, finally, the suc-
cessful conveyance of meaning can, sometimes, require a proce-
dure different from the expected.

Metrical poems have three components which, taken to-

gether, compose the overall scheme. The first is rhyme, the sec-
ond is line length, and the third is the metrical pattern used.

THE RULES
 Even as the ruler needs inches to keep things regular, the
metrical line needs some unit of division to keep things in order.
Every line of a metrical poem is divided into a certain number of
feet. Each foot contains one complete unit of some metrical
pattern.

Where had I heard this wind before

Footi Foot 2 Foot 3 Foot 4

There are many such patterns. In this handbook we will

attend to the four most common, whose names are iambic, tro-

and anapestic.
chaic, dactylic,

The process of their construction is not unlike the division of

music into units called measures or bars — units that contain
both a repetition of rhythm and, if the composer wishes, a cer-

tain allowable amount and kind of variation upon that rhythm.

In the metrical poem as in music, such varieties and vari-
ations do not violate the established pattern, but give it added
excitement and interest. They are the gestures and flourishes that
compound the ongoing drama of sound, the sound of the music
or the poem: steady beat and counterpoint.
It is fair to say that the metrical poem has a quality that is

unbreakably and reliably musical.

Here are the opening lines of a metrical poem:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

(A. E. Housman, "Loveliest of Trees")

Patterns
And here are four lines (a complete poem) which are not
metrical:

O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into
people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
(Ezra Pound, "Coda")

In the four-line metrical stanza, the arrangement of the

words strives to elicit a rhythm of alternating stresses, light then
heavy, light then heavy. Though the rhythm is touched with a
difference or two (the initial syllables of both the first and the
fourth lines pull in a different direction), there is a definite,

ongoing pattern which the reader is meant to hear. In Pound's

short poem, the cadences are those of natural speech. The poem
is wonderful, but it is not patterned. It has no rhythm which we
can grasp, and which we easily begin to anticipate as we read
through the lines.

Rhythm is made up of the continual tonal rise and fall of

speech, by writing the words down in such a way that the inflec-

tions, heavy or light, will fall at certain points only, or mainly, to

make a pattern, as in the Housman example. Inflection helps to
release the meaning of language. Indeed, there is no satisfactory

language without it. In metrical poetry, it is the basis of every-

thing; it is the reasonwhy there can be a pattern.
If words, with their few or many syllables, are the material of
language, inflection surely is its spirit. Almost all words of more
than one syllable contain at least one syllable which is uttered
with special emphasis, and others which are spoken lightly. As in

"twenty," or "people," or the word "emphasis" itself.

THE RULES
 .

In addition to such variation within a word, there is mean-

ingful and necessary inflection within the phrasing of any group
of words. Many words in the English language have only one
syllable, and still inflection — both in the metrical poem and in
ordinary speech — must be created to release the meaning of
what is said. The specifics of inflection create tone; tone shapes
meaning.*
It would seem likely that emphasis would fall for this pur-
pose upon verbs and nouns, the important parts of speech,
rather than upon the less important connectives, articles, or
prepositions. And in the flow of ordinary speech this is, sensibly,
"
true. Hurry , I see a bluebird , it's on your mailbox! " you call to

someone, and it is the underlined words that you emphasize.

In the metrical poem there is less certainty about the words
that are to be spoken with emphasis, since there are in the
metrical poem, always, two forces at work: sense and pattern. The
emphasis can, and often will, point to important parts of the
syntax, as in the following line:

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen. . .

(Robert Frost, "The Tuft of Flowers")

Yet theremay also be lines in which the force of the pattern rules.

Thus the same poem has lines like the following:

I thought of ques tions that have no reply,

or

*If inflection is absent, the impression given is of something mechanical, even

sinister. Someone enters a bank, waves a gun, and says in an uninflected tone,
"Don't move!" Mostly, we speak to be heard and, when heard, to be answered.
Language is essentially a dialogue. But not in this case.

Patterns
 .

The mow er in the dew had loved them thus,

in which the rather minor words "that" and "in" are spoken with
an emphasis. Such emphasis does not cross meaning, for mean-
ing is paramount of course. But the metrical poem is, without
question, very forcibly pattern-driven.

Scansion is the mechanical notation of the metrical pattern

of a poem; in this process every syllable of every word is ac-

counted for, and both the prevailing pattern and all variations
are revealed.
In order to write and to read metrical poems, an under-
standing of scansion is essential. In no other way can the process
of metrics be explored, and comprehended both in its inflexible

and its relaxable latitudes.

In the process of scansion, syllables to be given heavy stress
are indicated by a stroke (') placed at the end of the stressed
syllable, and syllables to be given light stress are indicated by a

curved mark Q placed directly over that syllable/ So, still using
the initial Frost line, we have the following:

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen. . .

Since we are looking at only one line here, and since rhyme is a
matter of the relationship of sounds, we will put the subject of
rhyme aside for the moment in order to concentrate on pattern,
and the length of the line.

The symbol placed over the light syllable is also known as the breve, and the
symbol indicating a heavy syllable the macron.

10 THE RULES
 . . .

Each line of the poem carries within it, repeated over and
over, foot by foot, a rhythm, which creates the pattern, some-
times exactly and sometimes with some permissible variation.

Each foot is constructed of a single emphasis plus details — that is,

one heavy stress and no more, and whatever light stresses are

needed to make up the chosen pattern.

Thus, by reading the line as naturally as possible, and count-
ing the heavy stresses, one can find* the number of feet in the

line. The pattern of the poem does not intend to be obscure but to be
discernible through sensible reading.

In the line given here, it is easy counting: there are five heavy
stresses and five light stresses. The line has five feet.

w v w ,* w .• w • w y

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen. . .

If the line had read

w w
And the dew was gone
s w xw
that made
• w
his blade so
vwyw
heavy . .

it would still be a five-foot line, since we are finding the answer

by counting only the heavy stresses. Similarly, this line

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

also, since it has five heavy stresses, is a five-foot line. And this

one,

Under the wide and starry sky . .

*Almost always. This chapter on the general rules will be closely followed by a
discussion of exceptions.

Patterns 11
which, when we read it naturally, has four heavy stresses, is surely

a four-foot line; and the following

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,

are certainly three-foot lines.

The proper names of such lines, according to their length, are
given in the following chart.

Names of Metrical Lines According to Length

A one-foot line is called monometer.

A two-foot line is called dimeter.
A three-foot line is called trimeter.

A four-foot line is called tetrameter.

A five-foot line is called pentameter.
A six-foot line is < :alled hexameter.

A seven-foot line is called heptameter.

An eight-foot line : is called octameter.

So we can say that the original line we are using for illustra-

tion, with its five heavy stresses, is a pentameter line. Now we

turn our attention to the individual metric feet within the line.

The next chart indicates the four primary meters — the four
metrical patterns — which we will be discussing. Later on you
will quickly recognize each of them by its distinctive music. But

12 THERULES
 ' .

to begin you need to memorize all four — their names, patterns,

and notations.

Metrical Patterns and Their Symbols

Iamb: a light stress followed by a heavy stress. " '

v
Trochee: a heavy stress followed by a light stress. '

Dactyl: a heavy stress followed by two light stresses. '

Anapest: two light stresses followed by a heavy stress.

Using this chart, we see that the Frost line is a series of

iambs repeated five times — five times we get a combination of a
light stress followed by a heavy stress. And by adding vertical
strokes to indicate the separate feet, we can scan the line to
completion and perfection, as follows:

The dew was gone

| |
that made |
his blade |
so keen . .

and we can properly and correctly name it an iambic pentameter

line.

Every metrical poem is composed of an ongoing single pat-

tern, which prevails throughout the poem. But it is not, fre-

quently is not, the only meter employed. Substitutions are al-

lowed; variation is not only sometimes necessary because of the

syllable pattern of some word, it may well be in itself enhancing.

Change within the pattern may occur for inflection, for expres-

Patterns 13
 ..

sion, for emphasis, for nuance, for common sense, and because a
rhythm without some variation within it is a dull rhythm.

Any one of the four patterns given may at any time be substi-

tuted for any other.

The question of how much substitution is allowed is unan-
swerable. Nothing is certain but success — if substitution is used
too much, the pleasing sense of a pattern will be lost, at which
point all is lost. If no substitution is used, the poem may take on
a doggerel quality, and a feeling that complexity has been sac-

rificed for regularity.

As you see in the chart, the trochee (or trochaic foot) re-

verses the iambic — the heavy stress falls first, followed by a

single light stress. The trochee is endlessly useful as a variant in
an otherwise iambic line, as in the first line of "Bereft," or in the
following:

Something there |
is |
that does|n't love |
a wall. . .

("Mending Wall")

The forceful opening stress of the trochee is more dramatic than

the invitational, in-stepping iambic. It is for this reason, I imag-
ine, that Frost often uses it as the initial foot of a line when he
begins with a proper name or place name:

Silas |
is what he |
is — |we would|n't mind him —
("The Death of the Hired Man")

Mother can make | |

a com|mon tajble rear

And kick |
with two |
legs like |
an ar|my mule. . .

("The Witch of Coos")

14 THE RULES
 . . .

In each of these examples the proper name is naturally a

trochee — yet Frost, who built the lines, could have placed such
words within the line had he wanted to, and as he sometimes
did, stretching the word across two feet to avoid the trochaic
effect:

Poor Si|las, so |
concerned for oth|er |
folk. . .

("The Death of the Hired Man")

When the line is altogether trochaic, the effect is formal, even

artificial; certainly it is not natural. Iambic meter seems to carry
upon its broad and unexcitable back the cadence of sensible
speech, and it almost does — our natural speech flow has many
iambic "units." Yet speech is instanced by a continual disruption
of any sustained pattern.
Trochaic verse has no such similar-to-natural sound. It is al-

together like something composed, for it is something composed.

Longfellow's pleasant but truly acrobatic The Song of Hiawatha is

written in trochaic lines, a repeated drumlike pattern:

And the |
daughter of No|komis |

Grew up like the prairie lilies,

|
|
|

Grew a tall and slender maiden,

| | |

With the beauty of the moonlight.

| | |
. .

A second and familiar instance of the trochaic occurs in Mac-

beth, as the witches howl their culinary song:

Double, |
double |
toil and |
trouble;

Fire I burn and cauldron bubble. I I . .

Patterns 15
 .

The dactyl, also, is a composed and formal foot. Natural-

seeming enough in certain words (happiness, loveliness), when

used as a pattern it becomes a "music" almost deafening the

sense of what is being said. Again, Longfellow, with his interest in

New World subjects married to traditional forms, offers us an
obvious example. His long poem Evangeline (written in dactyls
with an occasional iambic or trochaic foot) begins:

This is the |
forest pri|meval. The murmuring pines
|
|

and the hemlocks.|

Bearded with moss, and in garments green,

|
| |

indis|tinct in the |
twilight,

Stand like |
Druids of |
eld. . .

The dactyl, like the trochee, is a useful variant in the iambic

line:

I wander'd lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.*

(Wordsworth, "I Wander'd Lonely . .

.")

The anapest, the fourth metrical pattern, is the reverse of the

dactyl — two light stresses are followed by a heavy stress. It too is

*Of course many words may be pronounced correctly in more than one way —
say, with three syllables or with two, as is true of the word "fluttering." Here,

16 THE RULES
a composed and formal and altogether uncommon prevailing

meter, though the anapest foot itself, light-footed and full of

energy, is necessary on occasion and always full of wonderful
uplift:

w ^ w • w x w • w s

The world much with us; late and soon,

is too
• w w w w / w > W• •

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;
W W S W W W f W • W X

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

(Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us . .
.")

And here are some lines from Lord Byron's galloping poem
"The Destruction of Sennacherib," altogether anapestic:

WW X w w y w w y w w •

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

ww f w w w w w w
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
x >* •

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

There is a fifth foot pattern — not properly a meter — which

is used with fair frequency, the spondee. It is an accommodation
for words that have no inflection although they have two sylla-

bles; examples are "heartbreak," "nightmare," "tomcat," and so

forth. When such a word is used to create a foot, and the empha-
sis within the foot is therefore equally balanced, two horizontal
lines, one over each of the two syllables, indicates the spondee:

heartbreak nightmare

however, the three-syllable pronunciation surely creates an actual audible and

palpable fluttering.

Patterns 17
 .. ..

A spondee may also be indicated when the emphasis, within

a single foot, is read as equal for two one-syllable words, as in the
following:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. . .

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

What one reader would read as an iamb, another might

legitimately read as a spondee — scansion has rules but also
elasticity, a willingness to coexist with a reasonable amount of
individuality. Thus, in a line of Frost's previously quoted, the

third foot can be read either as an iamb or as a spondee:

And kick with two legs like an army mule . .

And kick with two legs like an army mule. . .

("The Witch of Coos")

And here is another example, easily found (for they are many):

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . .

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . .

(Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us . .

.")

The spondee, like the four metrical patterns, may be used

freely as a substitute for any other prevailing meter.

18 THE RULES
 3

More About Patterns

Iambic meter gives a graceful, motionful sense of balance

and unexcited progress. It is the most common meter in English

metrical poetry — one might even say that it is the meter of
English verse. Certainly it is the mainstay. All other meters offer
useful and necessary variety; also they are the means to vivid but

"unreal" acrobatics. Iambic meter, in comparison with the other

patterns, is the least obviously composed.
Shakespeare uses the iambic meter, in the pentameter line, in

both the plays and the sonnets:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(Hamlet)

or

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

(Richard III)

More About Patterns 19

 . .

or

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state. . .

(Sonnet 29)

And here is Wordsworth:

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers;

and Keats:

The poetry of earth is never dead . .

and Marvell, on a shorter line:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

All of these lines, whatever their length, proceed steadily,

without pause and without flourish. Their pace is a kind of

neutral flow. There is enough pattern for the reader to feel the
ongoing motion, yet this pattern is simple enough that contem-
plation can accompany its felt pressure.
Against the simple and the smooth, vivacity flashes the most
brightly. So, when lines are not altogether iambic, but are en-
gaged with variety, a nice disturbance is created and felt — a
bounce, a flounce, a turn, a change — before the restoration
of the original pattern takes place, which it does, usually, very
quickly, an instance of pattern-drivenness. For example:

20 THE RULES
 A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness.

(Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder")

We have seen this before, the change of an initial foot from

the iambic to the trochaic, in an earlier discussion of a Frost line.
Here I want to draw attention not only to the dramatic emphasis
placed at the beginning of the line by the variation in the meter,
but to the effect of the two light stresses which are thereby put
together. Between "Kindles" and "clothes" there occurs, with this

twinning of light stresses, a levitation, a leaping, an instant of

nimble high-spiritedness, as the syllables arc between the two
heavier strokes. It feels very different from the smooth riverbed
of the regular iambic. This is a dancing part of the forward

motion, the briefest yet most pleasant upward pitch of spirits, led
by the pattern.
The same effect, a quick leaping, occurs when the trochee is

used instead of the iamb anywhere along the line. The only place
where it does not work reasonably is in the final foot, since the

line is meant to feel like a unit, and by the end of the unit, for the

feeling of completion, the original pattern (with its last heavy

stress) pulls to be restored.

There is, in the previous Wordsworth quote, in the final foot

of each line, an extra syllable which is given a light stress. This
light stress is not, of course, a part of the iambic pattern. It is an
accommodation to the words themselves ("hours" and "flow-
ers"*), which end with a light stress. Such words have, we say,

feminine endings, as opposed to "place," or "embrace," which are

e
See note on page 16.

More About Patterns 21

masculine. When such feminine words occur in the final foot of
the line, they may be scanned as a tag, a light stress, which in the
notation of scansion is not counted.

The winds that will be howl ingat all hours

Footi Foot 2 Foot 3 Foot 4 Foots tag

Now we come to an important and inevitable fact: that the

meters are not always "regularly" employed. Twice now I have
used the word "accommodation," and we are far from done.
When the meter is totally regular, it is called pure, and when it is

not, it is called impure. By "impure" I am not talking about

variety of meter, or substitution of one meter for another, or

even of the feminine tag, but of instances where, in one or more

feet, there is a substantial alteration from the very specific recog-

nizable pattern.
Here are two familiar lines:

Hickory, dickory, dock;

The mouse ran up the clock.*

Line 2 is pure iambic, a trimeter line. Line 1, however, is not pure;

it is composed of two dactyls and a final heavy stroke. It is,

therefore, impure dactylic.

Such an abbreviation of the final foot is not uncommon.

^Grudgingly I admit that "hickory" and "dickory" could be elided into two-
syllablewords, trochees, and in fact this was brought to my attention by an
observant editor who has seen at least one American edition so offering it:
"Hick'ry, dick'ry." But I say: alas, what leaping in the mouth is thus lost.

22 THE RULES
 . .

Here are the two opening lines of another poem — this time the
prevailing meter is trochaic — which utilizes the same device:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night. . .

When such a truncation of the final foot occurs, the process is

called catalexis; the foot itself is called catalectic. It is not regular.

It is impure. But it is also perfectly proper! And, on occasion,
wonderfully effective.

Consider how very different from the Blake lines are the
feeling of some lines from Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha,
with its unceasing pure trochees, each final foot with a last light

lifted syllable:

Can it be the sun descending,

O'er the level plain of water?
Or the Red Swan floating flying,
Wounded by the magic arrow. . .

In the Blake poem, that final heavy stroke at the end of

the line is one more hammer blow upon the forge of creation
which is a major presence throughout the poem. The effect of
the catalexis is, if you will, in tune with the subject of the Blake
poem, as it clearly is not in tune with Longfellow's poem, in
which each foot is an exact echo of the one preceding it.

Thus, such named accommodations as catalexis may more

properly be thought of as extensions of the rules rather than
oppositions to the rules.

More About Patterns 23

 Here are the names of more "irregularities":

When a foot within the line or at the beginning of the line

lacks a syllable (it would have to be a light syllable, as there can

be, properly, no foot without a heavy stress), it is called a lame

foot. Here is an example from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay,
called "Moriturus," a vigorous poem in sturdy dimeter:

Aware of the |
flight

Of the gol|den flicker

With his wing |
to the light;

To hear |
him nicker

And drum |
with his bill

On the rot ted willow; |

Lame Foot * Snug and |

still

On a grey |
pillow

Deep in |
the clay
Where dig|ging is hard,
Out of the way, |
—
The blue shard • |
Lame foot

Of a bro|ken platter —
Sometimes it is difficult to determine which foot in a line is the
lame foot. Since there is always a prevailing pattern, and since the
prevailing pattern here is iambic, the first foot of the line "Snug
and still" is the lame foot — the initial light stress is absent. For
the same reason, the second foot of the line "The blue shard" is

the lame one; the first foot is an iamb in fine order, the second
foot has only the heavy stress. (This is not catalexis, since the final
stress of the iamb, properly speaking, is in place.)

24 THE RULES
 .

Another example:

I know |
a bank where the wild thyme grows.
| | |
. .

t (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Here the third foot lacks any addition to the single heavy stress
— heavy beyond a doubt, since it is the only syllable in the foot.
How easy it would have been simply to say "whereon the wild
thyme grows," and have it not be lame. But then, how melodic
the line would have been — how without pause, without that
inner thoughtfulness we feel as Oberon slowly, craftily, considers

his next move. Even lame feet can be meaningful, and graceful.

Just as you might expect, there is also a name for a foot that
has within it too many stresses, to accommodate an overabun-
dance of syllables. Such a foot does not occur with any frequency,
yet often enough that it will be helpful to recognize it, and also of
course to know about it in order to use it if needed. The example
below comes again from Millay's "Moriturus," the final lines of
the poem.

With his hand on |

my mouth
He shall drag |
me forth,
Shrieking |
to the south
And clutch| ing at the north. Hypersyllabic foot

The name of any foot holding, as this one does, too many
syllables, is hypersyllabic. As with all such devices, it is not an
irregular foot that occurs by chance, but an irregular foot em-
ployed for the sake of some effect in the poem. Here, clearly,

More About Patterns 25

at the last outburst between life and nothing, the speaker is ap-
propriately filling and even brimming the final moment with
syllables.

When such an overabundance of syllables occurs at the very

beginning of the line — that is, at the beginning of the first foot
— it is called anacrusis. One of the songs from Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night, a dozen lines, is written in a prevailing trochaic
meter, and each line — except for the first two — begins with
the heavy opening stress of the trochaic foot.

Anacrusis O mistress |
mine, where |
are you roaming?
|

Anacrusis O, stay and |

hear, your true |
love's |
coming,
That can sing both high and low.
| | |

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter.

Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

The majority of the lines are regular trochaic. Lines 3, 6, 9, and 12

end with what you now know is a catalectic final foot. The two
instances of anacrusis, as indicated, occur in lines 1 and 2.

Each kind of line and foot offers something to the tone of the
poem and thus to its felt effect. The pure lines offer steadiness;

the four impure lines, with catalexis, offer a way of partitioning

what is being said, encouraging the reader's feeling that the "ar-

26 THE RULES
 . .

gument" has the strength of logic, and logic's progression; and

the two instances of anacrusis, those unnecessary and imploring
O's, an excess, begin the song with the splash of longing and
urgency, without which the song would be only the argument.

I have said previously that there is no foot without a heavy

stress. That is true, and not true. There is something called the
pyrrhic foot, which is composed of two light stresses. The pyrrhic
foot appears in Greek and Roman poetry; in English verse it

occurs only when immediately followed by a spondee, and the

two feet together are called a double ionic. Here is a rare example,

again from "Moriturus":

Here is |
the wish

Of one |
that died

Like a beached fish * Double ionic

|

On the ebb |
of the tide. . .

One more device of progression and hesitation is worth our

attention here: the employment of a pause, within the line, at a
logical break. Some mark of punctuation will be given, to verify
and intensify the pause, before the poem moves on. This pause is

called a caesura, and in scansion it is not counted, though it is

certainly meant to be felt. Milton used it frequently:

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, ||
and from the walls of Heav'n
Shoots farr into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn; ||
here Nature first begins
Her fardest verge, ||
and Chaos to retire. . .

(Paradise Lost, Book II)

More About Patterns 27

And here is Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . ||
Near them, on the sand
("Ozymandias")

A Caution
In the employment of each of these embellishments and oppor-
tunities, the inflection of the lines always follows the pattern of
natural speech — it never, never betrays the correct pronuncia-
tion of any word.* This we can count on. But, also, we must
remember that the pitch and tone of the human voice is multi-
dimensional, while in the mechanics of scansion we have only
three indicators: the heavy stress, the light stress, and the spon-
dee. The heavy stresses in any line are not apt to be equal,
therefore, though they will be heavier than any of the light

stresses. One must remember, always, the two forces that rule
here: sense, and pattern.

Summation
You now know most of the rules.

^Perhaps it is worthwhile mentioning one more time the fact that many words
may be pronounced correctly in more than one way. And also to recall that
language is lively and not static; proper pronunciation of words may change
over the years.

28 THE RULES
 4
Design: Line Length

Poets are free to select their own designs (within the rules,
I mean) and, among all the options, to determine the brevity or

the extravagance of their lines. But they rarely do — they rarely

go beyond the usual. In truth, much has been tried, and much
has What works, works for profound and understandable
failed.

reasons. And so the workable formulae have become the formal

structures which are used and used again.
The reason why these usual line lengths work is that they
inform the reader of a tone or mood, and thus help to persuade
the reader toward the idea in the poem. Line length is an active,

never a neutral, part of the process of writing.

We say the poem, whether we speak it aloud or in the back
room of the mind; therefore, we read the poem and, hearing it,
we breathe it. And we breathe it in linear fashion, since that is the
way it is presented to us. So our breathing (and our hearing) fit
themselves to the length of the line and its "message." The mes-
sage of an eight-foot line is very different from the message of
the two-foot line, or the dancing three-foot line. Thus we can
speak of the "message" of the line length.

Design: Line Length 29

 .

More poems in English literature are constructed with the

five-foot line than with any other length of line. The work of
Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, to
name a few, rests upon the foundation called pentameter. The
secret of its constant employment is simply that it is the line
which is the closest to the breathing capacity of our lungs — we
have just enough breath on one uninterrupted reach to say it

through — at the end we are neither exhausted nor do we have

any real amount of breath left. It fits us. Thus the message it

delivers is a message of capability, aptitude, and easy fulfillment,

not edginess, not indolence, but the ease of something that fits

— the ease of the song that fits, that one sings calmly. Within it

passion, great passion, is held in the wildfire of form.

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing. . .

Shakespeare begins Sonnet 87 using such a five-foot line, which

lingers an instant within itself, with its feminine tag. Yet, what is

he saying? That to hold on to his love is impossible, that he is

going to lose his love. And also (we hear this in the pentameter
line) he is saying an additional thing — that he is going to face
this loss and this anguish with dignity; he is not going to rail or
weep; he is saying that it is a grief too deep for weeping, too dear
for railing; he is going to speak about it — about love and loss
— with courage and with grace. He has chosen for this task
the pentameter line. And we can expect therefore that we are
not going to be bruised, and trod upon, but rather elevated, in-
structed; we are going to be witness to humanity at its best, to

capability in spite of great grief.

This is also the message of doomed Keats's heavily laden
sonnet:

30 THE RULES
 ..

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art. . .

Or these lines, by Sir Philip Sidney:

Come, Sleep; O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,

The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low. . .

(Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 39)

Lines shorter than pentameter leave the reader feeling

slightly hurried and, thus, agitated. You might think that the
opposite, a sense of relaxation, would be felt, since there is more
breath left with the shorter line. But it is not so. We speak briefly
when a sense of urgency is upon us, when we are pitched to some
emotion sharper than contemplation. We reach, in ceremony or
in thought, for the complete; we reach, in emotion, for the suc-
cinct.

And here we see how forceful is the pattern's work upon us,

for we quickly, within a line or two, believe the pattern that is

given; we put on its "atmosphere" and adjust our mood accord-

ing to the length of the line. It is amazing. And it is reliable.

Even as pentameter is suitable to the construct of meditation,

an ordering of emotion, so tetrameter is well suited to "story"

poems — poems in which there is movement, confrontation,
action. Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is te-

trameter:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

Design: Line Length 31

 He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

A sense of restlessness, unsettledness, moves us forward; some-

thing is not quite right, and it wants to be resolved. Which is,

indeed, what the poem is about. The poem is empowered, in

part, by the tetrameter lines.

The traditional ballad stanza is made up of two tetrameter

lines (lines 1 and 3) and two trimeter lines (lines 2 and 4), in-

creasing the forward motion even more:

There lived a wife at Usher's well,

And a wealthy wife was she;

She had three stout and stalwart sons,

And sent them o'er the sea.

(Anonymous)

Emily Dickinson's use of this form, in her anxious and iron-

willed lyrics, is a part of the narrative believability of her poems.
It is the ballad form become the Protestant hymn stanza become
the Dickinson luminosity, which seems always to have been ut-
tered just above last gasp:

I died for Beauty — but was scarce

Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room —
Millay's poem "Moriturus," in dimeter, rings with the swing-
ing back and forth between the two strikings, like the heart with
its double beat:

32 THE RULES
 . .

If I could have
Two things in one:
The peace of the grave,
And the light of the sun. . .

But, finally, the process of oiling the wheels, of increasing

speed, agitation and excitation, fails. A poem in monometer is

almost not a poem. Without any sort of repeated pattern in the

line, it fails of energy:

Thus I

Pass by
And die:
As One,
Unknown
And gone. . .

(Robert Herrick, "Upon His Departure")

Adding to the line length, increasing it from pentameter to

hexameter, heptameter, octameter even, creates very different
effects, as one might suppose. Gone, again, is that sense of calm
intelligence, of a construct exactly right for eloquent and unhur-
ried meditation.
Instead the longer line gives a feeling of abundance — some-
times with a sense of energy and brimming over, at other times

with a feeling of extraordinary authority and power.

A six-foot line made up only of iambic feet is called an
alexandrine. That such a line is different indeed from the pen-
tameter is illustrated by Pope, in his "discussion" of writing style:

Design: Line Length 33

 If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'

The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep.'

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
("An Essay on Criticism")

Working with lines in lengths beyond the pentameter, except

for the occasional hexameter as above, is perilous work; so
quickly, along this longer line, is the sense of poetic language —
language compressed — lost. Edgar Allan Poe uses an octameter
line in the pattern of "The Raven," but gives at least some of the
eight-foot lines an internal rhyme, so that in fact the perceived
length is actually that of two four-foot lines:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak

and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten
lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came
a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber

door —
'"Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my
chamber door —
Only this and nothing more."

In "The Raven" there is little feeling of natural speech, which

is not at all Poe's aim at any time. The long lines, even with their
internal rhymes, speak of poetry composed, of its sparkling ar-

34 THE RULES
tificiality, of what the poet can make rather than what he can say.

This kind of excitation of the reader's spirit by composition was

not the aim of the sonnet writers, who walked the firm pentame-
ter line. That line, five feet, is less a thrust or a fling than it is a
natural gesture, a sweet force, vigorous but not too vigorous. It

does not say: here is something composed; but, rather: here is

something thought, then followed, until it came to its almost

inevitable fruition.

Design: Line Length 35

 5

Release of Energy
Along the Line

The energy released across any line of poetry may re-

main steady, it may accelerate, or it may slacken. This release

changes with any change in line length, and with any change from
the prevailing pattern to a variant meter. Such a "manipulation" of
energy affects tone, and is part of the significant usefulness of
variation.

In Byron's "So, We'll Go No More A-Roving," such changes

occur in a majority of the lines, and not randomly but with
precise intent.

So, We'll Go No More A- Roving

So, we'll go |
no more a-roving |

So late |
into |
the night,
Though the heart |
be still |
as loving,

And the moon |

be still |
as bright.

36 THERULES
 II

For the sword |

outwears |
its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast, | |

And the heart must pause to breathe,

| |

And love itself have rest.

I I

in

Though the night |

was made |
for loving,

And the day |

returns |
too soon,
Yet we'll go |
no more a-roving |

By the light |
of the moon.

In ten of twelve instances in this trimeter poem, the line

begins with an anapestic first foot, then settles into the less

energetic iambic to finish the line. Only lines 2 and 8 are alto-

gether iambic; the first of these speaks of the late night, the
second of the necessity of rest.

Thus each line with its anapestic first foot starts with a little

rush of energy, of esprit; at the change, one doesn't react to the

incoming calm iambic so much as one feels the failure of the
anapestic meter to continue — its discontinuance "says," rhyth-
mically, that the speaker's energy (like his youth) has run out —
and one feels this poignantly over and over each time the poet
enters the line with a rising energy that he cannot sustain. Espe-
cially poignant is the final line in which (at last) the anapestic is

repeated; but, it would seem, at the cost of length, for the third
foot is absent, as though the effort of two anapests has left the
speaker without enough reserve even for the final iamb.
This being so, we read the last line at a slower pace, to drag its
brevity to the expected length, and thus the two anapests, clam-

Release of Energy Along the Line 37

bering to rise, are inevitably dragged down. Altogether the poem
expresses, in its meter, the same clash of wish and fact as is

expressed in the poet's actual bittersweet words.

Poe's strange, melancholy poem "Annabel Lee" is another
example of the extreme effects that the meter can, in daring

hands, produce. All through this thirty-six-line poem the line

begins with anapests and, as in the Byron poem, settles at last, or
"sinks" here and there, to the iambic. In this case, however, the

iambic seems the reasonable meter — there is so much effort by

the anapests, and dactyls too, to lift energy — to cause just that
excitation of the mind Poe considered essential in a poem —
until the iambic feet begin to seem like small, calm islands in a

turbulent ocean.

It was man|y and man|y a year ago, |

In a king|dom by the sea, |

That a mai|den there lived whom you may know

—
| |

By the name of Ann|abel

|
Lee;
And this mai|den she lived |
with no |
other thought
Than to love |
and be loved by me. |

And, indeed, the turbulence grows more intense — no line

in the first five stanzas reaches its completion without dipping

back to the iambic. In the fifth stanza, three of the six lines
suddenly break free and do not revert to the iambic, but continue
across the line their rousing anapests, and in the last stanza

every one of the six lines is pure anapestic — twenty-eight unin-

terrupted anapestic feet, with their lively surging power. Twice
they reach the name of Annabel Lee itself and, as has almost but
not quite happened in previous lines, the lines now ingest the

name in perfect anapestic order, without a single change in me-

ter. By the end of that sixth stanza the reader is transported, by

38 THE RULES
the rhythm, by the unnatural, composed, pressuring rhythm,
straight out of this reasonable world and into the delirium, the
opulence, the mythology, the rich and endless night of a different
order.
Such matters — the line, the energies of the line rising or
falling — are no small part of the power of the poem. The con-
cretions of composition, narrative and form, are so powerful.

Release of Energy Along the Line 39

 Design: Rhyme

Rhyme — that decisive repetition of sound at the end of lines

— gives the kind of pleasure felt with any anticipation and arri-

val. We learn from the early lines of the poem when to expect the
rhyming sound; we feel pleasure as each rhyming unit is brought
to its fruition; our pleasure increases throughout the poem each
time we anticipate the rhyme, and wait for it, and are not disap-
pointed. It is the closing of the perfectly fitting lid upon the
delicate box. It is the sound the tumblers make in the lock as the
combination is given, and they click their respect for order as

they spin and find their place.

There are several kinds of rhyme. The strongest is the couplet

— rhyme which occurs in consecutive lines — and it is at its

boldest when it occurs in the form of true rhyme (or, as it is also

called, perfect rhyme), in which the words rhyme exactly. Here is

Blake again:

Tyger! Tyger! burning br ight (a)

In the forests of the n ight . ... (a)

40 THERULES
Here each of the rhyming words has the same inner sound,
preceded by a different consonant sound. Each is a one-syllable
word and is therefore heavily stressed; by this definition it is

masculine rhyme. Such masculine and true rhymes naturally

achieve the deepest possible emphasis and effect.

Words of more than one syllable that end with a lightly

stressed syllable create what is called feminine rhyme. Here is

Byron:

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story; (a)

The days of our youth are the days of our glory; (a)

(Lord Byron, "All for Love")

Here the rhyme is deliciously present, but lighter in force than

the masculine rhyme above.

The longer the line, the milder the effect of the rhyme, as it

takes us that much longer to reach the closure. The first example
below is tetrameter; the second only a foot longer:

And since to look at things in bloom (a)

Fifty springs are little room, (a)

About the woodlands I will go (b)

To see the cherry hung with snow. (b)

(Housman, "Loveliest of Trees")

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, (a)

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight; (a)

Design: Rhyme 41
 .

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin, (b)

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. . . (b)

(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream)

The heroic couplet composed of two consecutive lines

is

which rhyme and which express within them a single com-

pleted thought; at the end of the two lines, therefore, some punc-
tuation will appear. Traditionally the heroic couplet is written
in iambic pentameter. Here is Pope, master of the heroic enclo-
sure:

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed, (a)

Is like a clown in regal purple dressed; (a)

or

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, (a)

As those move easiest who have learned to dance. (a)

("An Essay on Criticism")

In such writing, the second line of each unit (couplet) is nec-

essarily end-stopped, or self-enclosed — in immediate thought or
grammar, it has come to a conclusion. The reader may even be
inclined to pause for an instant. By contrast, lines in other writ-
ing may continue the thought over the first line and into the
second, and perhaps beyond the second, creating an altogether
less emphatic sense of completion and formality, and even a little

rumpling of the feeling of the measure — if nothing has come to

a completion at the end of the line, the reader is likely to hurry

42 THE RULES
on to the next line. This is called enjambment. Here is a fairly
mild but noticeable example:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: (a)

Its loveliness increases; it will never (a)

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep (b)

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep {b)

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing, (c)

(Keats, "A Thing of Beauty")

Here, after the initial line, phrases conclude internally rather

than at the ends of the lines, and the lines therefore swing rapidly
from the right back to the left. There is, in this passage, no
extreme breakage of the small phrases of logic or grammar —
such breakage seems to be a modern trait. Contemporary non-
metrical poems are full of it, and perhaps wisely so. Without
meter, this ability to manipulate the speed of the line turn is

even more inviting than in the metrical poem, where it operates

as a viable counterpoint to the tempo of the ongoing metrical
pattern.

When the lines are of various lengths and do not contain

within their twinning any regular measure, rhyme with a light,

sweet (yet unbreakable) touch is created:

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, (a)

Sails the unshadowed main, — (a)

The venturous bark that flings (b)

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings (b)

In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, (b)

Design: Rhyme 43
 And coral reefs lie bare, (c)

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. . . . (c)

(Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus")

Two words of corresponding sound create a rhyme, but the

rhyme may of course go on in additional lines. In Robert Frost's
poem "Bereft" (p. 4), the rhyme pattern is a definite part of
the poem's evocation of despair and spiritual stagnation — five

times the line ends on the same rhyming sound before the poem
manages to move on to a second rhyming sound — and then it

recovers itself to no reliable pattern but, once again, gets almost

paralyzed upon this second rhyme. And so on, to the end of the
poem. In "The Chambered Nautilus," on the other hand, the
rhyming pattern, at the end of the unequal measures, is only
lightly noticed and lightly felt. No two rhyming patterns could be
more different, more obviously intended for different effects. So
various are the possible uses of corresponding sound.

All of the rhyming sounds in the examples given so far are

exact or true rhymes. This preciseness of sound, crisp and em-

phatic, is the most commonly used. But there are other kinds,
and degrees, of rhyming.
Slant rhyme (or off-rhyme, or imperfect rhyme) also occurs

frequently. In slant rhyme, the rhyming words have a similar but

not an identical inner vowel sound: "clack" and "black" are true
rhymes; "clack" and "bleak" are slant rhymes. The effect of slant
rhyme is to create the usual clasping instant, but it is less simple,

less emphatic than the closure of true rhyme — as though it

were darkened by some disturbance, some complexity. One is apt

to hear in true rhyme a cheerfulness and sense of resolution; in

44 THE RULES
 .

slant rhyme one hears a minor key. Emily Dickinson often used
slant rhyme. So did Wilfred Owen:

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple, (a)

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; (a)

("Arms and the Boy")

An even more intense form of slant rhyme appears when

"matched" words have similar but not exact inner vowel sounds
and the same initial and final consonant sound. Again, the exam-
ple is from Owen's poem "Arms and the Boy":

Let the boy try along this bayonet blade (a)

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood . ... (a)

Feminine rhyme is of course double rhyme; "story'V'glory"

used in the Byron couplet (p. 41) is a two-syllable or double
rhyme. When double rhyme is used extensively (as in The Song
of Hiawatha where, page after page, it is the only rhyme, com-
pleting the final trochaic foot), it becomes a fairly overwhelming
presence, a music that loses its suppleness in the rigidity of its

exact duplication for so long a time. It becomes too noticed.

There is also triple rhyme, as in the following:

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December. . .

(Poe, "The Raven")

At least theoretically, four-syllabled rhyme also exists. But with

such lengthy collaboration of syllables we are pretty much out of
the deep water of serious poems and into the chuckling shallows

Design: Rhyme 45
 . . .

of lighthearted verse and word games, where the rhyming is

more ornamental than seriously useful.

Multisyllabled rhymes, in poems serious or foolish, may be

made up of words of unequal syllabic length, so long as the
syllabic stresses work out correctly. Thus one may come upon

rhymes like the following:

And then my heart with pleasure fills ,

And dances with the daffodils . .

(Wordsworth, "I Wander'd Lonely . .

.")

or

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes ,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods . .

(Emerson, "The Rhodora")

or even

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion ,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean . . .

(Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind")

When metrical poems are written down in the units called

stanzas, the initial group of lines sets the design to be followed,

establishing the metrical pattern, the line length or lengths, and

46 THE RULES
the system of rhyme. The four-line stanza (or quatrain) is the
most common. It may have one rhyming pair of lines and one
unrhyming (a.,b,c,b), or it may have two rhymes (a,b,a y b). There
is no one rule about line length; sometimes all lines are the same,
sometimes not:

O my Luve's like a red, red rose, {a)

That's newly sprung in June : (b)

O my Luve's like the melodie (c)

That's sweetly played in tune , (b)

(Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose")

or

There lived a wife at Usher's well, (a)

And a wealthy wife was she; ( b)

She had three stout and stalwart sons, (c)

And sent them o'er the sea. (b)

(Anonymous, "The Wife of Usher's Well")

The employment of two rhyming pairs of lines holds the

poem in a strict formality. It is of course more difficult to write,

but the enjoyment of rhyming closure is doubled:

Strew on her roses, roses , (a)

And never a spray of yew {b) ,

In quiet she re poses : (a)

Ah! would that I did too! (b)

(Matthew Arnold, "Requiescat")

or

Design: Rhyme 47
 He stood, and heard the steeple (a)

Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town. (b)

One, two, three, four, to market-place and people (a)

It tossed them down . (b)

(Housman, "Eight O'clock")

Another way to pattern the rhymes of a four-line stanza is

with one inner and one outer rhyme; that is, a,b>b,a. Tennyson
uses this scheme throughout his book-length poem In Memo-
riam.

Behold, we know not anything; (a)

I can but trust that good shall fall (b)

At last — far off — at last, to all, (b)

And every winter change to spring , (a)

Poems written this way feel a little different from poems that use
the previous patterns. Perhaps it is the long reach of the outer
rhyme (the ear waits longer) surrounding the shorter reach of

the inner rhyme (which is actually a couplet) that gives such

stanzas a sense of their own completion, compared with the flow

of the a,b,c,b and the a y b ay b patterns.
y

Additional rhyming patterns are used in longer stanza ar-

rangements, in the sonnet, and in other traditional forms, which
are discussed in the following chapter.

Blank Verse
Blank verse is traditionally iambic pentameter without rhyme.

Poets have used it for short poems — Frost's "Mending Wall"

48 HE RULES
is written in blank verse — and for longer poems as well. Mil-

ton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's Prelude are also written

in blank verse. So are the plays of Marlowe and the plays of
Shakespeare. Therefore, and easily, one may say without chal-
lenge that blank verse — iambic pentameter and no rhyme,
though of course with many of the other language and poetic
devices exquisitely employed — is the main highway of English
poetic language.

Design: Rhyme 49
 7

Design: Traditional Forms

Some formal designs are centuries old. The sonnet( a little

song) was originally an Italian form; sonnets were written by

Petrarch long before the form was used by Shakespeare.
The Petrarchan sonnet, fourteen lines long, is made up of
two parts, an eight-line section (octave) followed by a six-line

section (sestet). These two parts may be, but are not always, sep-
arated by a line of space. In usual practice, the octave sets forth
a situation, or a question; the sestet "solves" it, or in some co-
hesive or resonant way comments upon this original premise.

The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is exact and diffi-

cult. The octave pattern is a,b,b,a a,b,b a —
that is, the eight-line
y

octave operates with two rhyming sounds. The sestet's design

varies; it may be c,d,e c,d,e or it may be c,d,c a\cy d.

The sonnet is slightly less rigid in the English or Shakespear-

ean version, which loosens these patterns somewhat. It is still a
poem of fourteen lines and it is still written traditionally in
iambic pentameter. But the design of the rhyme is less fearsome;
the English or Shakespearean sonnet is composed of three quat-
rains and a final couplet. Thus, with an occasional variation in
the third quatrain, the pattern is a,b,a,b c,d,c,d e,f,e,f g,g.

50 THE RULES
 Of the sonnet we expect both gravity and scintillation. Our
inheritance of Shakespeare's sonnets, as well as work by Sidney,
Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, places the son-

net in this special category. So much has been said — memora-

bly — within its mere fourteen lines! The form is comfortably
recognizable. The composure of the pentameter; the progression
of thought through the quatrains; the "turn" between octave and
sestet, as though back into a mirror; the extravagance and yet
applicability of its imagery — these are all unforgettable. After a
little reading of sonnets, we count the lines no more, but feel
what is being said developing toward a wholeness, and know,
reliably, when it has come.
Contemporary poets have treated the sonnet with both def-
erence and an iconoclastic spirit of experimentation. Millay
wrote a few sonnets in tetrameter and also a sequence using an
alexandrine as the final line. Some contemporary sonnets have
fewer than fourteen lines, some have more. Such poems break
from the rules of design but remain (or intend to remain) true to
the nature and spirit of the sonnet — which, in our age, includes
its illustrious history. Gerard Manley Hopkins's shining poem
"God's Grandeur," although written in a particularly individual
style, is a sonnet. So, fittingly, in the first act of the play, are the
first fourteen lines of conversation between Romeo and Juliet.

The ballad form is suggestive rather than rigid. More often

than not, the ballad will be written in four-line stanzas, and the
line lengths will alternate between tetrameter (lines 1 and 3) and
trimeter (lines 2 and 4). But this is not necessarily so. Sometimes
the stanza will have one pair of rhymes, sometimes two. Occa-
sionally an additional line, called a refrain, is attached to the end
of each stanza. This line is also, sometimes, called the burden.

Design: Traditional Forms 51

 Since the ballad was orally remembered and transmitted
from one listener to another, and often in association with mu-
sic (and, thus, an individual performer), there are often many
slightly different versions of the same ballad. Ballads make use
of dialect, and of obsolete words, the correct pronunciation of
which — besides the meaning — is no common matter. This is a
part of the difficulty of enjoying ballads — and also, of course, a
part of their richness.
Poets no longer write ballads; they cannot, since the world
in which ballads were a rich, weird, and real part of everyday life

no longer exists. Some poets do, however, still write literary

ballads.

No one knows who wrote the traditional ballads. They were,

no doubt, a multitude — of singers, and storytellers.

You will recall that two rhyming lines are called couplets. In a

continuation of this logic, three rhyming lines are called tercets:

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.
(Tennyson, "The Eagle")

The same word, tercet, is used for a three-line stanza that

does not rhyme, or rhymes only partially.

Terza rima utilizes such a three-line stanza. It is traditionally

a poem in iambic pentameter, with a rhyming pattern a,b,a b,c,b

c,d,c, etc., with no pause or sense of completion, necessarily, in

either statement or grammar, between tercets. There is, rather, a

strong sense of movement forward. In Shelley's "Ode to the West

52 THE RULES
Wind," four tercets are followed by a single couplet, this arrange-

ment of lines making up a single self-contained portion of his

spirited and breathy ode.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe (a)

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! (b)

And, by the incantation of this verse, (a)

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth (b)

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (c)

Be through my lips to unawakened earth {b)

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, (c)

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (c)

The villanelle, originally and still a French form, is a poem of

nineteen lines, set out in five tercets and a final quatrain. The
poem works on only two rhymes; the first line and the third
line of the initial stanza are repeated, exactly or almost ex-
actly, throughout the rest of the stanzas, as follows: a,b,a a,b,a
a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a,a. A better bet is to look at Elizabeth
Bishop's villanelle "One Art," in the anthology section of this

book.
As you might expect, given their rigid form, villanelles are
not common. They are usually, but not always, in iambic pen-
tameter.
The Spenserian stanza is a nine-line unit; the first eight lines
are iambic pentameter, and the final line is an alexandrine —
a six-foot line in perfect iambic. The rhyming pattern is

a,fr,a,fr,fr,c,fr,c,c. Edmund Spenser stitched together this stanza

Design: Traditional Forms 53

for The Faerie Queene. The effect of the first eight lines is, natu-
rally, that of a reliable regularity; the longer reach of the final
line, even though longer by only one foot, is useful and richly
surprising. Keats elected to use this stanza for his long and lush
poem "The Eve of St. Agnes."* Pentameter moves the story
forward — the lovers meet, they feast, the hour grows late; a
sense of danger builds. Yet with each stanza that single longer
line holds them back, there is an anchor in it, a drag, a lag, which
deepens the story and the felt suspense — will the two lovers
escape or not?

xxxix

'Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,

Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise — arise! the morning is at hand; —
The bloated wassillers will never heed: —
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, —
Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.'

XL

She hurried at his words, beset with fears,

For there were sleeping dragons all around,

At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears —
The poems included in the anthology section are primarily for illustration,
and length was necessarily a consideration. Had it not been, "The Eve of St.

Agnes" would have been one of the first poems chosen.

54 THERULES
 Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found. —
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar;

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

There are other exacting traditional forms. Many metrical

poems, of course, are not so detailed, but evolve through the
continuing four-line stanza, or by simple continuance, one line
following another, the meter alone the principal support of a
requisite formality. Or, a poet may regale out of the language a

nameless but appropriate design for a particular poem. John

Donne's "Song" and George Herbert's "The Flower" stand for-

mal and metered, but there is no name for their designs. Col-

eridge, in "Kubla Khan," suddenly and dramatically changes line

length; such refusal of regulation emphasizes the wildness of the

poem's landscape. The stanza that Shelley uses in "To a Skylark"
also has no name — a twice- rhymed quatrain of trimeter lines,
then an alexandrine ascending:

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not

Design: Traditional Forms 55

 Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

56 THE RULES
 8

Words on a String

Along with metrical correctness and fluidity, patterned

poems retain the usual need for other language devices, which
make poems a sweet and memorable honey on the tongue and in
memory. Alliteration and assonance are as potent here as any-
where, and their richness, along the little mountain ranges of the
heavy and light stresses, is as desirable here as in any other type
of poem.
Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds of words, as in:

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in cjothes a wantonness.
(Herrick, "Delight in Disorder")

or

His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

(Richard Wilbur, "Parable")

Words on a String 57
 . .

or

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods wjth w^rm breast arid wjth |h! bright wjngs.

(Hopkins, "God's Grandeur")

Such writing pleases the tongue. It aids memory. It is helpful

to the presentation of what is being said: we linger over what we
like; we skim briskly what we don't find interesting or attractive

or pleasurable.
Assonance involves vowel sounds and the interiors of words.
The reading (listening) mind is captivated by repetition, as the
same "note," housed inauspiciously inside the words, is struck
again and again, as in the following:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my s ou l . .

(Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus")

or

He clasps the crag with crooked hands. . .

(Tennyson, "The Eagle")

The effect of vowels altogether, not repeating but changing in

a certain order, opening gradually or closing gradually so that
their effect is of darkening or lightening, has no name, but it can
create a powerfully felt moment in a poem, as in the following

two examples, the first of which closes and darkens in tone, while
the second lightens and opens:

58 THE RULES
 . . .

Once the ivory box is broken,

Beats the golden bird no more.

(Millay, "Memorial to D.C.")

. . . Round the decay

of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
(Shelley, "Ozymandias")

Onomatopoeia is the use of words that mean exactly what

they say — or, rather, what they "sound": birds actually do
"chirp," bees actually do "buzz." Many words and phrases, if not
truly onomatopoetic in this way, are certainly first or second
cousins to it. Wordsworth describes his daffodils

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. . .

("I Wander'd Lonely . .

.")

Coleridge presents us with the river Alph

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion . .

("Kubla Khan")

while Frost, in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," talks

about

. . . the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake . .

all passages with a haunting sensitivity to sound.

Words on a String 59
 9

Mutes and Other Sounds

Sound itself (I have said this before) is surely a signifier of

mood, and thus of message; each or the twenty-six letters of the
alphabet represents a sound with a particular tonal quality. The
letters themselves can be divided into a number of groups —
vowels and consonants, which are further divided into semivow-
els, aspirates, liquids, and mutes.
The letters representing mute sounds are b; c, k (hard), and q;

d; g (hard); p and t. Each is whack of a sound, emphatic

a quick
and vibrationless; each, importantly, is a sound that refuses to

elide with any other. "The dogs jump into the car" leaves no felt
space between "dogs" and "jump" because there is none. But
"The dog jumps into the car" sets up, between the word "dog"
and the word "jump," an unfillable instant of nothingness —
speech ends on the hard g sound and begins again with the ;', but
our actual, physical vocal apparatus cannot make any bridge of
sound across the very narrow but felt vacuum. It is so with the
hard sound of g and all the other mute sounds, and it is so with
none of the other sounds, or letters.

Such created "silences" within a poem are noticeable, trun-

cating as they do, for an instant, the otherwise unbroken string

60 THE RULES
 .

of sound. Within a line, use of a mute sound is like a tiny swoon,

a mini-caesura:

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.
A
(Tennyson, "The Eagle")

At the end of a line, a mute sound naturally deepens the physical

pause before the eye sweeps back to the left; it is a snap and a
click; it is an enforcer of the self- containment, and so the cer-

tainty, of what has been said:

'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

'Whether they work together or apart.'
A
(Frost, "The Tuft of Flowers")

Other categories of sound create other effects. The liquids /

and r are just that, watery sounds; they suggest softness, fluency,
motion. If you want to create a scene of softness and ease, the

liquids will be appropriate:

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell. . .

(Keats, "Bright star, would stay steadfast . .

.")

And so it is with each category of sound, with each word. The

very letters of the words rasp, or whistle, or sigh. Or shout. Or
whisper.Sound is either a help or a hindrance to the poem, for
no sound is neutral.

Mutes and Other Sounds 61

 10

The Use of Meter in

Non-Metric Verse

Sustained metrical design does not exist in free-verse

poems, of course, but often some meter is employed briefly

for effect. Especially one finds meter "happening" at the con-

clusion of the poems. Such practice is simply evidence of the
almost natural usefulness of meter with its repeated rhythms
and their reliable effects — the absolute certainty that is cre-

ated by design. Meter has received no recognition as an ad-

junct to the cadences of the contemporary non-metrical poem.
Yet here it is, for example, at the end of Dylan Thomas's "Fern
Hill":

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would

take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields

62 THE RULES
 And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Thomas uses the anapest with frequency throughout the

poem, and indeed he must, for it is a common pattern appear-

ing, for example, whenever there is a one-syllable preposition

followed by an article followed by a one-syllable noun — "in

the moon," "to the farm," and "in my chains" are all anapests.

But when repeated, the anapest creates something more — a

design, an intent Here, at the end of Thomas's rich, lyric lamen-

tation, the three anapests slow down the final line of the poem;
they formalize it; they bow to artistry rather than to the pattern-

less running, playing, rising, and falling that are part of the
natural physical actions celebrated in the body of the poem.
There are many instances in which the free-verse poem is, for

amoment, so formalized. In Henry Reed's non-metrical poem

"Naming of Parts," the line concluding the first stanza is

And today we have naming of parts

and the almost identical line

For today we have naming of parts

is the last line of the last stanza — a metrical echo — a pressure

of meter toward formalization and conclusion.
The two following lines, by Millay,

The Use of Meter in Non-Metric Verse 63

 .

Once the ivory box is broken,

Beats the golden bird no more . .

(from "Memorial to D.C.")

are tetrameter; the first line is pure trochaic, the second is tro-

chaic also, with a catalectic final foot. But the lines come at the

conclusion of a non-metrical poem.

And so on.

64 THERULES
 11

The Ohs and the Ahs

Oh and Ah (or O and Ah), those invitational exhalers of emotion

— those signifiers of ascending emotion and blasted restraint —
appear in poems of all ages and kinds. This, however, is true: in

free verse the poet says oh or says ah whenever he or she chooses

to do so, while in metrical lines there is, perhaps, a temptation to
say oh or ah — or not to say it — because it suits an ongoing
pattern. Occasionally the use of such syllables is attached to the
pattern by anacrusis, as in the song "O mistress mine . .
."

(p. 26). More usually, the exclamation is simply one of the toes of
the foot, needed for fit whether or not it is an asset to the tone.

The use of oh or ah is most believable when it could have

been avoided by the choice of another word, but was chosen
itself instead, as in:

Why thou were there, O rival of the rose!

(Emerson, "The Rhodora")

Here the presence of the expletive is utterly pleasing; clearly

Emerson could have used any of a hundred one-syllable adjec-

tives, but did not.

The Ohs and the Ahs 65

 . .

There are no rules about such determinations, only the cau-

tions of good sense and good taste. When the use of the exhor-
tation might be judged premature or unsuitable, when it seems
to sit at an unripe moment in order to press forth the reader's

emotion, a garish sentimentality instantly flows into the poem.

But when it is earned, when it is pinned to the line with a calm
and grave certainty, then it is choice, and fine:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul

(Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus")

or

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth . .

O for a beaker full of the warm South. . .

(Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale")

Use oh, and use ah, and use them with care. Use them when
the feeling of the moment is deep, or exalted; when the poem has
made an arrival, or has come to a pitch of longing — when what
you want to express needs it, and never when it merely suits the

marching orders of the meter.

66 THE RULES
 .

12

Image-Making

There is language which is literal, discursive, rhetorical.

And there is language which is figurative.

Figurative language uses figures — that is, images, "pictures"

of things — to provide clarification and intensity of thought.

For grace, for illumination, for comparison, to create a language

that is vibrant not only with ideas but also with the things of the
world that we know through our sense experiences.

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers . . .

(Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us")

Poetry, imaginatively, takes place within the world. It does

not take place on a sheet of paper.

Some figurative language attempts no more (but this is im-

portant!) than adding to the objects in the poem the elements of
freshness and exactitude. They help us to see:

Image-Making 67
 . . .

And the daughter of Nokomis

Grew up like the prairie lilies . .

(Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha)

or

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance . . .

(Frost, "Mending Wall")

Metaphor and simile both work through comparison. With

simile (the Longfellow lines), one thing is "like" another (or, in

the active construction, one thing takes action "as" another thing
takes action). With metaphor (the Frost example), the boulders

are directly described as loaves and balls, without any expressed

comparative word.
Both metaphor and simile may be sweetly simple, or fairly

complex, or deeply and elaborately complex.

Here is the opening line from Byron's "The Destruction of
Sennacherib":

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold . .

and here not only does a visual concurrence happen, but all

the other attributes of the wolf devolve upon the warrior: the
thoughtlessness, mercilessness, strength and power, the hunter's
gladness perhaps — whatever "wolf" means to a reader, begin-

ning with the visual but not confined to it, works in this figure to

intensify our sense of the scene.

Milton closes the second book of Paradise Lost with the fol-

lowing rich passage, describing Satan's flight from Heaven after

68 THE RULES
 the great battle and conference, and then his first glimpse of the

earth: "with ease," he writes, Satan

Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light

And like a weather-beaten Vessel holds

Gladly the Port, though Shrouds and Tackle torn;

Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air,

Weighs his spread wings, at leasure to behold

Farr off th' Empyreal Heav'n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With Opal Towrs and Battlements adorn'd
Of living Saphire, once his native Seat;
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies.

What becomes apparent in this passage is that the force of

figurative language can be associative and cumulative, as well as
astonishing with each individual figure — that we carry an in-
tended swelling residue with us down the page. Striking enough
to visualize Satan as a weather-beaten vessel — and perhaps
there is a second effect emanating from that word — was Satan
not originally the Lord's "vessel"? And how the word "shrouds"
flows in two directions, to the image of the sails and to the image
of death. The vast space outside Heaven, and the undiscernible
v
shape of Heaven itself, are immensities that accompany us to
the final lines, which compose another figure: the earth as Satan
first sees it. In all that immensity, it is so tenderly small. Like
an ornament, or perhaps a watch (full of time), it hangs in its

golden chain, precious (as gold is precious), and "pendant" (de-

Image-Making 69
pendent? not free and spinning but attached to the hand of the
Lord?).
And how chilling, then, that "mischievous revenge" in the
mind of Satan as he descends on his "weather-beaten" wings.
And, finally, how perfect that Milton gives no figure to help us

see the earth itself. This, too, is the work of the poet — to lead
the reader forward through the scintillations of figurative lan-
guage, and then, when it is wise to halt — to halt. Milton could
have given us a last glorious figure, no doubt. Instead, each
reader is faced at that moment with seeing, in a privacy, a Milton-
induced intimacy, our sweetest just-created world.

It is possible of course to write a poem without figurative

language. And yet . . . What is poetry but, through whatever par-
ticular instance seems believably to be occurring, a meditation
upon something more more profound?
general and
Frost's poem Woods on a Snowy Evening" has
"Stopping by
no metaphor or simile, no figure; it is no more than precise, and
very lovely, description. And yet The poem is surely about
. . .

more than a simple pause before a winter forest. The whole

poem, in fact, is a figure. The traveler is talking both about a
particular journey and about all the miles still to be traveled,
which are life itself; the traveler's hesitation before the allurement
of the deep dark, with its suggestion of rest, is surely the longing
of a wearied and uncertain spirit; the "promises" are the respon-
sibilities we either meet or fail. Perhaps Frost made no use of a
single figure so that the transcendence of the sixteen lines might
more easily be accomplished — that we might savor the entire
figure more fully. In any case, there is no mistaking the poem's
transcendence from a particular musing and rather melancholy
instance to the more profound level of a life decision.

70 THE RULES
 Blake's poem which begins

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?
("And Did Those Feet")

works in somewhat the same way, not through the delightful

presence of figurative language as we usually think of it — simi-

les and metaphors — but through the effect of a sudden, unex-
plained correspondence. If we miss this, we miss the poem. But
we are not likely to miss it. The first two stanzas give us history,
and a question — did ever God walk through England, which
was once green and pleasant, but which has become dark and
satanic? Then, in the wild third stanza,

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

we feel the spirit of religion as a roused warrior, arming not with

the iron of hate but with "arrows of desire" and a bow of gold. It

is a moment Blake wisely gave not to discourse but to passion

and outburst — responsibilities so wonderfully fulfilled by figu-

rative language.

Another figurative device is personification, in which some-

thing inanimate — in order to create an intimacy or a sense,
however impossible logically, of an operating will — is made to

seem animate. Again, here is the familiar Wordsworth sonnet:

Image-Making
 . . .

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon . .

or, from Shakespeare's Sonnet i8,

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd . .

or, from Wilfred Owen's "Arms and the Boy,"

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

A conceit is the word used for an extended metaphor — an

idea or correspondence that continues, sometimes through an
entire poem, rather than occurring swiftly, in a singular instance.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 87, which begins

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing . .

in which the poet speaks about love and the loss of love in exact
legalistic terms, is a conceit. Because it is unusual, even fanciful,
it is called a metaphysical conceit. Conceits that make use of
more natural and less surprising comparisons are called Petrar-
chan. Shelley's use of a wild bird as an emblem of imaginative
energy, throughout his long poem "To a Skylark," is an example
of a Petrarchan conceit.

72 THE RULES
 The Physical World
Poetry is rich with objects of the natural world used as images,
comparisons, or emblematic figures. The force of the physical
world upon us — even in our "civilized" state — is beyond
measure, and it was even more so in Shakespeare's time, or the

age of Keats, or even Frost. Thinking is an exercise that proceeds

from experiencing, and the physical world is our arena of experi-
ence. We see, hear, smell, taste, touch — and begin the medita-
tion. What is abstract, general, and philosophical woven with
is

the living fibers of grass, red roses, nightingales, snowy evenings,

and dawns.
Our experience with the physical world is assumed — a fact
which may, alas, soon be no longer true for some of us. Keats's

bright star, or any star, is hardly visible now from many cities,

and daybreak is an hour on the watch face rather than the illu-

mination of rosy fingers over the village.

And yet assimilating the experiences and the references of

the poetry of the past requires that our relationship with the
physical world be fresh, forceful, and firsthand. When Donne
wrote a poem called "Daybreak," in which he says that the light

shining from his lady's eyes is for him the dawn, he is not
speaking generally or just prettily — he is making a comparison
between two experienced sources of light.
Unless the reader is also experienced with one of these
sources of light — the arrival of dawn —
the figure (the light of
her eyes) for that reader is no more than rhetorical, and no
experienceable realization can be received from the figure in the
poem. Without knowledge of the natural world, it is poor work
trying to read the old poems and "feel" them. No one speaks
about this, but it is a real peril. As we remake our world, as we
take down the physical surroundings of our past, the art of that

Image-Making 73
 .

past is becoming a "storybook" place and not the real "interface"

(to take back an old word) between the lightnings, the blood
flows, of passion, language, and thought.

The final device of figurative language to be considered here

is allusion, which is a reference made in a poem to something
more generally known, or exemplary, or of a certain connota-

tion; it is used to swell the importance or gravity of some point

in the poem. Keats's reference to "Eremite" in the following lines

is an example:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task. . .

("Bright star, would I were stedfast . .

.")

In order for the allusion to work, the reader naturally must

recognize the reference. Here, as in too many instances, this rec-
ognition is unlikely — how many of us know offhand that the
Eremite is a religious solitary, a recluse of the third century, a
hermit, often a desert dweller? Such lack of recognition is a
problem that becomes ever more serious as the fields of classical
mythology, history, and religion are less and less generally stud-
ied; for these are all fields mined heavily for allusions in the age
of metrical poetry.
There is no solution but the pursuit of the particular knowl-
edge that will disclose the meaning of the allusion. Modern poets
will never stop using such allusions altogether, for in their tradi-
tion and age allusions are solid and powerful, but of course poets

74 THE RULES
are just as apt to use names and other references that are easily
familiar to modern readers.

The final poem in the anthology at the end of this book,

Emerson's "Uriel," is difficult in its meter, statement, and use of
allusions. It is also, or anyway, an unmistakably glorious poem,
and it is placed last in the selection not only because it is difficult

but because it is so suitable to a place of honor. The small work

of conning for an understanding of the allusions will be long
finished before the other elements — meter and meaning — re-

lease themselves to you in their entirety. It is a mountain of a

poem, not to be climbed in a single day. But, begin! You now
know the regular and abiding rules of a metrical poem. You now
are able to dance with it.

Image-Making 75
 Part Two
The Dancers One by One
 13

Style

But, everywhere you turn, there is the flute of exception that

surmounts the rules.

I do not mean that the rules are greatly disobeyed or ne-

glected, but that they are leaned upon in such a way that the
poem takes on particular and distinct habits of language, of tone
and phrasing, and sometimes of scansion displacement, which
themselves become almost reliable and characteristic.
That is: the poem has style.

Dancing with Mr. Emerson is not much like dancing with

Mr. Blake; certainly it is not like dancing with Mr. Pope or Ms.
Dickinson. Each poet, following the abiding rules more than less,

writes differently from all other poets.

The rules, that is, are somewhat bendable. The poem, that is,

has a second source of energy, which is the individual's direc-

tion: the individual's sensibility, speech patterns, conscious in-
tent, love of plainness or opulence, and so on.
All significant poets have a distinctive style.

Even Poe, whose poems are so perfect in their scanability, has

a style. Or, to put it another way, his meticulous fulfillment of the
metrical pattern is his style. Poe's poems, flowing without hesita-

Style 79
tion, answering with utmost neatness each expectation of heavy
or light stress, as in "Annabel Lee," excite with a sense of ar-

tificiality, polish, and perfection. One feels some small god —

no human — is speaking the poems. Which is exactly what Poe
wanted — to create that sense of "elevating excitement," as he

termed it, which is the result of contemplating Beauty, which

exists in perfect Form.
But most poets do not dream of this sort of rigid perfec-
tion. Instead, they develop a style with more pliant horizons.
They seek, along with the steady rhythm of the metrical pat-
tern, opportunities to create an emphatic counterpoint — that
is, to speak within the rhythm with more believable secondary
patterns of haste and hesitation — of inflection — than perfect,

flowing scanability would allow.

Usually such need leads to simple variation in the pattern,
which is why variation is housed with the rules — it is entirely
necessary.

Less often, such need leads to irregularity — lame feet, hy-

persyllabic feet, a little awkwardness or actual stumbling in the
line, or some faintly felt but stone-hard hitch in the stream of
the language — some nameless but distinct idiosyncrasy. That
is: style.

Blake does not always scan cleanly. Coleridge, in "The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner," occasionally changes the stanza pattern,
adding a line here, using a different rhyme scheme there. It is a
great poem all the same. Irregularities are not necessarily errors.
They are, simply, exceptions, which may be, in the right hands,
exceptional!
But the breakage, or out-breakage, from the pattern is only
part of what is meant by style. There are also that tone of voice
and habits of speech that are distinctive. Is there any mistaking

80 THE DANCERS ONE BY ONE

 .

Pope's wit, those pithy lines that twirl twice in the air, then close
neatly upon their perfect rhyme?

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
("An Essay on Criticism")

Is there any mistaking Shelley's voice, a little breathless and

sometimes a little pompous too, and likely addressing all four

quarters of Heaven, but always sonorous with his passion for

those two pantheons, the physical world and the human spirit?

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. . .

("To a Skylark")

Style 81
 Is there any mistaking Frost's characteristic tone, the sudden
rhetorical certainties flashing out above the green fields of his

vernacular easiness?

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

'As all must be,' I said within my heart,

'Whether they work together or apart.'

("The Tuft of Flowers")

Which is what style is.

In reading the poets, therefore — and I say this meaningfully

rather than "poems" — it is helpful to look for the poet's style, to
study it, and to accept it. You may like it or not like it, according
to your taste. But it is a part of the poem, and indivisible from it.

The metrical poem needs steadiness; also it needs the occa-

sional surprise; also it needs the individual voice. Moreover, the
greatest literature does not strive to be literature. All elements of

the poem — meter, sound, sense, and style — are there only to
make what is written more reasonable, passionate, and effective.

Orpheus, who did not even seem to think, only to sing, is the
ultimate poet.

Your Own Style

will take time. It will reveal itself. You cannot force it.

You can, however, suppress it when it begins to appear, and

82 THEDANCERSONEBYONE
this you should guard against. In an effort to be rule-abiding,
you may smooth out your own work too fiercely. Just those
distinctions that often accrue finally to a style are, at first, often
rough and hard to handle. But cherish them. Do you seek small
perfections, which are not so hard tocome by once you know the
rules? Rather be patient, and make room always for those oddi-
ties that are your own manner, your own voice.
Your own voice.

Style 83
 Part Three

Scansion, and the

Actual Work
 14

Scansion: Reading the

Metrical Poem

The poem isever refreshed on new lips. No poem, there-

fore, is old. It may have historical niceties, but it is, emphatically,
about things that are timeless. All it needs is a hand opening the
book and a mind that knows how to begin the flowing and
polished motions of reading, as of dance.
Dancing is the art of moving in accord with a pattern. Good
dancing is the art of creating embellishment upon this pattern.

Which is not a bad analogy with reading metrical verse. One

sorts out the pattern, one relies on it, and relaxes from effort to

pleasure, one begins to come upon and follow opportunities for

counterpoint, flourishes, hesitations, as well as certainties, and
repetitions. It is an eloquence that involves total imaginative

involvement, both physical and mental.

If words were only words, fit only for mental reception,
speech-givers would be careful not to move, since, if this fool-

ish premise was true, movement could only create ruptures or

corrosions of our attention. Of course speech-givers do move,
and their motions are suggestive, invitational, emphatic, wistful,

forceful, smooth or jerky, repetitive, and (though utterly mute)

Reading the Metrical Poem 87

eloquent. And the force of their words is strengthened by the
movements of their bodies.
Speech-givers also use variety of tone, of volume and, above
all, of inflection. The voice drops, it lifts, hurries, lags, it hesitates,

it repeats. Again, mere meaning, without the participation of our

creature bodies, is inadequate.
The metrical pattern of the poem, which itself creates tone,

inflection, emphasis, and velocity, is the vehicle of not only sug-

gestive but also specific felt responses. The little letters on the
page only seem to be silent. In their arrangement, and in your
ability to read them, they are far more — orators, singers, even,

as Shelley said, the "unacknowledged" — and uncommonly mu-

sical and wonderful — "legislators of the world."

Reading the metrical poem, you must not fail the pattern. If
you fail the pattern, you cannot hear the poem, which is half
statement and half the music upon which it is impressed — the
one so twined within the other that separation, with vigorous life

intact, is impossible. For within that pattern are the dancing

motions — pitch, and velocity, and emphasis — that raise the
body along with the spirit-lifting words, or weigh down the
physical body, its muscles and its breath, along phrases of dolor,
or wrath.
Poems will have lapses, if you want to call them that. They
might as well be called idiosyncrasies, or signatures of style. For
the language of the poem is a living material; it is not rigid. It

is something far more complex than a list of instructions, say,

which is more easily assembled than a poem and might actually

hope to be perfect, in the way of simple things.

If you are reading with a willingness, with an undaunted

interest, then the prevailing pattern of sound, once discovered,

88 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

will not leave you; it will carry you safely across any lame feet,

hypersyllabic feet, caesuras, instants where you might wonder if

the iamb or the spondee is called for; it will carry you across
the little rushes forward from enjambment, little pauses at end
punctuation; the fullness of vowels, the closures of mutes, and
always the tap and patter of the river running on, with voice
speaking just above it — a voice that so often seems to be speak-
ing the choice and daring words of your own thoughts, though
spoken originally, as poems are, by someone else.

To begin, it is helpful to read through a few lines of a poem,

noticing where the heavy accents belong, in a natural way.
Remember: each foot is composed of a single emphasis (heavy
accent) plus details.
Remember also: after you have identified the prevailing me-
ter, you will find some variations. But after the flounce or the

leap, the poem will surely return, and quickly, to its pattern.
Read on, read on, as though the meter were a natural event.
Let the idea of the poem press upon you with its shapeliness.
Honor the regular and abiding principles of meter, as you
now know them. But be ready, also, for the exceptions, and for
the exceptional.
Do no violence to correct pronunciation or common-sense
inflection. Remember that you are reading with care for the sake
of elevating the meaning, not for the sake of honoring the meter.
As you read, you work on the meaning while the pattern
works on you. When you read the poem thoughtfully, you are a
scholar. When you read the poem thoughtfully and feelingly, you
are a scholar and a participant.

Reading the Metrical Poem 89

 15

Scansion: Writing the

Metrical Poem

Dancing happens not only with the body but with the
mind. What you write down on the page, your succession of
words, is the music of the dance.
When the poem begins to lurch and sway, its formality is
shaken. When awkwardnesses trip the dancer, pleasure and at-
tention, on the instant, will cease. Under the eye of the struggling
reader, your poem has failed.

I am not, of course, talking about matters of style, or habits

of expression, or anything else cordial to effectiveness, but, sim-
ply, of a pattern that doesn't maintain itself strongly enough —
reliably enough — to be a real pattern.
Writing metrical poetry is difficult work, no one ever said
otherwise. It does, however, get easier with effort and experience.
In the beginning, when you reach a difficult place you will think
primarily of pressing forward, grappling for a solution in that
forthright but narrow way. After a while you will begin to look
for solutions in other ways. You will become more willing to
backstep, to rearrange, to rewrite whole patches of the poem in
order to move on rhythmically and with eloquence. You will

90 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

begin to do this — accept rewriting — as the writing itself be-

comes — not easy, but easier.

Also, the more you work with meter, the more your thought
will originally articulate itself — arrange itself — metrically. I

had a student once who found it quite possible, while he was

writing in pentameter, to speak, also, and altogether, in pentame-
ter. At first it was disarming, then rather too odd for our infor-
mal society. His parents nearly went mad.
Still, the point was made. Our nimble minds learn to do,

even easily, what at first is extremely difficult.

Begin simply. Begin with iambic meter, pentameter or te-

trameter, couplets or quatrains. If you use quatrains, use a single

rhyming design (a,b,c,b). The double rhyme is twice difficult. It

is better to concentrate on feeling out and learning to be loyal to

the prevailing pattern, than on the search for rhymes.

Keep line lengths the same, and write only phrases that fit the
length of line — hold off using enjambment. There will come a

moment when, not consciously but "naturally," you introduce

enjambment, for rhyme, or velocity, or surprise. When this hap-
pens, you are ready to use it.

Do not overuse variant patterns. This is a major error of

beginning writers. The thought is: since the variant patterns ex-

ist and you have the words to fit them, why not use them. Truly
they must be few if the pattern is to give pleasure. "Stopping

by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a magical and flowing poem,

is built of sixteen tetrameter lines — sixty-four feet therefore —
and each foot is an iambic foot. There are no variant feet in the

poem, not one. And certainly much of the effect of this poem
rises from its physical construction — the careful and deter-

Writing the Metrical Poem 91

mined and even melancholy steadiness of the iambs against the
cold and dark and unanswerable world. Think on it.
Expect to use one hypersyllabic foot in ten years, perhaps.
Anacrusis, rarely. Catalexis: often. The double ionic: when the
next comet flies over. Caesura: once you start using enjambment,
caesura will often become useful — the phrase that does not

pause at line's end often wants to come to momentary rest at the

heart of the next line.

Do not fill out the lines with adjectives. Horror of horrors!
Metrical verse requires adjectives as exact and unexpected as
those for any other poem.
As the pattern is discoverable to the reader by faith and
intelligence, so it is put down on the page by the writer through
faith and intelligence. And, perseverence.

Write so that the flow of the pattern brings out the swing and
rap of importance.
Remember the all-important difference between scansion
(three levels of intonation possible: heavy, light, and equal) and
reading (uncountable levels of tone and emphasis and inflec-
tion). Write your poems as a writer must: exacdy. Read them as a
reader should: flowingly, and intelligently.
Consider each poem a concert, played for multitudes. How
many wrong notes will you allow?
Finally, do not humble your thoughts, their length or their

complexity. Try to seem simple. But do not be simple.

92 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

 16

Yourself Dancing:
The Actual Work

Since this is a handbook for writers, I would be remiss if

I failed to consider the real work — the actual writing of the

poem. Still, I continue, in this chapter, my welcome to readers

of poetry. The process of writing is neither dull nor entirely

inexplicable, and readers as well as writers should find what is

said here interesting enough. Somewhere Emerson criticizes

Hawthorne, saying that he "invites his readers too much into

his study, opens the process before them. As if the confectioner
should say to his customers, 'Now, let us make the cake.'" The
caution is hardly applicable here. Certainly a part of the power
of the poem is the mystery of its existence altogether, which
includes our sense of wonder concerning its strange, almost
imperial or numinous quality. A handbook, however, is not so
much about the poem in its context of mystery as it is about
the sturdy ship in which it sails — we are safe, in these pages,
from an overabundance of mysteries revealed. That subject —
poetry's deep -cut underground rivers and its clearly celestial

purposes — remains for another time. What we honor here is

the work.

Yourself Dancing 93
 Discipline

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity

for receiving discipline.

Herr Klesmer in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

When you are starting to write poems, make a schedule of the

times you will work, and adhere to it with careful and steadfast
exactitude.
In this multifaceted, interruptive, too busy world, the con-
scious mind often closes down to the merely expedient. This is

not true, however, of your invisible and uncharted creative vital-

ity, which is reliably and sleeplessly a chamber of energy, and

which, even when you are not aware of it, is full of restiveness
and invention.
Whenever you work, you (the conscious part of your mind)
are summoning it much greater, richer subconscious part of
(the

your mind) to sit down at the desk, that you and it may write the

poem together. But your subconscious energy works in accord-

ance with waves and tides very different from conscious intent. It

needs, in fact, to know when it will be summoned to the actual

labor; moreover, needs to know that you will summon it, and
it

reliably.

Conscious energy says, this is what I will do, and now is when
I will do it. Subconscious energy works another way. Let us say
you are flying to Bermuda in a week; though you don't con-
sciously think about it all the time, it is always there at the back
of your mind, stirring and sparkling. So, too, with subconscious
creative energy; it is always there stirring and sparkling — but

94 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

in this case it is stirring and sparkling toward an active objective:

to float upward ideas, words, even phrases. And so this energy

arrives, when it is time to write, with much work already done.

Though you were busy with tasks —

getting through traffic

lights, keeping appointments — this part of you has been con-

tinually at work. If you prove yourself reliable — if you are al-

ways there at the desk as promised — it will grow strong and

more fertile; it will arrive with all kinds of offerings. But the
dread of preparing, and arriving and being forsaken, is very real.

As in a romance, the partnership will flourish with each expecta-

tion met, or it will wither with each disappointment.
Naturally, in talking about this preparation, I don't mean
that you should not scribble down those occasional fistfuls of
words that fly by, sometimes even under the traffic lights. Of
course you should catch them, if you can. And in fact, work-
ing on a schedule, being loyal to it, increases such instances of
easy receipt, as the subconscious, in its happy working state,

brims over.

Re vi sion

All poetry consists of flashes of the subconscious

mind and herculean efforts on the part of the

conscious mind to equal them. This is where
training comes in. The more expert the poet, the
better will he fill in the gaps in his inspiration.

Revising is the act of consciously improving

what has been unconsciously done.

Amy Lowell, John Keats

Yourself Dancing 95
Revision is absolutely necessary. If something is easily too good
to alter, thank the gods, but don't expect it to happen again.

Expect, rather, that you will need to improve upon the given, to
continue the imperfect formation that your initial work has pro-
duced. Which is, after all, what making the poem is all about —
to take the passion and, without cooling it, to put it into a form.
For such work all the usual assets will help: energy, honesty,
patience. But nothing is so helpful as an interest in language that
amounts almost to a mania. Indeed, it is essential. For emotion
does not elicit feeling. Style elicits feeling.

Exercise, and Fun

Dancers exercise. They dance not only in performance but in

preparation for that performance. Also, they have fun. I don't

mean slapstick, idle hilarity, but the good humor, the elasticity,

that comes from their constant awareness of and interest in

motion. They are lighthearted as well as light-footed. Singers

exercise, and not dolefully but with concentration and energy.
Musicians also. Painters also, without waiting for the immense
pressure of an idea, sketch, paint, construct, and enjoy. They play.
It was fun, such dancers and artists might say of any whiled-away
afternoon, in unembarrassed ease.
With poets, such a scene is difficult to imagine. Poets are so
serious. As if the world were waiting for them to speak — impor-
tantly. Or, perhaps, as if each poem represented a disclosure of
some personally meaningful sort, which naturally the speaker
would want to display from a stage of sobriety. Who rhymes,
who riddles, who makes up sonnets for fun?
Alas! Solemnity is the littlest god there is. Purposeless, inert
solemnity! Next to him, exercise is the lean arm of lightning. And

96 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

fun, fountain of mirths, is often the cup of ease, surprise, and
good ideas.

Poetry is not the expression of personality, but

an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot

There are two kinds of useful exercises. The first sort is

to "play" with technique. Such exercises keep the conscious

mind freshly aware of options, and skilled in their employment.
Choose a subject, any and write some iambic tetrameter
subject,

lines, rhyming six times. Make them end-stopped. Write another

set, enjambed. Try dactyls, or anapests. In other words, play
with the patterns. Examine what works, and how it works. Or
doesn't. There is no failure in such activity. The intent is to learn
— and that, of course, is taking place whenever one puts words
to paper.
There is a second benefit, probably more important than the
first. Even as the subconscious mind, treated honorably, will

work with the conscious mind, so the conscious mind needs to

nourish that rich underworld, by "giving" it every detail available

concerning form. The more familiar the subconscious is with the
patterns, the details of form, the more likely the real work, the
first approaching line of words, will arrive — will select itself —
properly. What we do consciously so deeply affects our first sub-
conscious formulations. And, truly, how much more easily the

poem reveals itself when it begins, at the first instance, in a fea-

sible pattern!

Yourself Dancing 97
 To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is

the great distinction of merit.

William Blake

Another kind of exercising is to start, not by thinking and

writing, but by looking. Some pinch of the real world is in every

poem. Sometimes whole sweeps and fields of it. Description,

especially of the natural world, which is the genesis of metaphor,
is at the heart of many a poem. Can you find words to make
some living inch of the physical world vigorous, breathy, fibrous?
Upon such bright straws the weight of your work leans. As with
any enterprise, practice will make you better.

Reading
Your best teachers are not the talkers, the demonstrators, the
encouragers, and the chiders, but the poets of the past, or in a
few cases of the present, whose work stands as example. Read.
Read! You can never read enough.
Nor is there any harm in imitating, for a while, the poets you
admire, as part of the learning process. It is, for the young poet,
an act of admiration. It will do no harm, and the possibility of its

doing good is ample. You will learn what can be learned — then
you will leave that place, wanting your own territory, though it

be mostly, at first, a wilderness.

Editing
Learn to read your own poems as if you never saw them before.
Become your own ferocious and unbribable critic. It is essential.

98 SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK

Such a skill, like all the others, demands much practice. After all,

it is your poem — how can you read it and not be biased? But
you can, and must. You, of all people, must be able to see what is

unnecessary and unhelpful in it, though it be some personal

touch that is dear to you. And you must equally be able to see
what it lacks, that seems to be there because it is in your own
head, but which simply isn't findable on the page. The poem for

you — your poem — is freighted with emotion, from the first

word. But is the first word, and the next and the next, freighted
with emotion sharp enough to make its clear signal to the pulse

and mind of someone who does not know you or anything about
you? We are, after all, in our poems, writing to strangers.

Modesty
Always remember that the thing you love is language, poetry, its

motion, its good news, the applicability of what it says to a

thousand human spirits, or a million; and what you do not care

about very much is yourself as the poet. And therefore it is the
process that is important, and the body of literature entire, and
how it changes us from mere humans into meditative beings.
Modesty will give you vigor. It keeps open the gates of prayer,
through which the mystery of the poem streams, on its search for
form. Just occasionally, take something you have written, that
you rather like, that you have felt an even immodest pleasure
over, and throw it away.

The world of imagination is the world of reality.

Gully Jimson in The Horse's Mouth, Joyce Cary

Yourself Dancing 99
 Part Four

A Universal Music
 Then and Now

Can wisdom be documented in mere words? Is ecstasy re-

portable? Is there a way to look upon sorrow quietly, to consider
it slowly and in detail, with all the time we require?

Is a poem, which after all is only a literary construct within

an imagined framework, a reasonable way to understand the
world?
The answer to all of these questions, apparently, is yes. If it

were not, poetry would have become an art starved in the mists

of the past, mysterious and evocative but not intimate, not pal-
pable, not thriving. the poems themselves — po-
And likewise
ems written long ago — would have become oddments, foot-
notes, amusing curiosities, rather than the passionate certainties
that they are.
Time is meaningless to a poem; if it is about something that
pertains to the human condition, then it is about something of
interest to the most modern man, if he is a thoughtful man.
Shelley is forever twenty-nine years old, and he is forever sum-
moning us to hear the skylark's shrill song, to feel this aerial
passage toward "unbodied joy." Poetry, said Aristotle, said Mat-
thew Arnold — said everybody who ever thought about it — is

Then and Now 103

about truth and seriousness, and it carries its ideas in a supe-

rior language in which an inviting and perhaps essential mo-

tion is embedded. And such poems, though old, are as rich today

as when George Herbert was a boy and sat in the kitchen listen-

ing to the conversation between two grown-ups, his mother and

his mother's friend John Donne. As rich today as when a man
named William Shakespeare wrote the fourteen-line version of
the aria over and over, tracing the long and heady rise and fall of
love. Nothing in the world has changed.
And as you understand by now, the style of the poems with
which this book is concerned is not so formidable as you origi-
nally thought. There is method, which you now comprehend,
both in the way the form is severe and in the way it relaxes so that

a particular voice may develop its own individuality. You under-

stand, now, how and to what effect Frost restrained his natural

voice with a shaped and exacting formality. You feel the urgent,
joyful physicality and pulse of those praise-poets Herbert and
Hopkins. You sit wracked and luminous before the miraculous
developments and ravishments of Shakespeare's sonnets. Such
are the poems of the past, which are also the poems of the pres-

ent hour.
As for the poets themselves, let me speak of them in the
following final paragraphs.

Envoi
No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high
ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to

argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise

littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.
On the contrary, poets have, in freedom and in prison, in
health and in misery, with listeners and without listeners, spent

104 A UNIVERSAL MUSIC

their lives examining and glorifying life, meditation, thoughtful-
ness, devoutness, and human love. They have done this wildly,

serenely, rhetorically, lyrically, without hope of answer or reward.

They have done this grudgingly, willingly, patiently, and in the
steams of impatience.
They have done it for all and any of the gods of life, and the
record of their so doing belongs to each one of us.
Including you.

Then and Now 105

 Part Five

An Anthology of
Metrical Poems
 An Anthology of Metrical Poems

With one exception, the poems appear in this anthology

in the order in which they are initially mentioned in the text.

Now and again, in the need for illustration, or the wish for a
particular illustration, I have quoted in the text from a poem that
is not in the anthology. Length was naturally a consideration in
making decisions about what to include.
I am aware that Browning is not here, and very little Col-
eridge, and no Dryden, or Spenser, and so little Milton it is a pity.
But the anthology is intended to be no more than an introduc-
tion to such poems. And the works of all poets, quoted here or
not, can be found in any library or bookstore.
Robert Frost's "Bereft," Shakespeare's "O mistress mine," and
Byron's "So, We'll Go No More A-Roving" are quoted in their
entirety in the text, and are not repeated in the anthology.

Poets Represented Here

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
John Donne (1572-1631)

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 109

 Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
George Herbert (1593-1633)
John Milton (1608-1674)
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
William Blake (1757-1827)
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Richard Wilbur (1921-)
Anonymous (seventeenth century)

110 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

A. E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Ishung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 111

 The Tuft of Flowers

Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

'As all must be,' I said within my heart,

'Whether they work together or apart.'

But asI said swift there passed me by

it,

On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

112 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

"Whether they work together or apart.'

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 113

 A Thing of Beauty (from Endymion)

John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep, and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring into us from the heaven's brink.

Nor do we merely feel these essences

For one short hour; no, even as the trees

114 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us til they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,

That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,

They always must be with us, or we die.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 115

 Requiem
Robert Louis Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

116 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Mending Wall
Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 117

 He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'
Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old- stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Il8 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 From The Song of Hiawatha
in. Hiawatha's Childhood
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Downward through the evening twilight,

In the days that are forgotten,
In the unremembered ages,

From the full moon fell Nokomis,

Fell the beautiful Nokomis,
She was a wife, but not a mother.
She was sporting with her women
Swinging in a swing of grapevines,
When her rival, the rejected,
Full of jealousy and hatred,
Cut the leafy swing asunder,
Cut in twain the twisted grapevines,

And Nokomis fell affrighted

Downward through the evening twilight,
On the Muskoday, the meadow,
On the prairie full of blossoms.
"See! a star falls!" said the people;
"From the sky a star is falling!"

There among the ferns and mosses,

There among the prairie lilies,

On the Muskoday, the meadow,

In the moonlight and the starlight,
Fair Nokomis bore a daughter.
And she called her name Wenonah,

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 119

 .

As the first-born of her daughters.

And the daughter of Nokomis

Grew up like the prairie lilies,
Grew a tall and slender maiden,
With the beauty of the moonlight,
With the beauty of the starlight.

And Nokomis warned her often,

Saying oft, and oft repeating,

"O, beware of Mudjekeewis,

Of the West- Wind, Mudjekeewis;
Listen not to what he tells you;
Lie not down upon the meadow,
Stoop not down among the lilies,
Lest the West-Wind come and harm you!'
But she heeded not the warning,
Heeded not those words of wisdom,
And the West-Wind came at evening,
Walking lightly o'er the prairie,

Whispering to the leaves and blossoms,

Bending low the flowers and grasses,

Found the beautiful Wenonah,

Lying there among the lilies,

Wooed her with his words of sweetness,

Wooed her with his soft caresses,

Till she bore a son in sorrow,

Bore a son of love and sorrow.
Thus was born my Hiawatha. . .

120 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 From Macbeth
Act 4, Scene i

William Shakespeare

All. Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

2nd Witch. Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind- worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of pow'rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

All. Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

3rd Witch. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' th' dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse,

Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,

Finger of birth-strangled babe

Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 121

 .

Add thereto a tiger's chauldron.

For th' ingredients of our cauldron.

All. Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble. . .

122 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 ."
*1 Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud . .

William Wordsworth

I wander'd lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not be but gay,

In such a jocund company:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For when on my couch I lie

oft,

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 123

 The World Is Too Much With Us

William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. — Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

124 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Destruction of Sennacherib

(from Hebrew Melodies)

George Gordon, Lord Byron

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

ii

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither 'd and strown.

in

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd;

And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

IV

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 125

 And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

VI

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

126 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 127

 Sonnet 29

William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,

I all my outcast state,

alone beweep
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoyed contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee; and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

128 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

John Keats

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's — he takes the lead
In summer luxury, — he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 129

 To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide

of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

130 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS LU

 Delight in Disorder

Robert Herrick

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art

Is too precise in every part.

132 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Tyger

William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water 'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 133

 Moriturus

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I could have
Two things in one:
The peace of the grave,

And the light of the sun;

My hands across
My thin breast-bone,
But aware of the moss
Invading the stone,

Aware of the flight

Of the golden flicker

With his wing to the light;

To hear him nicker

And drum with his bill

On the rotted willow;
Snug and still

On a grey pillow
Deep in the clay

Where digging is hard,

Out of the way, —
The blue shard

Of a broken platter —
If I might be
Insensate matter
With sensate me

134 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Sitting within,

Harking and prying,

I might begin
To dicker with dying.

For the body at best

Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;

It cries when it wakes

"Alas, 'tis light!"

At set of sun
"Alas, 'tis night,
And nothing done!"

Death, however,
Is a spongy wall,
Is a sticky river,
Is nothing at all.

Summon the weeper,

Wail and sing;
Call him Reaper,
Angel, King;

Call him Evil

Drunk to the lees,

Monster, Devil, —
He is less than these.

Call him Thief,

The Maggot in the Cheese,
The Canker in the Leaf, —
He is less than these.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 135

 .

Dusk without sound,

Where the spirit by pain
Uncoiled, is wound
To spring again;

The mind enmeshed

Laid straight in repose,
And the body refreshed
By feeding the rose, —
These are but visions;
These would be
The grave's derisions,

Could the grave see.

Here is the wish

Of one that died
Like a beached fish
On the ebb of the tide:

That he might wait

Till the tide came back,
To see if a crate,

Or a bottle, or a black

Boot, or an oar,
Or an orange peel
Be washed ashore. . .

About his heel

The sand slips;

The last he hears

From the world's lips
Is the sand in his ears.

136 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 What thing is little? —
The aphis hid
In a house of spittle?
The hinge of the lid

Of the spider's eye

At the spider's birth?

"Greater am I
By the earth's girth

Than Mighty Death!"

All creatures cry

That can summon breath;

And speak no lie.

For He is nothing;
He is less
Than Echo answering
"Nothingness!" —
Less than the heat
Of the furthest star
To the ripening wheat;
Less by far,

When all the lipping

Is said and sung,
Than the sweat dripping
From a dog's tongue.

This being so,

And I being such,

I would liever go
On a cripple's crutch,

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 137

 Lopped and felled;

Liever be dependent
On a chair propelled

By a surly attendant

With a foul breath,

And be spooned my food,

Than go with Death
Where nothing good,

Not even the thrust

Of the summer gnat,
Consoles the dust
For being that.

Needy, lonely,
Stitched by pain,
Left with only

The drip of the rain

Out of all I had;

The books of the wise,
Badly read
By other eyes,

Lewdly bawled
At my closing ear;
Hated, called
A lingerer here; —
Withstanding Death
Till Life be gone,
I shall treasure my breath,
I shall linger on.

138 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 I shall bolt my door
With a bolt and a cable;

I shall block my door

With a bureau and a table;

With all my might

My door shall be barred.

I shall put up a fight,

I shall take it hard.

With his my mouth

hand on
He shall drag me forth,
Shrieking to the south
And clutching at the north.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 139

 From A Midsummer Night's Dream
Act 2, Scene 2

William Shakespeare

Oberon.
Iknow a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopi'd with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in;
And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies.

140 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 From Paradise Lost, Book II

John Milton

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heav'n
Shoots farr into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins
Her fardest verge, and Chaos to retire

As from her outmost works a brok'n foe

With tumult less and with less hostile din,

That Satan with less toil, and now with ease

Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light
And like a weather-beaten Vessel holds

Gladly the Port, though Shrouds and Tackle torn;

Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air,

Weighs his spread wings, at leasure to behold

Farr off th' Empyreal Heav n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With Opal Towrs and Battlements adorn'd
Of living Saphire, once his native Seat;
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 141

 Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

142 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Sonnet 87

William Shakespeare

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou know'st thy estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches my deserving?
where is

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;

So thy great upon misprision growing,

gift,

Comes home again, on better judgment making.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter —
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 143

 Sonnet
Written on a Blank Page Shakespeare's in
Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint."
John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

144 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Astrophel and Stella

Sonnet 39

Sir Philip Sidney

Come, Sleep; O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low;
With me from out the prease
shield of proof shield

Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw:

make in me those civil wars to cease;
1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so.

Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,

A chamber deaf to noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine in right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 145

 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

146 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Wife of Usher's Well

Anonymous

There lived a wife at Usher's well,

And a wealthy wife was she;

She had three stout and stalwart sons,

And sent them o'er the sea.

They hadna been a week from her,

A week but barely ane,

When word came to the carline wife
That her three sons were gane.

They hadna been a week from her,

A week but barely three,

When word came to the carline wife
That her sons she'd never see.

"I wish the wind may never cease,

Nor fashes in the flood,
Till my three sons come hame to me,
In earthly flesh and blood!"

It fell about the Martinmas,

When nights are lang and mirk,
The carline wife's three sons came hame,
And their hats were o' the birk.

It neither grew in syke nor ditch,

Nor yet in ony sheugh;
But at the gates o' Paradise
That birk grew fair eneugh.

carline = country fashes = troubles syke = marsh sheugh = trench

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 147

 "Blow up the fire, my maidens!
Bring water from the well!
For a' my house shall feast this night,
Since my three sons are well."
And she has made to them a bed,
She's made it large and wide;
And she's ta'en her mantle her about,
Sat down at the bedside.

Up then crew the red, red cock,

And up and crew the gray;
The eldest to the youngest said,
" 'Tis time we were away."

The cock he hadna craw'd but once,

And clapp'd his wings at a',

When the youngest to the eldest said,

"Brother, we must awa'."

"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,

The channerin' worm doth chide;
Gin we be miss'd out o' our place,
A sair pain we maun bide."
"Lie still, lie still but a little wee while,
Lie still but if we may;
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,
She'll go mad ere it be day."

"Fare ye weel, my mother dear!

Fareweel to barn and byre!
And fare ye weel, the bonny lass
That kindles my mother's fire!"
channerin' = fretting

148 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 / died for Beauty — but was scarce

Emily Dickinson

I died for Beauty — but was scarce

Adjusted in the Tomb

When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room —
He questioned softly "Why I failed"?

"For Beauty", I replied —

"And I — for Truth — Themself are One
We Bretheren, are", Hesaid—
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Moss had reached our
Until the lips —
And covered up —
our names —

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 149

 From "An Essay on Criticism

Alexander Pope

Expression is the dress of thought, and still

Appears more decent as more suitable;

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed,

Is like a clown in regal purple dressed;
For different styles with different subjects sort,

As several garbs with country, town, and court.

Some by old words to fame have made pretence;
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense!
Such laboured nothings, in so strange a style,
Amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile.
Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play,

These sparks with awkward vanity display

What the fine gentleman wore yesterday;
And but so mimic ancient wits at best,
As apes our grandsires in their doublets drest.
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old;
But not the first by whom the new are tried,

Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

But most by numbers judge a poet's song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
In the bright Muse though thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire,
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,
Not mend their minds; as some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine but the music there.

150 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 These equal syllables alone require,

Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,

While expletives their feeble aid do join,

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line,

While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,

With sure returns of still expected rhymes.
Where'er you find 'the cooling western breeze,'
In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees';

If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'

The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep.'

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know
What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the easy vigour of a line
Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 151

 Annabel Lee

Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee; —
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

She was a child and /was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love

I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud by night

Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

Went envying her and me: —
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)

152 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling

And killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: —
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea —
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 153

Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa
George Gordon, Lord Byron

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story;

The days of our youth are the days of our glory;

And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty

Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?

Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew be-sprinkled:
Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!
What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory?

Oh Fame! — if I e'er took delight in thy praises,

'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,
Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover
She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;

Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory.

154 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Chambered Nautilus

Oliver Wendell Holmes

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,

Sails the unshadowed main, —
The venturous bark that flings

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings

In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;

Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming of life was wont to dwell,

As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,

Before thee lies revealed, —

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no

more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap, forlorn!

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 155

 From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that

sings: —
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low- vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

156 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Arms and the Boy

Wilfred Owen

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;

And god will grow no talons at his heels,

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 157

 The Rhodora:

ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou were there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

158 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley

O Wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes:O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

ii

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 159

 Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

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

in

Thou, who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

160 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scare seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

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

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

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

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?

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS l6l

 A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June:
my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune!

As fair art my bonnie lass,

thou,
So deep in luve am I:

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
1 will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve!

And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

162 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Requiscat

Matthew Arnold

Strew on her roses, roses,

And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.

Her mirth the world required:

She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,

And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,

In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.

Her cabin'd, ample Spirit,

It flutter 'd and fail'd for breath.

To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of Death.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 163

 Eight O'clock

A. E. Housman

He stood, and heard the steeple

Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,

He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;

And then the clock collected in the tower

Its strength, and struck.

164 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 From In Memoriam
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

LIII

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroy'd,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall

At last — far off — at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 165

 From Romeo and Juliet
Act i, Scene 5

William Shakespeare

Romeo. If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Juliet.

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo. O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo. Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.

Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg'd.
[Kissing her.]

166 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Eagle

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 167

 One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

168 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Song

John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the Devil's foot;

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,

And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights

Till Age snow white hairs on thee;

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me

All strange wonders that befell thee,

And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know;

Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet.

Though she were true when you met her,

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 169

 And last till you write your letter,

Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

170 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 The Flower

George Herbert

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;

To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quick'ning, bringing down to hell

And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss,
This or that is:

Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 171

 Off' ring at heav'n, growing and groaning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring-shower,
My sins and I joining together:
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent,
as if heav'n were mine own,

Thy anger comes, and I decline:

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my only light,

It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide:

Which when we once can find and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

V2 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers are girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 173

 Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

174 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 To a Skylark

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing stilldost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of Heaven,

In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see —
we feel that it is there.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 175

 All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aereal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves.

176 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:

Thou lovest — but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 177

 We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then — as I am listening now.

178 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Parable

Richard Wilbur

I read how Quixote in his random ride

Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.

For glory lay wherever he might turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 179

 God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

180 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness, —

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

ii

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS l8l

 Ill

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

IV

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays:
But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

182 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk- rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

VI

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 183

 VIII

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?

184 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 And Did Those Feet

William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 185

 Daybreak

John Donne

Stay, O sweet, and do not rise!

The light that shines comes from thine eyes;

The day breaks not: it is my heart,

Because that you and I must part.
Stay! or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy.

186 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 Uriel

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It fell in the ancient periods

Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere,

Gave his sentiment divine

Against the being of a line.

'Line in nature is not found;

Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'

As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,

A shudder ran around the sky;

AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS 187

 The stern old war-gods shook their heads,

The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;

Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell

On the beauty of Uriel;
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;
Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway, a forgetting wind

Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.

188 AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS

 PERMISSIONS
"One Art" from The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright
© 1979> 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Poem 449 from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson.
Copyright 1890, 1891, 1896 by Roberts Brothers. Copyright 1914, 1918, 1919,
1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copy-
right 1951, © 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copy-
right 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1969 by Mary L.
Hampson. Published by Little, Brown and Company.
"Bereft" from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright © 1956 by Robert Frost, copyright 1928, © 1969 by Henry Holt and
Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
"Moriturus" by Edna St. Vincent Millay From Collected Poems, HarperCollins.
Copyright 1928, © 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by per-mission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary
executor.
"Arms and the Boy" by Wilfred Owen, from The Collected Poems of Wilfred
Owen. Copyright © 1963 by Chatto & Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.
"Coda" by Ezra Pound, from Personae. Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Re-
printed by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright
1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
"Parable" by Richard Wilbur, from Ceremony and Other Poems, copyright 1950
and renewed ©1978 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt
Brace & Company.

PERMISSIONS 189
 Index

adjectives: use of, 92 blank verse, 48-49

"Ah": use of, 65-66 breath, 3-5, 29
alexandrine, 33-34, 51 breve, ion
"All for Love" (Byron), 41 "Bright Star" (Keats), 31, 61, 74, 144
alliteration, 57-58 burden, 51
allusion, 74-75 Burns, Robert, 47, 162
anacrusis, 26-27, 65, 92 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 17, 36-
anapestic foot (anapest), 7, 13, 16-17, 37, 38, 41, 45, 68, 125-26, 154

37> 38-39. 63
"And Did Those Feet" (Blake), 71, 185 caesura, 27, 92
"Annabel Lee" (Poe), 38-39, 80, 152- catalectic foot (catalexis), 23, 24, 92

53 "Chambered Nautilus, The" (Hol-

Anonymous ("The Wife of Usher's mes), 43-44, 58, 66, 155-56
Well"), 32, 47, 147-48 Chaucer, Geoffrey, viii

"Arms and the Boy" (Owen), 45, 72, "Coda" (Pound), 8

157 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 55, 59, 80,

Arnold, Matthew, 47, 163 173-74
aspirates, 60 conceit, 72
assonance, 57, 58-59 couplet, 40-45, 52, 91; heroic, 42
Astrophel and Stella (Sidney), 31, 145

dactylic foot (dactyl), 7, 13, 16

ballad stanza, 32, 51-52 dancing: metrical verse and, 87-89
"Bereft" (Frost), 4, 7, 44 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 94
Bishop, Elizabeth, 53, 168 "Daybreak" (Donne), 73, 186
Blake, William, 23, 40, 71, 79, 80, 98, "Death of the Hired Man, The"
133, 185 (Frost), 14, 15

190 Index
"Delight in Disorder" (Herrick), 21, 33-34, 37, 53, 91; lame, 24, 80; pyr-
57, 132 rhic, 27; spondee, 17-18; trochaic,
descriptive writing, 98 7, 13, 14-15, 21, 23, 26, 64
design, 50-56 feminine rhyme (ending), 21-22, 41,

"Destruction of Sennacherib, The" 45

(Byron), 17, 68, 125-26 "Fern Hill" (Thomas), 62-63
Dickinson, Emily, 32, 45, 79, 149 figurative language, 67-75
dimeter, 12 five-foot line. See pentameter
discipline in writing, 94-95 "Flower, The" (Herbert), 55, 171-72
Donne, John, 51, 55, 73, 104, 169-70, formal design, 50-56
186 four-foot line. See tetrameter
double ionic foot, 27, 92 four-line stanzas (quatrain), 47-48, 55
four-syllable rhyme, 45-46
"Eagle, The" (Tennyson), 52, 58, 61, Frost, Robert, viii, 4-5, 7, 9, 13, 14-15,

167 18, 21, 31-32, 44, 48, 59, 61, 68, 70,

editing poetry, need for, 98-99 73, 82, 91, 104, 117-18, 146
eight-foot line. See octometer
"Eight O'Clock" (Housman), 48, 164 "God's Grandeur" (Hopkins), 51, 58,

Eliot, George, 94 180

Eliot, T. S., 97
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46, 65, 75, 79, Hamlet (Shakespeare), 19

93, 158, 187-88 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 92

energy release along the line, 36-39 heavy stress, ion., 10-11
enjambment, 43, 89, 92 heptameter, 12, 33

"Essay on Criticism, An" (Pope), 34, Herbert, George, 55, 104, 171-72
42, 81, 150-51 heroic couplet, 42
Evangeline (Longfellow), 16 Herrick, Robert, 21, 33, 57, 132
"Eve of St. Agnes, The" (Keats), 54-55 hexameter, 12, 33-34
exercise of writing skills, 96-98 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 43-44, 58,

exhortations, 65-66 66, 155-56

expletives, 65-66 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 51, 58, 104,
180
Faerie Queen, The (Spenser), 54 Housman, A. E., 7, 8, 41, 48, 111, 164
"Farewell! thou art too dear for my hypersyllabic foot, 25-26, 80, 92
possessing" (Shakespeare), 72, 143
19-28; anapestic, 7, 13, 16-
feet, 7-18, iambic foot (iamb), 7, 13, 14, 15, 19-21,

17. 37> 38-39, 63; catalectic, 23, 24, 22, 24, 33-34, 37, 53, 91

92; dactylic, 7, 13, 16; double ionic, iambic pentameter, 13, 42, 48-49, 53-

27, 92; hypersyllabic, 25-26, 80, 92; 55, 91. See also iambic foot; pen-
iambic, 7, 13, 14, 15, 19-21, 22, 24, tameter

Index 191
"I died for Beauty — but was scarce' metrical patterns. See patterns, metri-
(Dickinson), 32, 149 cal

image-making, 67-75 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shake-

imperfect rhyme, 44-45 speare), 25, 42, 140
impure meter, 22, 26 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 24, 25, 27,

inflection, 8-9; absence of, 9n 32-33, 51, 59, 63-64, 134-39

In Metnoriam (Tennyson), 48, 165 Milton, John, viii, 27, 30, 49, 51, 68-
irregularities in meter, 23-25 70, 141
"I Wander 'd Lonely as a Cloud" modesty in writing, 99
(Wordsworth), 16, 46, 59, 123 monometer, 12

"Moriturus" (Millay), 24, 25, 27, 32-

John Keats (Lowell), 95 33. 134-39
multisyllabic rhyme, 46
Keats, John, 20, 30-31, 43, 51, 54, 61, mutes, 60-61
66, 73, 74, 129, 144, 181-84
"Kubla Khan" (Coleridge), 55, 59, "Naming of Parts" (Reed), 63
173-74
octameter, 12, 33, 34
lame foot, 24, 80 octave, 50-51
light stress, ion., 10-11 "Ode to a Nightingale" (Keats), 66,
line length, 4, 6, 29-35 181-84
liquids, 60, 61 "Ode to the West Wind" (Shelley),
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 15, 46, 52-53, 159-61
16, 23, 45, 68, 119-20 off rhyme, 44-45
"Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" "Oh": use of, 65-66
(Housman), 7, 41, 111 "One Art" (Bishop), 53, 168
Lowell, Amy, 95 one-foot line. See monometer
onomatopoeia, 59
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 15, 121-22 "On the Grasshopper and the
macron, ion Cricket" (Keats), 129
Marlowe, Christopher, 28, 49 Owen, Wilfred, viii, 45, 72, 157
Marvell, Andrew, 20, 130-31 "Ozymandias" (Shelley), 28, 59,
masculine rhyme (ending), 22, 41 142
"Memorial to D.C." (Millay), 59,

64 "Parable" (Wilbur), 57, 179

"Mending Wall" (Frost), 48, 68, Paradise Lost (Milton), 27, 49, 68-70,
117-18 141

metaphor, 68-71 patterns, metrical, 4, 6-28. See also

metaphysical conceit, 72 feet; non-metric verse and, 62-64;
meter: non-metric verse and, 62-64 reading, 87-89

192 Index
pentameter, 11, 12, 13, 30-31, 35. See scansion, 10, 87-92; reading and, 87-
also iambic pentameter 89; writing and, 90-92
perfect rhyme, 40 self-enclosed line, 42
personification, 71-72 semivowels, 60
Petrarch, 50 sense: pattern and, 9
Petrarchan conceit, 72 sestet, 50-51
Petrarchan sonnet, 50 seven-foot line. See heptameter
physical world: description of, 73-74 Shakespeare, William, viii, ix, 14, 18,

playing with technique, 97 19-20, 25, 26, 30, 42, 49, 50-51, 72,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 34, 38-39. 45, 79- 73, 104, 121-22, 127, 128, 140, 143,

80, 152-53 166; Sonnet 18, 18, 72, 127; Sonnet

Pope, Alexander, 33-34, 42, 79, 81, 29, 20, 128; Sonnet 87, 72, 143

150-51 Shakespearean sonnet, 50-51

Pound, Ezra, 8 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's
Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 49 day?" (Shakespeare), 18, 72, 127
pure meter, 22, 26 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28, 46, 51, 52-
pyrrhic foot, 27 53. 55-56, 59, 72, 81, 142, 159-61, 175-

78
quatrain, 47-48, 55, 91 Sidney, Sir Philip, 31, 51, 145
silences, 60-61
"Raven, The" (Poe), 34, 45 simile, 68-71

"Red, Red Rose, A" (Burns), 47, 162 six-foot line. See alexandrine; hex-
Reed, Henry, 63 ameter
refrain (burden), 51 slant (off; imperfect) rhyme, 44-45
"Requiem" (Stevenson), 116 "Song" (Donne), 55, 169-70
"Requiescat" (Arnold), 47, 163 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow),
revision of writing, 95-96 15, 23, 45, 68, 119-20
"Rhodora, The" (Emerson), 46, 65, sonnet, 50; Petrarchan, 50; Shake-
158 spearean, 50-51
rhyme, 4-5, 6, 40-49; couplets, 40- "So, We'll Go No More A-Roving"
45; four-syllable, 45-46; multisyl- (Byron), 36-37
lable, 46; slant (off; imperfect), 44- speech-giving, 87-88

45; of sonnet, 50-51; triple, 45; true Spenser, Edmund, 30, 53-54
(perfect), 40 Spenserian stanza, 53-54
rhythm, 8 spondee foot, 17-18

Richard III (Shakespeare), 19 stanzas, 46-47; four-line, 47; vari-

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The" ations in pattern of, 80-81

(Coleridge), 80 "Stanzas Written on the Road Be-
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 51, tween Florence and Pisa" (Byron),
166 154

Index 193
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 116 true (perfect) rhyme, 40
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy "Tuft of Flowers, The" (Frost), 9, 61,
Evening" (Frost), 31-32, 59, 70, 91, 82, 112-13

146 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 26

stress: heavy, ion, 10-11; light, ion, 10- two-foot line. See dimeter
11 "Tyger, The" (Blake), 40, 133
style, 79-83
substitutions in meter, 13-14 "Upon His Departure" (Herrick), 33
syllabic stresses, 10-11 "Uriel" (Emerson), 75, 187-88

tag scanning, 22 variations in meter, j-9, 13, 36-37,

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 48, 52, 58, 6i, 80, 89, 91
165, 167 villanelle, 53

tercets, 52

terza rima, 52-53 watery sounds, 61

tetrameter, 12, 31-32, 41, 51, 64, 91 West-Running Brook (Frost), 4
"Thing of Beauty, A" from Endymion "When in disgrace with Fortune
(Keats), 43, 114-15 and men's eyes" (Shakespeare), 20,
Thomas, Dylan, 62-63 128
three-foot line. See trimeter "Wife of Usher's Well, The" (Anony-
"To a Skylark" (Shelley), 55-56, 72, mous), 32, 47, 147-48
81, 175-78 Wilbur, Richard, 57, 179

"To His Coy Mistress" (Marvell), "Witch of Coos, The" (Frost), 14, 18

130-31 Wordsworth, William, viii, 16-17, 18,

traditional poetic forms, 50-56 20, 21, 30, 46, 49, 51, 59, 67, 71-72,
trimeter, 12, 37 123, 124
triple rhyme, 45 "World Is Too Much With Us,
trochaic foot (trochee), 7, 13, 14-15, The . .
." (Wordsworth), 17, 18,

21, 23, 26, 64 67, 124

194 Index
Mary Oliver
W inner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

For both readers and writers of poetry, here is a concise and engaging

introduction to sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion — and why they matter.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest

who have learned to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case

of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound

and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in

the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert

Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us

understand what makes a metrical poem work — and enables readers, as

only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of

sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure."

With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical

poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop

Mary Oliver is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and prose.

for which she has received manv awards. She holds the Katharine Osgood

foster ("hair tor Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College in Vermont.

ISBN 0-395-85086-X

Poetry/ $13.00

0698/6-92472

9 780395"850862 Cover design by Steven

MARINER BOOKS / HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY