[Alan Sullivan]

The X.J. Kennedy anthology, "Tygers of Wrath," takes its title from a line in Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and this Blake poem appears at the beginning of the book. I think we will find some metrical oddities to discuss here. Perhaps Caleb will pass by and say "Ah ha! you lame New Formalists. This man knew better than you, all that long time ago."

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not; my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

---William Blake

[Richard Wakefield]

The third line of the second stanza, "And I sunned it with smiles," is a stumbler. My voice doesn't know what to do with it. Maybe with lots of ingenuity we could make it scan, but we'd be making music of it post hoc. I guess I'd never claim that any master is perfect, though. Great works have their flaws, and sometimes the flaws are in proportion to their greatness. The trouble is, for those of us who are less than great, that big flaws do not of themselves great poems make.
And of course it's still an open question whether this particular poem is great.
Richard

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[Alan Sullivan]

Richard, I thought the line you cite would be likely to cause problems. But the whole poem has a strongly trochaic impulse. In the first stanza I believe the initial pronouns in the first and third lines (not the second or fourth) should be read with stress. It figures, given Blake's self-esteem.

In the second stanza I scan first and third lines as acephalic tetrameter: AND i SUN-ned IT with SMILES. No flaw here. We just need to remember that participles ending in -ed were often spoken with an extra syllable in Blake's day.

Alan

[This message has been edited by Alan Sullivan (edited 10-20-2000).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, of course. Not only were -ed endings often pronounced in poetry, but no doubt anything on a Christian theme, with its inevitable biblical echoes, would be even more likely to use the extra syllable. This exercise is always interesting to me: how our sense of original context changes our expectations and demands. What's the story, by Borges, I think, called "The Author of the Quixote," in which he analyzes two identical passages allegedly written centuries apart and finds vastly different literary qualities in them? It's funny, but it's also strangely true. If someone wrote this poem now it would be condemned as doggerel, maybe rightly. But that takes nothing from our appreciation of it in its own context. As you're aware from reading my own verse, however, the acephaly doesn't bother me in the least, not in archaic verse and not in contemporary. Not in moderation, anyway.
Richard

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[Caleb Murdock]

Ah ha! You lame New Formalists. This man knew better than you, all that long time ago!

[Alan Sullivan]

Thank you, Caleb! But actually, once you catch onto Blake's intended placement of stress, as the above comments indicate, the poem is far more regular than it seems at first glance.

Alan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, Caleb -- I try not to be dogmatic about formalism, although it is often awfully easy to fall back on formal considerations to rationalize my idiosyncatic reactions to a poem. My objection to much contemporary poetry isn't the departures from form in themselves, but the sense that a poem is good in proportion to its eccentricity or raggedness. If Bach throws in a discord, I take notice -- the man has his reasons. When a contemporary composer writes nothing but discords, the expressive power is lost after a half dozen measures.
Richard

[Caleb Murdock]

I wasn't making a serious comment -- I was just echoing Alan's words for me in his first post, which I had just discovered.

I think I'll spend more time on this board, as critiquing other people's poetry is too explosive. This seems to be where the serious discussions are.

That particular poem by Blake is not a favorite of mine, lacking in subtlety as it is.

I understand what you are saying, Richard, insofar as meter is concerned. Judson Jerome -- the author I trusted more than any other on these issues -- said that a good poet will not go too many lines without re-establishing the meter of the poem by inserting a regular line. Otherwise, the poem degenerates into metrical chaos. My concern, however, is that I'm seeing poems on this board that have no irregular lines at all (i.e., lines with significant metrical variations beyond the occasional trochee or anapest). The very best poets will be able to HEAR regularity and irregularity of rhythm without counting. But once a poet gets into counting, that counting can become a damper on creative excursions.

In a thread on the other board, I scanned the first line of a sonnet by Shakespeare, a sonnet which was written primarily in iambic pentameter. That line, however, had only one iamb. I contended that the writing process of modern formalist poets does not permit for such lines, yet it is often in such lines that the greatest drama and creativity occur. Carol was the only one to reply, and what she said wasn't very useful.

I am going to insert that scansion again, and I'd really like to hear from you guys how you allow for such lines in your own poems:

LET me /NOT to / the MAR / riage of / TRUE MINDS

or alternatively:

x LET / me NOT / to the MAR / riage of / TRUE MINDS

Caleb

[Richard Wakefield]

Caleb, I should have responded to your question about scanning that line when you posted it on the other board. It seems to me that the voice can do a lot of things with accents here, any of them more or less correct depending on what sense the reader brings to the words. I'm not trying to weasel out of the difficulty when I say that there's no meaning without a voice to give breath to the written words. That's not to say that anything goes, only that a range of things might go. In this case I think Shakespeare does something that's hard to get away with. He lets the first line confuse us a bit, or lets us feel our way through it, before establishing more regular cadences later on. You mentioned Jerome's notion that the poet needs to reestablish the underlying meter often enough to keep it sounding even in those lines where it is violated; here, I think, we're hung out to dry, or left to our own devices (choose your cliche!), and brought to order later. If one were reading a single sonnet by an unknown author and it began this way, it would presume a bit on the reader's open mindedness. Shakespeare's sonnets, as far as I know, were circulated in manuscript, many at a time (although I don't think in the sequences modern editors have devised), and so even as first readers we would have come upon it in a context that told us the poet's technical skill wasn't in question; we'd have assumed he was up to something quite deliberately, even if to this day we can't agree on what. When we critique poems over on the other board we rarely have the advantage of very much context; we're often learning to read this writer from the first line. Poems that would raise no objections in a collection draw all kinds of fire when presented individually. I suppose too that I have to answer what I tell my students when they ask why Dickinson gets away with things I'd criticize in their work: If you're a genius, you're on your own -- it's going to take a very discerning reader to recognize you, and most of us most of the time just aren't up to it. Moreover, when the theme of the board is "metrical poetry," it's no surprise that meter is one of the things at which we look hardest. Admitedly, I do sometimes forget that there's more than meter to a poem.
Richard
PS I realized you were quoting Alan. My words sounded more defensive than I intended. Finally, as for actually scanning that line, I could read it "let ME/ NOT to/the MARR/iage of/ TRUE MINDS." Now the emphasis is on the speaker's reluctance, and we have the repetition of the adjacent stresses, ME/NOT and TRUE/MINDS, for metrical balance. It shifts the focus of the poem a bit, sort of a "Far be from me" effect.

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[Caleb Murdock]

Everything you say is well taken, but let me make some additional points:

In all the dozens of times I have read that sonnet, the meter of that first line has never sounded wrong to me, or confused me in any way. It sounds natural to me from the get-go. I've never felt hung out to dry by it, as you say. When speaking emphatically in normal life, we have all used the cadences that Shakespeare uses in that first line. Why, then, do those cadences now confuse formalist poets, or make us assume that Shakespeare was up to something when he wrote them?

Knowing my own writing process, I think I know how Shakespeare wrote them. He was probably thinking about love and marriage, and, being the poet that he was, trying to put his thoughts together in a poetic way. In a flash of inspiration, the first sentence (through "impediments") popped into his head. He wrote them down and then counted the syllables and possibly also the beats, and then divided the sentence after "minds" to form his first line. To the extent that Shakespeare used some form of scansion, he may not have even scanned the line. If it sounded right to him, and if it fit within his syllable count, that was probably enough. I doubt that in his mind he was doing anything unusual beyond expressing himself in the cadence that felt natural to what he was saying.

I believe that some "new formalists" are overly focussed on counting and metrical conformity, and they do this both in their writing and in their reading. In my view, such poets tend to write monotonous poetry, and they make poor readers. I do not think, for example, that the kind of metrical variations we see in the first line of Shakespeare's sonnet should be questioned by anyone, yet they would be on the Metrical Poetry board.

We use the term "Metrical Poetry" by default. Meter is not, as you know, the only kind of measure -- there is accentual poetry and syllabic poetry also. "Form" tends to make people think of fixed forms, like the sonnet. Were it up to me, I might name the Metrical Poetry board "Measured Poetry", but that might confuse some people since it is not a term in wide circulation. But even if the Metrical Poetry board is specifically about poetry written in meter, meter allows for more variations than most people think.

About the scansion of the first line of the sonnet: Although it can be read with an emphasis on "me", I doubt Shakespeare intended it that way, as such a reading would draw too much attention to the speaker. But even with an emphasis on "me", there are only two iambs in that line.

Caleb


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