It’s a good question, Jason. It’s a limitation or slight drawback of having Metrical and Non-Metrical boards that there may sometimes be uncertainty as to where to put something. I don’t believe (
pace Clay in the other thread) that a clear boundary can be drawn between metrical and non-metrical. Any definition of metrical seems too simple. For example, poems can and do vary the number of stresses per line (sometimes on no particular pattern, as in some of the great classic odes) and remain both rhythmic and metrical.
I do think there’s a Shadowlands region inhabited by poems whose metricality or not will be perceived differently by different readers. I would say the Donaghy poem above is metrical (I don’t think it matters that one can’t identify a fixed pattern or alternation of stresses per line) but others might hear it differently.
Here’s a poem called “A Day in Autumn” — which I’ve run together as prose:
It will not always be like this, the air windless, a few last leaves adding their decoration to the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs of the boughs with gold; a bird preening in the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up from the day’s chores, pause a minute, let the mind take its photograph of the bright scene, something to wear against the heart in the long cold.
Does that sound metrical? Most readers would say no, I suspect. There are so many places where stresses fall back to back (AIR WINDless, LEAVES ADDing, LAWN’s MIRRor, and so on) that you could easily read its rhythms as prose — especially if your metrical ear is tuned mainly in the iambic direction.
Now the poem as printed:
A Day in Autumn
It will not always be like this,
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening
In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up
From the day’s chores, pause a minute,
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold.
R.S. Thomas
And here’s another one by the same author:
Death Of A Poet
Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once -- what can he say?
His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day's news, just the one word, ‘Sorry’;
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet's war; that he preferred
The easier rhythms of the heart
To the mind's scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.
Again, reading this almost as if it were prose, with hardly a pause on the enjambments, one might well be tempted to put it firmly in the non-met camp. But actually, both of these can be read as (almost entirely) in accentual tetrameter, like a number of Thomas’s poems.
it will NOT ALways be LIKE THIS,
the AIR WINDless, a FEW LAST
LEAVES ADDing their DECorATion
to the TREES’ SHOULDers, BRAIDing the CUFFS...
LAID NOW on his SMOOTH BED
for the LAST TIME, WATCHing DULly...
SORRy for the LIES, for the LONG FAILure
in the POet’s WAR, that HE preFERRed...
To me a clear case of lineation playing a necessary role in clarifying meter. It helps to pause briefly at the end of each line, enjambed or not, something encouraged — dare I say it? — by the line caps.
Notice the medial caesura in most lines — two speech stresses on each side. It seems clear that Thomas was influenced by the old Anglo-Saxon meters as used for Beowulf, though his alliteration is only light and occasional. Once you catch on to what the poet is doing, you’ll probably have little difficulty in hearing these as metrical — if you’re attuned to accentual meters. If you aren’t, you might hear them as non-metrical.
Linear Mode
