Robert, I dislike the repetitions in lieu of rhyme in the first and fourth positions of each stanza. I very much like the last sentence. Janet, that's a remarkably sustained effort to toss off in one evening. And lord knows, t.r. in trimeter is a feat. Yes Wendy, we let you get away with murder. Let's see you produce one perfectly regular poem during this exercise. Janet, all rules waived over here. Clive, in the Pallbearers there are 15 nouns and verbs to 2 modifiers. At 7.5 to one, that's about the highest G.R. score in my work. Of course you're dead right about the sentence being everything. If we flash back to Robert's poem, I think the first two sentences are pretty strained and only the final one really works. I strive to write extended sentences in these measures, great examples of which can be found in Yeats.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a jibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Shorter, but no less elegant is

That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

Here is a poem from DoG which converses very dirrectly with RF and is largely comprised of a long sentence:

Nothing Goes to Waste

Rearing on spindly legs
a pair of famished stags
nibble our apple twigs
while does heavy with fawn
file from the woods at dawn
and tiptoe across the lawn
to feast on orchard mast
scattered in harvest haste
before the first hard frost.
Nothing goes to waste.

Wendy, this dates to a time when I allowed myself freely to mix slant and full rhyme, which I no longer do, having become a much more precise rhymer than I was fifteen years ago. Successful long poems in short lines are very much the exception. Easter 1916 is one such, Mezey has a long trimeter in his Collected. In my own case Case Notes is 35 lines, but it's really five little poems; and my Last Will is 28 lines, a single, integrated poem. My elegy for my father has 65 lines of trimeter, but again, it's a bunch of tiny poems. Yeats' The Fisherman is 40 wonderful lines long, and let's look at it:

although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast hisflies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

And maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried: "Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn."

Now there are a couple of huge sentences! I think it was intoxication at the swing of these sentences in waltz time that determined me to become fluent in trimeter. Clive, I'll be particularly interested in your comments on this.

Tim,

While I accept that you may or may not "like" the repeated words in my exercise, I question your saying they are "in lieu of rhyme." In fact my specific goal here was to create a form that repeated the L1 end-word in the L4 position, using it in a different grammatical/syntactical way. Therefore, what I have is a repetend, whcih I don't see as being "in lieu of" a rhyme.

Accepting for the sake of argument that the repetend should stay, then your objection might best be answered by not rhyminf L2 of each stanza to L1, thus exorcising the ghost of rhyme altogether. Alternatively, perhaps my attempt at "repetend" is doomed, too artificial?

I repeat, the idea here was a new "form". I am fascinated by the various forms that entail the use of repetends, but think that by and large villanelles, triolets and the like come across as unnatrually forced because the repetends come in such large chunks. Apparently modern poets think so too; hence, the current trend towards radical variation of the repetend in these poems.

Taking my key from that, I said to myself "Why not reduce the repetend to a single word?" and thus freed up the entire line for variation, as it were. The tw`o words, incidentally (dream and decline) are apposite to each other, consonant with each other, and each absolutely central to the poem itself.

I'm not trying to "justify" the poem btw, in the sense of saying it's better than it is; I'm trying to see if the form itself is justifiable...

(robt.)

Robt, I guess I hadn't thought of those lines as one word repetends, and in fact, I believe repetends in French forms should be unvaried. My bigger problem is writing like "Home is not where I dream." Well, home IS where you dream of being at sea, of screwing beautiful women, of being buried in Poets' Corner, whatever. The trick to writing tiny poems is to make them seem effortless, and yours seems labored. Go over to dimeter and look at what Schechter has done with a far more demanding form.

Tim--

Your "Dakota Greeting" is hymn meter, not trimeter. I'm not being persnickety--much less complaining about the chance to read the poem. But there is, I think, a serious distinction to be made between the feeling given by a pair of common lines, 4/3, and the feeling given by a pair of trimeter lines, 3/3.

Try this:

The very deep did rot: O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

contrasted with this:

The land may vary more;
But whatever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

It would be interesting to get all the way down to bottom of the difference between these. A first thought: There's some expectation of closure to the stanza which Coleridge's ballad form grants him, and that's missing from Frost's trimeter.

That suggests to me a way in which Tim Steele has rightly observed the nervousness of trimeter.

Now, it's true that certain forms just won't work for certain topics. (I have saved in a file a set of submissions I once received, which retold various scenes from the Bible in non-comic limericks. Remind me to show these to you someday, Tim. You haven't lived till you've read the parable of the Prodigal Son in a chain of limerick stanzas.)

But there's nothing in trimeter that prohibits it from doing low comedy or high elegy, whether strict as Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" or as loose as Yeats's "Easter 1916."

Still, a kind of nervousness does sit in trimeter lines. As I said, they don't bring their own closure, the way hymn meter does. More, I think, they feel deliberate in a way that tetrameter and pentameter don't. One measure of Yeats's triumph is the naturalness he brings to the Easter poem.

Jody


[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited May 23, 2004).]

My only completely trimeter piece:

This cosmos. . . always was
and ever shall be ever-living fire. . . .
Heraclitus


O Phoenix Culprit!

My life’s consumed by fire
with every breath I take,
and feverish from its heat,
I dream while I’m awake:

of rosy-fingered dawn
the ancient bards admire,
that fallen folds—a fist
of terrifying fire;

of leaves on an apple tree,
their glorious green subsiding,
that flare like fuses, fall
to death, the tree surviving;

of the flaming fallen phoenix,
transformed again to ashes,
that sparks itself and rises,
flies high before it crashes.


------------------
Ralph

Ralph, that's very fine, a good take-off on Heracleitus' epigram and an example of the compression trimeter is capable of. Jody, just muddle-headed me! Of course Dakota Greeting is ballad, as are many of my poems. Particularly the funny ones. In point of fact, the trim is usually reserved for elegiac purposes, as in this poem that Pursglove discussed in Acumen's review of VFN:

Dies Irae

At the field's edge a feather
clings briefly to a bough
before a change of weather
offers it to the plough,
much as it did my father.

Tim
You have just proved my point about near rhyme. That would be much less powerful with perfect rhyme.

In my piece above I deliberately used perfect rhyme but I will never regard perfect rhyme as anything other than an internal point where rhyme begins. I wanted to show you I could do it (hence terza rima) but I am very glad to see the above poem from you.
I should add that near rhyme never works unless the poet has a capacity to make perfect rhyme.

Fine poem.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 23, 2004).]

With all due respect to Tim Steele, who's terrific, I don't really hear much "nervousness" in my favorite examples of trimeter--it can be serious and stately, or bright and breezy.

But you may be on to something, Jody, with the suggestion that hymn or ballad meter (alternating tetrameter/trimeter lines) can bring a special sense of closure. Here's an old, famous example from Tennyson using accentual trimeter. But he shifts to the 4/3 pattern at the end of the last two stanzas for his closing--something I never thought about until reading your comment on closure:


BREAK, BREAK, BREAK

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.


Houseman's "When I Was One and Twenty" is another old trimeter standard in a breezier vein--no nervousness at all that I can hear.

Here's another, less well known, by John Boyle O'Reilly:


A WHITE ROSE

The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
Oh, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.

But I send you a cream-white rose bud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.


I'm afraid I don't really have one of my own for the open mike. The only trimeter I can recall writing was a piece of light verse about a trip to Lake Tahoe I took with my girlfriend 25 years ago. We fell asleep on the beach without enough sunscreen and got burned really badly. My feet were so cooked it was excruciating to walk for days. It started something like:

On fiery sands at Tahoe,
We singed our legs and feet.
I looked like a tomato;
You were my sugar beet....

It went on for several stanzas more...but I'll stop here. (She married me anyway, despite the sunburn and the poem!)

Bruce, I can't believe she married you after that! No, it's very funny. Another poem that mixes tet and trim even more skillfully than Tennyson's to my ear, is To Anne Gregory.

Never shall a young man
thrown into despair
by those great honey-coloured
ramparts at your ear
love you for yourself alone
and not your yellow hair.

"But I can get a hair-dye
and set such colour there,
brown or black or carrot,
that young men in despair
can love me for myself alone
and not my yellow hair."

I heard an old religious man
but yesternight declare
that he had found a text to prove
that only God, my dear,
could love you for yourself alone
and not your yellow hair.

'Pologize if I'm mispunctuating. Memory, y'know.

Dear Tim

I wonder if there is a risk of confusing our discussion of trimeter by employing the term “nervousness”, as you do in sharing Tim Steele’s opinion of this line. (Bruce follows you in this respect.) I suspect – though I am not able to ask him – that by “nervousness” Tim Steele meant something closer to “tension” or “agitation”. For me, “nervousness” implies something rather different, a fearful hesitancy, let us say.

So, when I wrote above of “nervous insistence”, it was to tension or agitation that I was referring. I apologize if I have unwittingly misled anyone.

Regards

Clive