One of my favorite trimeter poems is another by Frost. It doesn't seem "nervous" to me, and it's also a good example of sustaining long sentences over many lines. The first sentence ends on L11 and draws to a truly moving close. L11 is trimeter, I know, but it almost takes on a tet quality as each word is a monosyllable and the pace slows down: "of SO MUCH WARMTH and LIGHT". I also love the title:


Happiness Makes Up In Height What It Lacks In Length

O stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

This is not a good poem, but it is in trimeter. I wrote it mostly as a joke, in 15 minutes, in Greece, at the request of a friend who claims since to have used it to good advantage. Certainly it's more his charisma than the poem itself. If I find it more amusing than others, perhaps it's the adolescent in me I haven't yet exorcised.

Your heart's an iron city
where better men than I
know no taste of pity
and starved and homeless die.
Goddamn it girl!--you're pretty
cruel when you deny
me any taste of titty,
any lick of thigh.

Chris

Clive, I guess I prefer nervous tension to nervous energy. I find nothing intrinsically nervous about trimeter, but I have no wish to dwell on it or set Tim up as a straw man, which I have probably done. He is a great thinker on meter who, as I have remarked here before, generously advised me to write IN and not ON meter.

Roger, I'm not crazy about that Frost poem, which seems pretty stilted to me. And I don't want to imply that I only admire long sentences in short measure. In Neither Out Far every sentence is short, and every sentence is perfect. In fact, they are almost like waves lapping at the beach.

Here is a poem that meant a great deal to me as a gay boy:

A Dream

Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts today,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
A railway terminus,
And crowded in that gloom
Were beds, and we in one
In a far corner lay.

Our whisper woke no clocks,
We kissed and I was glad
Of everything you did,
Indifferent to thos
Who sat with hostile eyes
In pairs on every bed,
Arms round each other's neck,
Inert and vaguely sad.

What buried worm of guilt
Or what malignant doubt
Am I the victim of,
That you then, unabashed,
Did what I never wished,
Confessed another love;
And I, submissive, felt
Unwanted and went out?

W.H. Auden

I could wish he had written more trimeter, although Precious Five is certainly an outstanding example of a huge trimeter. In fact, he excelled at short lines, but he wrote a great deal more of tetrameter, ballad, catalectic tetrameter, and dimeter, than he did of trimeter. Carol mentioned at the masthead that I would be discussing the canon, and so I hope you'll put up with and engage me as I type in many examples of my favorite measure.

I think this is the only solid trimeter I have:

Ironic Tableau

When you pass some roadkill phoenix
don't you rue its rotten luck...
resurrected from its ashes
to get broad-assed by a truck.

- Bugsy

Chris, I could almost have written that! Adolescence can be rather protracted, you know.

Break, Break, Break and To Anne Gregory are two of my favourites.

I have quite a few of my own that are tet/tri mixtures, but
I find I’ve attempted little in trimeter alone. The few I’ve written in that measure are on the light side. I posted Interruptus in the TDE a while back.


INTERRUPTUS

I dined with her under the stars
and, it may be, false pretences.
To the strains of twin guitars
I tried to keep my defences.

It was chance that our fingers met
while the pollo and tortellini
mingled in saucy duet —
chance, or the third Martini.

It was drink, or so I insist,
or the music that loosened us up;
still I held to my plan to resist,
to sideslip the proffered cup.

But come the zabaglione,
I wondered — what had we begun?
And fretting she’d think me a phoney,
I was very nearly undone.

Then Baci were brought to the table,
sweet kisses that made me unwise
and led (my resolve was unstable)
to an intercourse of eyes.

Her lips moistened and parted,
she hung on my words, held them tight;
I’d need to be hard, hard-hearted
to withdraw with a simple goodnight.

But I did it: I left and I kissed her,
a kiss more fleeting than deep,
and though it was hell to resist her,
we went to our separate sleep.
....

Nervous? Who, me?

Also on the light side, I and a number of others attempted, in this recent Fun Exercise to match the trimeter of Edward Lear’s How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear . Mine is How Pleasant to Tipple with Quince. I won’t try your patience by reposting all eight stanzas here. Perhaps just these two which pretty well sum me up:

He sits with his wine by the ocean
And thinks about wenches he’s known;
He walks with a bouncy mocean
And despises the portable phown.
.................... *
He can bash out a tune on the keys
In a rough imitation of Monk;
He’s ravished by sky and by treys,
But the ladies now need to be dronk.


Henry

I've always liked to do a trimeter villanelle.

Gathering Moss

Mick Jagger's old--and gray
where only groupies find it--
but will not fade away.

With bloated bills to pay,
he still must bump and grind it.
Mick Jagger's old and gray

with nothing new to say;
he knows that he has mined it
but will not fade away.

His Stones one had their day,
but now they're far behind it.
Mick Jagger's old and gray,

Bill Wyman will not play,
and Richards can't unwind it
but will not fade away.

His act is slick and fey;
for decades he's refined it.
Mick Jagger's old and gray
butt will not fade away.

Tim
This post of mine was buried and I'm interested in your response--even if you tell me to get lost ;)

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.

I wrote
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

Tim, I’m with Janet on Dies Irae (very fine example of trimeter compression) and the concluding off-rhyme. — Henry

I have nothing to add but my thanks for a most interesting thread...and this small poem by Robert Francis.

The Thief

Now night the sneak thief comes
Warily from the woods,
Shadowing our homes,
Greedy for all our goods.

Doors cannot keep him out.
Windows are his for peeping.
Soon he will roam about
In rooms where we are sleeping.

Who knows what he will take?
What he will leave behind?
Who knows when we awake
What we shall never find?

Before I take my leave, Tim wants me to add this footnote: he never heard of Robert Francis till the mid 1990's. Any resemblance between his work and that of the poet from Fort Juniper is strictly coincidence.

I guess everyone channels someone, eh? Me Roethke; Tim, Francis. I was writing Roethke before I ever heard of him, too...

(robt)