Delightful thread.

Henry, To Anne Gregory is the poem that had me fall helplessly in love with poetry. I think I was a freshman in high school.There were plenty of poems in my early childhood, but that one just reached down into me and left its mark forever. It came into my life at the right time.

Tim, it's a lovely reply to Frost's Gold, with a terrific close. Are you saying the slants weaken the poem ? That if you'd written it today you'd perfect the rhymes? Gad, I hope not. Spindly is spindly, afterall, and solid standing is solid. I guess I take exception to the general idea that slants are sloppy or somehow easier to employ. I think they produce wonderful, ambiguous effects and a lovely kind of music. They do have to work hard to overcome the general prejudice against them. I love slants, and have often wondered why they aren't more lauded/experimented with on the 'sphere, except of course by Alicia. Oh, heavens, yes, what Janet and Henry said about the slants in Dies Irae.

I had to laugh over your comment about my getting away with murder. I don't disagree. I can't believe it's my o-so-charming-personality. I tend to think the short line allows for more, not fewer liberties, though I know you feel otherwise. Or maybe (gasp) even purists accept a bit of the free verse element now and then. Pls don't throw stones.

Below is one that meets the challenge you put my way. I feel it does not sound like me. I'm pasting in a couple that are more representative, by way of contrast.


About Certainty

There's much to be learned
from the open curve
of the question mark,
from the comma's calm,

from the certain G,
and the soft w
to the kindred link
of the q and the u,

and yet,

and yet,

in this state,
a breath away
from the fervent curve,
from the i and the u

is the certain fear
of a kind of dark:
the abrupt chagrin,
the erasure mark.

````````

Of all the Words

Of all the words
that move about
and whisper through the air,

surprise, allow,
incongruous,
wonder and despair,

remembering,
suddenness,
melancholy, dare

I choose the ones
that have the lightest
melodies to spare

and move about
like sunlight in
the brown that is my hair.

```````````


The Moving Wall

The Native people came.
They walked the grass and found
where sky agreed to name
this land a sacred ground.

A golden eagle flew
and mountain mares were fed
sweet hay as time withdrew
and piece by piece the dead

were resurrected here.
To build or to destroy
the reverence and the fear
that filled my little boy.



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited May 24, 2004).]

Almost forgot I'd meant to post this by Cunningham


For My Contemporaries

How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.

But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lies swell
With spiritual noise

Despise me not!
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.


Oops. I've just realized the subject headers in these threads have changed, and I've posted mostly dimeter pieces here. Feel free to move them if it's easier on you, Tim.




[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited May 24, 2004).]

Lord, quel embarasse de richesse! First of all on slants. No, I wouldn't give up the slant in Dies Irae for anything. Even Frost once closed a poem by rhyming breath with faith. Death just wouldn't have done! And the last line is supposed to surprise, not fulfill an expectation. And guys, I still employ slant rhymes, it's just that I tend to employ them in some kind of a stuctural program, as Janet does, rather than willie nillie as I did in Nothing Goes to Waste. In fact my only dissatisfaction with that poem is that the second tercet is full rhymed. No, Wendy, we'll leave all your dimeters here. The trimeter is very fine, although I don't really understand the import of the three line sentence fragment that concludes it. Chris, your poem is terrific up to the last two lines. Michael, I can't even write a villanelle in pentameter. Henry, I remember well and fondly your restaurant poem. I briefly felt less lonely at the Deep End to see such skillful trimeter by a partner in rhyme.

I want to get back to sentence. Here is the first good trimeter I ever wrote:

Jasper Lake


Perched on a granite peak
where golden eagles shriek
my love and I peer down
watching the Rockies drown---
crag and evergreen
sunk in aquamarine.
Over the lake last night
speckled trout took flight,
leaping the mirrored moon.
Now in the warmth of noon
gullied glaciers groan,
pouring silt and stone
into the seething streams.
Brief! Brief! a marmot screams,
diving under the scree
as its mountain heads for the sea.

Although the poem is all couplets, the first sentence breaks into two tercets. The second and last sentence are tercets. Only the penult is a quatrain. This striving of paired rhymes against tercets gives the poem an interesting rocking motion to my ear. Many years later I used the same trick on the Canadian Rockies:

Henry IV, Part III

A sea fan’s fallen leaf
lithifies as a reef
asphyxiates in silt.
Folding and faulting tilt
the ocean’s upthrust bed
into a watershed
rivulets trickle down.
Uneasy lies the crown
shells on a misty crest
eloquently attest
before the summits drown.

--Specimen Ridge, Alberta
Here only the first sentence is a tercet, which forces the second ilt rhyme into a four line sentence that ends with the introduced down rhyme, whose partner is forced into the final sentence, which is only resolved by employing yet a third rhyme, drown. These are very different poems, both meditations on geologic time put to their own purposes. The older poem uses my typical Saxon simple vocabulary, the newer poem, a rather Latinate vocabulary which is unusual for me, but seemed appropriate to a poem that turns on a reference to Henry IV. As I told Clive privately, I usually don't think much about sentences, but in these two instances I did, because I was deliberately trying to create a strain of rhyme versus sentence. Speaking of sentence, everyone should hop over to dimeter, where Peter has posted Hardy's great "I Found Her Out There." The sentences working their supple way through so confining a form are glorious.

Amazingly long thread for two days on the board! Attesting to the power of trimeter indeed.


[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited February 09, 2005).]

Here's a recent attempt of mine at trimeter. I'll probably post it in Metrical at some point.


Prayer of Reconciliation

I don’t believe in balance,
But if you have purloined
From others the allowance
Of pain disbursed to me,
I wish it from my friend
And not my enemy.


------------------
Steve Schroeder

I'd like to post the last stanza of J. V. Cunningham's "For My Contemporaries," which is missing, above:

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.

He was certainly a master of the short line! Here's another of his, "The Scarecrow"

His speech is spare,
An orchard scare
With battered hat;
Face rude and flat,
Whose painted eye
Jove's flashing doom
From broken sky
Can scarce illume:
The Thunderer
May strike his ear,
And no reply.

Jester Courts the King

Isn't it entertaining
when the royalist who's reigning
is courted by a Fool?

Palace tongues are wagging:

"Whatever could this mean?
If they keep it up
is he to be our queen?"


[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited May 24, 2004).]

Yikes, Rhina, I cut off its feet when I cut and pasted ! Thanks for paying attention. I'll go ahead and edit so the poem isn't just floating around in midair.

wendy

Tim, thanks for the comment on mine. I studied yours in detail before digging in to bring this to trimeter from tet/trim/tet/trim. As you noted, adjectives get cut.

Cheers,

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

Just two more. Returning for a moment to the point Jody raised earlier about the feeling of "closure" in ballad meter, alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, these two poems by Frost and Housman seem to achieve a similar "closure" by ending each trimeter stanza with a line of dimeter.

The Frost seems leisurely, not at all tense. I think perhaps that's because it has more anapests than iambs, and lots of feminine endings. I've known this poem by heart for decades, but never consciously scanned it until now. I was surprised to realize that it was in trimeter.


RELUCTANCE

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?


Here's the Housman, in strict iambic. (Actually this is the best three stanzas of a six-stanza poem.)


On miry meads in winter
The football sprang and fell,
May stuck the land with wickets:
For all the eye could tell
The world went well.

Yet well, God knows, it went not,
God knows, it went awry;
For me, one flowery Maytime,
It went so ill that I
Designed to die.

And if so long I carry
The lot that season marred,
'Tis that the sons of Adam
Are not so evil-starred
As they are hard.