Multum in Parvo

Robt and Terese and I, among our other stalwarts, have recently posted trimeters at TDE. I propose to host a workshop on the short line, examining examples from the canon, and liberally illustrating my arguments from my own examples of dimeter and trimeter. Tim Steele, one of our first Lariats, has forcefully argued the centrality of pentameter in English. And he once confided to me that trimeter is useful for “conveying a certain nervous energy.” Never was Tim more wrong. “Easter 1916” conveys more than a certain nervous energy. More like FUCKING MAJESTY! As does “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep:”

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull.
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

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

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

Wasn’t it Trilling who thought Frost’s little masterpiece the most perfect lyric in English? It is inexpressively grave, and I readily employ trimeter for grave subjects:

The Pallbearers

At the prairie cemetary
where the river meets the road
and Murphys come to bury
love in the loam we’ve sowed
my brother lets me carry
the light end of the load.

And for silly subjects:

Dakota Greeting

Frosted sign in a frozen ditch:
“Stranger, welcome to Oakes,
home to hundreds of friendly folks
and one mean son-of-a-bitch.”

Most of you have read Case Notes, which uses trimeter for scary, confessional purposes, and my Last Will and Testament, which manipulates trimeter to the point where it is admissable as a pour-over will in probate court. My point is that I think any meter can be used to express anything. (Exception: Beaton’s bumptious anapests in service of high elegy, which David Anthony and I persuaded him to rewrite as iambics.) It’s just a matter of catching the tune and going with it. A merit of trimeter and dimeter is that you CAN’T flunk Golias’ razor when you employ our shortest lines. And you MUST become an expert rhymer if your rhymes are to fall every 4 to 6 syllables, instead of every 10. I have adjured many beginners at the Sphere to devote themselves to the pentameter until they have it mastered. A conspicuous example of someone profiting from this advice is Macarthur (Andrew) who is now writing fluently in the five banger. But for the next month or so, let’s have some fun with short lines. I shall open Open Mics for dimeter and trimeter. At the beginning of each thread, I shall post some of my own little poems. And I’m happy to workshop both measures over here rather than at the Deep End. Welcome to the Workshop From Hell.

Moore, who is fluent in trimeter and knows Winters and Cunningham cold, could be very helpful in this exercise. yr lariat, Tim

Tim
I take it that the one poem every eight days elsewhere will not be affected by posts here?
Janet

Tim,
Here's my first fling. I'll be back with contrasted rhyme endings later,
Janet
Vicarious

The eye of Proust is keen
for details that evoke
the essence of a scene.

Dickens with a stroke
sketches in the group
with misery and smoke.

Austen will not stoop
to passion in the skin
but stays within the loop.

Boccaccio laughs at sin,
particularly vice
that leaves us with a grin.

Flaubert isn’t nice
about hypocrisy,
but hellishly precise.

Shakespeare feels quite free
to sympathise with flaws
that drive humanity.

Dante judges whores,
adulterers and cheats,
whose morals he deplores.

Rushdie gaily beats
the drum for open speech
then hastily retreats.

Writers offer each
of us a chance to live
while staying out of reach.

May all of them forgive
the less inquisitive.

(for Robert. I was just Danteing along and along and along ;)


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 22, 2004).]

I don't know exactly what you want, Tim, but this may as well be moved here since it's specificaaly an exercise in taut form on the trimeter skeleton, and since it's drawing little technical comment (save from Wakefield) in the Deep End. Feel free to delete it 'tillater or move it elsehwere as suits you.

Refusal

Home is not where I dream.
Nor can sorrow screen
my heart (or yours) from light —
nor light invade the dream

Of shadows that decline
the word "alive." A line
is crossed when you extend
your hand, and I decline.

(robt)

Janet,

Trimeter terza rima, eh? That's certainly setting yourself hurdles. I'm not up-to-speed on t/r, but I have a suspicion something different is supposed to happen in the last stanza? I'll read up on it...

(robt)

Fixed Robert,
J.

Much mo' bettah :)

(robt)

Edited out my second poem. Overkill. I will return. I tried alternating feminine /masculine rhyme but the poem is a bauble.
Janet

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

Well, Tim, as you know, I'm most at home with the little meters as well, so I'll jump in. Neat idea, this.

Your own short lines are bound up tight and stocky as all get out, often seeming to wind up for the knockout punch at the close, whereas I use the same meters to try and achieve a very different effect: an airy sort of atmosphere and lots of trailing off room. And sometimes pithy or wiseacre humor just begs for the short line. There is indeed great freedom in di and tri and lots of neat ways to regulate pace, which I hope you'll talk a little about. You mention rhyme, which is something else I hope you'll talk about. In your Pallbearers I notice you've an even mix of nouns/verbs in the rhyme positions. Well, it's a good idea to get a healthy mix in any meter, but in di/tri it seems especially so, otherwise, what you get is the unmistakable sound of straining. Or clinking, which is even worse. Humor is an exception, I'm sure. My own dimeter and trimeter pieces rarely follow a strict rhyme scheme, and are generally peppered with slants. Over on the DE, irregular rhyme (not to mentions mixing slants with true) in IP or tet is practically verboten, but I don't recall ever being flagged for committing these same crimes in my short lines. I often wonder if it's the ear that's forgiving in those poems, or my readership !

It's also my experience that long poems in di or tri are practically impossible to pull off, and not just because they're too...well, leggy on the page. I've one, but I've never been satisfied with it. Have you successful examples of any ?

I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with reciting these short-lined poems for an audience. Do you pause at the end of your lines, or is it context/enjambment dependent ? I occasionally do readings, and find myself reciting more slowly/expressively when I do my itty bitty poems. I'm not sure if that's a virtue of the short line or just a sign of my comfort within them. I know it's said that IP allows the most 'natural' breaks for breaths/pauses in the language, but I'm at all sure I believe it. Of course I'm a slow talker, and tend to be spare in my conversation.
Well, most of the time.

Can't help post the obvious RF below. I'll stop in again and put up JVC's Contemporaries it if hasn't appeared already. For Open Mic, too.

ps to Janet: sweet finish on Vicarious !

and Robt: you mean you haven't a Robt Ward Waltz?


```````````

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited May 23, 2004).]

Dear Tim

This looks likely to be an interesting and useful exercise.

A couple of points….

You say that it is a “merit of trimeter and dimeter is that you CAN’T flunk Golias’ razor when you employ our shortest lines”. As far as trimeter is concerned, I think you can. Indeed, you might well want to. A much more important controlling issue is the length and complexity of the sentence. In my view, metre is very much a secondary issue – which is one reason why the Razor can be useful in discussing prose. The real issue is always the nature of the fit between sentence and metre. Many different kinds of expressive fit are possible. I am wary of prescription.

As to the wonderful Frost poem you cite, its subject and diction are certainly grave, but I am with Tim Steele insofar as my ear catches a certain nervous insistence here. It is notable that all the lines are end-stopped. It is the combination of this rhythmic-syntactical feature with the short lines which gives the poem its characteristic timbre. As for“Easter 1916”, Yeats allows himself much freedom in the metre: indeed, I would describe the metre of this fine poem as accentual trimeter rather than accentual-syllabic. This, too, has its effect on its tone, which for me is a kind of haunted, driven quality.

No doubt these are, to some extent, subjective matters. I merely register my own sense.

Good luck with this project.

Kind regards

Clive


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited May 23, 2004).]

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

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)

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.