[Alder Ellis]

Here is another one by Donald Justice (see his great "The Tourist from Syracuse" posted by Mark in the General Talk thread):

To Waken a Small Person

You sleep at the top of streets
Up which workmen each morning
Go wheeling their bicycles

Your eyes are like the windows
Of some high attic the one
The very one you sleep in

They're shut it's raining the rain
Falls on the streets of the town
As it falls falls through your sleep

You must be dreaming these tears
Wake up please open yourself
Like a little umbrella

Hurry the sidewalks need you
The awnings not one is up
And the patient bicycles

Halted at intersections
They need you they are confused
The colors of traffic lights

Are bleeding bleeding wake up
The puddles of parking lots
Cannot contain such rainbows.

Each line has seven syllables, as does the title (come to think of it, so does the title of "The Tourist from Syracuse"), most with 3 stresses, a few with 2. The title itself is metrically / semantically ambiguous:

to WAken a SMALL person [as opposed to a big person]

to WAken a SMALL PERson [as opposed to a small non-person...]

Such an ambiguity is one expressive potential of syllabic verse, as opposed to accentual-syllabic verse which would force one meaning or the other by means of a metrical context. Perhaps a differentiating criterion of syllabic verse would be just that: it does not impose a metrical context.

Anyway, the poem is tantalizingly almost, but not quite, trimeter, which keeps the reader on his or her toes, in a way. You can't quite settle down into a predictable rhythm. It makes you pay attention to what's going on rhythmically instead of putting that whole business on automatic pilot.

What's particularly interesting about this poem is the way Justice combines it with another similarly angled technique, the absence of punctuation. This is not his normal technique, & surely not a quasi-ideological rebellion against the tyranny of punctuation -- rather, an experiment with the expressive potential of context-withholding. The reader is required to supply the context normally specified by punctuation, & this has the curious effect of legitimizing feeling. Compare

Are bleeding! Bleeding! Wake up!

with

Are bleeding bleeding wake up

The first line would be hard to get away with in this day & age, too flagrantly emotional, imposing itself on the reader. Take away the punctuation, force the reader to bring his or her own, and the flow of feeling strangely shifts from being writer-sourced to being reader-sourced, & the line passes muster. A mere trick, but an instructive one.

The poem overall is evidently in dream-space, dream-logic. The small person is, surely, oneself. I love the last two lines.

And, yes, I am totally in favor of syllabics being admitted to the metrical forums. But does that mean they will be barred from the free verse forum?