[Mike Todd]

Two more from Frost.

One Step Backward Taken

Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing
And the sun came out to dry me.

Each line ends with a feminine rhyme. This, coupled with short meter, unavoidable phonic foolery—add up the instances of alliteration and consonance in LL3-6; and check out the cheeky off-rhyme of gallons / balance—, and the wry, self-satisfied tone of the close, creates something altogether risible. Contrast this with the final stanza of Desert Places:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

As evinced by the poem's broken meter, the speaker is struggling to keep calm, to maintain control over his mind; and now in the final stanza, feminine endings come in, replacing what were masculine endings: one gets the sense that the speaker is losing his last psychological foothold. Only a final spondee and two plosives suggest some remaining resolve.