Hi Tom,
I wouldn't go so far as to call any of these favorites, but after your kind words about "Kites at the Washington Monument," I thought I'd mention a few things from that. As you implied, some of the lines in that poem are meant to be more overtly "mimetic," though John Hollander sternly and rightly cautions us all about how literally to take terms like "mimetic versification." Nevertheless, "The line goes tight as wire" is intended to sound like a "tight," taut line, with its three abrupt iambs and long "i"s. But "Or sags, falling, and goes slack" is meant kind of to collapse in the middle, with its trochaic reversal in the second foot and its extended third foot, an anapest or more likely a bacchic foot. Later on, with "When the line breaks, the string," that enjambment is hoped to hang there in the air, string-like, for just a second to set up the musically different, airier "Floats to the ground in the wind."
But let me turn to a different kind of effort to do something with a line. I wrote a group of three-line riddles. One, in which one answer is "Poet," goes:
Dismissed as irresponsible, it's true
I kid, dissemble, feign, and misconstrue.
Why the long face? That's just between me and you.
The ambiguity of who has the long face and what has caused it and the ambiguity of the antecedent of "that's" allow (or force) the last line to be read in about a dozen different ways. At least that's what I wanted because I love those ironies where what's funny and sad and deadpan, clenched-teeth serious are inextricably tangled. Heck, not even tangled, since they exist simultaneously in the same utterance.
Anyway, does that start to answer your question?
Greg
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