The six-foot line, as Pope said, is often like a wounded snake which drags its slow length along. It sometimes, in effect, breaks into two trimetrs; at other times it can hobble and fragment and cease to have any integrity as a line; the final foot can sometimes seem like the dropping of a third shoe in the bedroom overhead. In the first eight lins, however, this poet handles the meter beautifully, his phrasing energized by that splendid theme of the sharing of waters. There are good moments throughout the poem, but the first two stanzas take the cake. One wonders, by the way, why the poem slips into past tense in line 24.
~Richard Wilbur
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