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).]
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