Clive, I guess I prefer nervous tension to nervous energy. I find nothing intrinsically nervous about trimeter, but I have no wish to dwell on it or set Tim up as a straw man, which I have probably done. He is a great thinker on meter who, as I have remarked here before, generously advised me to write IN and not ON meter.
Roger, I'm not crazy about that Frost poem, which seems pretty stilted to me. And I don't want to imply that I only admire long sentences in short measure. In Neither Out Far every sentence is short, and every sentence is perfect. In fact, they are almost like waves lapping at the beach.
Here is a poem that meant a great deal to me as a gay boy:
A Dream
Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts today,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
A railway terminus,
And crowded in that gloom
Were beds, and we in one
In a far corner lay.
Our whisper woke no clocks,
We kissed and I was glad
Of everything you did,
Indifferent to thos
Who sat with hostile eyes
In pairs on every bed,
Arms round each other's neck,
Inert and vaguely sad.
What buried worm of guilt
Or what malignant doubt
Am I the victim of,
That you then, unabashed,
Did what I never wished,
Confessed another love;
And I, submissive, felt
Unwanted and went out?
W.H. Auden
I could wish he had written more trimeter, although Precious Five is certainly an outstanding example of a huge trimeter. In fact, he excelled at short lines, but he wrote a great deal more of tetrameter, ballad, catalectic tetrameter, and dimeter, than he did of trimeter. Carol mentioned at the masthead that I would be discussing the canon, and so I hope you'll put up with and engage me as I type in many examples of my favorite measure.
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