Lord, quel embarasse de richesse! First of all on slants. No, I wouldn't give up the slant in Dies Irae for anything. Even Frost once closed a poem by rhyming breath with faith. Death just wouldn't have done! And the last line is supposed to surprise, not fulfill an expectation. And guys, I still employ slant rhymes, it's just that I tend to employ them in some kind of a stuctural program, as Janet does, rather than willie nillie as I did in Nothing Goes to Waste. In fact my only dissatisfaction with that poem is that the second tercet is full rhymed. No, Wendy, we'll leave all your dimeters here. The trimeter is very fine, although I don't really understand the import of the three line sentence fragment that concludes it. Chris, your poem is terrific up to the last two lines. Michael, I can't even write a villanelle in pentameter. Henry, I remember well and fondly your restaurant poem. I briefly felt less lonely at the Deep End to see such skillful trimeter by a partner in rhyme.
I want to get back to sentence. Here is the first good trimeter I ever wrote:
Jasper Lake
Perched on a granite peak
where golden eagles shriek
my love and I peer down
watching the Rockies drown---
crag and evergreen
sunk in aquamarine.
Over the lake last night
speckled trout took flight,
leaping the mirrored moon.
Now in the warmth of noon
gullied glaciers groan,
pouring silt and stone
into the seething streams.
Brief! Brief! a marmot screams,
diving under the scree
as its mountain heads for the sea.
Although the poem is all couplets, the first sentence breaks into two tercets. The second and last sentence are tercets. Only the penult is a quatrain. This striving of paired rhymes against tercets gives the poem an interesting rocking motion to my ear. Many years later I used the same trick on the Canadian Rockies:
Henry IV, Part III
A sea fan’s fallen leaf
lithifies as a reef
asphyxiates in silt.
Folding and faulting tilt
the ocean’s upthrust bed
into a watershed
rivulets trickle down.
Uneasy lies the crown
shells on a misty crest
eloquently attest
before the summits drown.
--Specimen Ridge, Alberta
Here only the first sentence is a tercet, which forces the second ilt rhyme into a four line sentence that ends with the introduced down rhyme, whose partner is forced into the final sentence, which is only resolved by employing yet a third rhyme, drown. These are very different poems, both meditations on geologic time put to their own purposes. The older poem uses my typical Saxon simple vocabulary, the newer poem, a rather Latinate vocabulary which is unusual for me, but seemed appropriate to a poem that turns on a reference to Henry IV. As I told Clive privately, I usually don't think much about sentences, but in these two instances I did, because I was deliberately trying to create a strain of rhyme versus sentence. Speaking of sentence, everyone should hop over to dimeter, where Peter has posted Hardy's great "I Found Her Out There." The sentences working their supple way through so confining a form are glorious.
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