Dear Mark
Just to add one footnote to Tim’s good observations about your attractive poem and - belatedly - one general remark about trimeter as opposed to dimeter.
“North Wind” is really one sentence and in my view should be punctuated as such. As you have it at present, the flow is broken up – ungrammatically in fact, since the clauses beginning “and hills” and “and seas” are the second and third in the series of temporal clauses of which the first begins “when north winds…”, the conjunction “when” being implied in each case. So, why not set it like this? -
There is an awful ache
when north winds shake the blind
to end the winter's truce
with air-raid-wails of pine,
and hills are slapped like cheeks
that cannot turn away
but must endure the shame
of being turned that way,
and seas are lashed in salt
with wounds of wind's design,
and life is such an ache
when north winds shake the blind.
The repetition of “and” is an essential part of the continuous construction you employ, though, as I have just said, your punctuation to some degree masks this. Certainly, you could drop some of the “and-s” – like this, perhaps…
There is an awful ache
when north winds shake the blind
to end the winter's truce
with air-raid-wails of pine.
Hills are slapped like cheeks
that cannot turn away
but must endure the shame
of being turned that way.
Seas are lashed in salt
with wounds of wind's design,
and life is such an ache
when north winds shake the blind.
…but though the prose sense is the same, the expressive feel is to my mind rather different. Dropping the conjunction creates a slightly more lapidary effect; their inclusion hurries this little ouroboros of a sentence forward ever so slightly faster. The difference is subtle, but a difference I think it is. So, it all depends on what you want to do here.
And now the general point, which I don’t think has been mentioned on this thread (or on the parallel thread about dimeter)…. I apologise if it has.
Metrically, dimeter and trimeter differ more fundamentally than the mere difference in syllable-count and number of beats might suggest. At the end of every line of trimeter there occurs a faint but quite definite “virtual beat”, something completely absent from dimeter. How far it is felt will depend on how forcefully the syntax pulls the sentence forward across the break and into the next line, but – to my ear, and I am sure from experience that I am not alone in this – it is always present and creates a brief point of resistance at the line-end. The reason for this effect lies in the inherent tendency of the language to group itself in patterns of two. (I could elaborate on this but shall excuse myself from doing so here.) Thus, the “virtual beat” completes a two + two pattern in the line.
The existence of the “virtual beat” in trimeter is what gives it what elsewhere I called its obsessive feel, a slightly incantatory quality which skilful versifiers can exploit or seek to diminish but which is always, I maintain, a tendency inherent in this line.
Anyway, Mark, just a couple of points to ponder….
Kind regards
Clive Watkins
[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited June 15, 2004).]
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