[A. E. Stallings]

"Snobbery" is a provocative word, admittedly! But of course, journals like The Formalist used to refuse to look at syllabics, and one often hears the idea that they are pointless because "you cannot hear them". One way, of course, to make them rather easy to hear is to rhyme them, as Wibur does. My point though is that they produce interesting results--are another limitation against which to work to see what new sounds and rhythms result. Just because it hasn't caught on much in English (which I totally agree with), doesn't mean it isn't something to try, or that it isn't a valid experiment.

Sometimes very curious line breaks (such as ending on "the") lead me to check out syllable count. I don't know--I think you get a feel for it after a while. A hunch. You can tell the poet is playing against something, and that it probably isn't traditional meter.

Here's another Plath syllabic poem. I'll leave folks to work out the pattern:

Frog Autumn

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
The sun brightens tardily
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.
The fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly
The genius of plenitude
Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin
Lamentably.


(By the way, I might add, I do find that syllabics work particularly well for "organic" things, the natural world, etc. Though I should also add that I do not have a theory as to why.)

PPS: the "goal" is surely just to get a good, interesting poem, and on the technical side to feel the tension of word/syntax against syllable count. Which in syllabics might also amount to letting in prosy rhythms that would have trouble slotting into more metrical templates.