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Unread 03-20-2009, 06:35 AM
Janice D. Soderling's Avatar
Janice D. Soderling Janice D. Soderling is offline
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Isn't the Millay poem--as the title suggests--a counted verse. Though the third line of each halves the main count of six words.

As Paul Hoover says in his intro to the chapter on that (Finch & Barnes)

Quote:
Counted verse operates by the number of words rather than the number of syllables and stresses to the line. It is not primarily syllabic and accentual, though it obviously has those features.
May Swenson "Four-Word Lines" is also counted verse. So is, says Paul Hoover, George Herbert's diminishing verse "Paradise". Which indicates to me that a poem can have more than one identifying "form characteristic". Thus, Elizabeth Daryush "Still-Life" is a syllabic sonnet, and Wilber's exquisite "Thyme Flowering among Rocks" is a rhyming haiku-based syllabics verse so beautifully crafted that only the content is noticed. Like a flower that is so lovely that you forget you are holding a flora which will help you identify it.

What this points up, I think, is that in the hands of a master craftsman, the form is a vessel of transparent glass, and though it holds the wine of the poem, it is not what you notice most.

A common fault of the "form tyrants", I think, is that they can pour the most inane content, or twisted logic, or inane rhymes, into a form, and offer that soured liquid as though it were Dom Perignon Brut Champagne.
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