Robert, I dislike the repetitions in lieu of rhyme in the first and fourth positions of each stanza. I very much like the last sentence. Janet, that's a remarkably sustained effort to toss off in one evening. And lord knows, t.r. in trimeter is a feat. Yes Wendy, we let you get away with murder. Let's see you produce one perfectly regular poem during this exercise. Janet, all rules waived over here. Clive, in the Pallbearers there are 15 nouns and verbs to 2 modifiers. At 7.5 to one, that's about the highest G.R. score in my work. Of course you're dead right about the sentence being everything. If we flash back to Robert's poem, I think the first two sentences are pretty strained and only the final one really works. I strive to write extended sentences in these measures, great examples of which can be found in Yeats.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a jibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Shorter, but no less elegant is
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
Here is a poem from DoG which converses very dirrectly with RF and is largely comprised of a long sentence:
Nothing Goes to Waste
Rearing on spindly legs
a pair of famished stags
nibble our apple twigs
while does heavy with fawn
file from the woods at dawn
and tiptoe across the lawn
to feast on orchard mast
scattered in harvest haste
before the first hard frost.
Nothing goes to waste.
Wendy, this dates to a time when I allowed myself freely to mix slant and full rhyme, which I no longer do, having become a much more precise rhymer than I was fifteen years ago. Successful long poems in short lines are very much the exception. Easter 1916 is one such, Mezey has a long trimeter in his Collected. In my own case Case Notes is 35 lines, but it's really five little poems; and my Last Will is 28 lines, a single, integrated poem. My elegy for my father has 65 lines of trimeter, but again, it's a bunch of tiny poems. Yeats' The Fisherman is 40 wonderful lines long, and let's look at it:
although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast hisflies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
And maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried: "Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn."
Now there are a couple of huge sentences! I think it was intoxication at the swing of these sentences in waltz time that determined me to become fluent in trimeter. Clive, I'll be particularly interested in your comments on this.
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