[A. E. Stallings]

This interesting discussion started by Kevin got a bit sidetracked. I'm trying to refocus it here.

Roger Slater had said:

Alicia, I was thinking of Larkin myself when I saw the topic. In Christopher Ricks' book on Bob Dylan, he digresses into a discussion of Philip Larkin's "Love Songs In Age," and most of the discussion has to do with the fact that each stanza enjambs into the next, and the final line of the poem is the only sentence whose ending corresponds with a stanza ending. I'm too lazy to type out Ricks' entire discussion, but here's part of it:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The point of ruinning one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of love songs. It is to create the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of the stop, the assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoratative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin's pattern (abacbdcdd) allows of a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambm ent, spilling across the line-endings. The result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in final settlement."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


It's also worth noting that Larkin believed in reading poems off the page, and not in hearing them recited, and so the stanza enjambment for him was a visual way of controlling the flow as well as an auditory way.
-----------------------------------------

Emily Dickinson was another poet to come up in the discussion. This one fits the topic particularly nicely:

I like to see it lap the Miles--
And lick the Valleys up--
And stop to feed itself at Tanks--
And then - prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains--
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads--
And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza--
Then chase itself down Hill--

And neigh like Boanerges--
Then - punctual as a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door--


There is that wonderful enjambment across stanzas as the train steps around a pile of mountains. Indeed, there is enjambment to greater or lesser degree (perhaps not so much in the last instance) across all the stanzas, which again suits the linked-up nature of a train, I think--the poem is one sentence chasing itself downhill. And her curious mention of the train complaining in horrid, hooting stanza. I have wondered about that, whether she is simply comparing its sound to a song, or whether she is using stanza in some more literal way, the cars of the train, for instance, as separate rooms. Like the Larkin poem Roger mention's, this poem too only really "stops" at the very end, literally at its own stable door. Wonderful!