[Matt Q]

And on the subject of moving dactyls, here's William Meredith's poem, Effort at Speech. Here the dactyl appears anywhere from the first to the fourth foot.

Effort At Speech
For Muriel Rukeyser

Climbing the stairway gray with urban midnight,
Cheerful, venial, ruminating pleasure,
Darkness takes me, an arm around my throat and
Give me your wallet.

Fearing cowardice more than other terrors,
Angry I wrestle with my unseen partner,
Caught in a ritual not of our making,
panting like spaniels.

Bold with adrenaline, mindless, shaking,
God damn it, no! I rasp at him behind me,
Wrenching the leather from his grasp. It
breaks like a wishbone,

So that departing (routed by my shouting,
not by my strength or inadvertent courage)
Half the papers lending me a name are
gone with him nameless.

Only now turning, I see a tall boy running,
Fifteen, sixteen, dressed thinly for the weather.
Reaching the streetlight he turns a brown face briefly
phrased like a question.

I like a questioner watch him turn the corner
Taking the answer with him, or his half of it.
Loneliness, not a sensible emotion,
breathes hard on the stairway.

Walking homeward I fraternize with shadows,
Zigzagging with them where they flee the streetlights,
Asking for trouble, asking for the message
trouble had sent me.

All fall down has been scribbled on the street in
Garbage and excrement: so much for the vision
Others taunt me with, my untimely humor,
so much for cheerfulness.

Next time don't wrangle, give the boy the money,
Call across chasms what the world you know is.
Luckless and lied to, how can a child master
human decorum?

Next time a switchblade, somewhere he is thinking,
I should have killed him and took the lousy wallet.
Reading my cards he feels a surge of anger
blind as my shame.

Error from Babel mutters in the places,
Cities apart, where now we word our failures:
Hatred and guilt have left us without language
that might have led to discourse

[Julie Steiner]

Thank you for these, Matt, and I apologize for not saying so sooner. Very helpful to have your observations on those traveling dactyls.

This is by Geoffrey Hill, from many Sapphics to choose from in this part of his sequence "The Daybooks" (Odi Barbare, 2012). I find it hilarious (Hillarious?) that in S2L1 he mentions Google, since I had already resorted to it twice by then in this section.

XXXI

Ghelderode's price here or the cost of Ensor.
Bloated Eros, your pain-extended body,
Jerked abroad scar-angry, a coarse cadaver
          Wired to a fine art.

Google my old blind of Platonics with Mc-
Taggart's mystic corpulence deemed endearing.
Sentiment grown wholly at one with logic,
          Durance feints passes.

Nobbled rhetor cleared but as aberration,
Scarcely gauge what skin I would have you shed here.
Rhetor not slave killer with net and trident
          Though it could well be.

So Petrarca, prego Madonna prego;
Wear dark glasses we must protect the sun. This
When in some sense naked desire's upon us
          Let us defer to.

Beggars' clay bowls ample for what was given,
I remember also Tagore's ecstatic
Mornings, all that rhapsody tuned by rapt strings,
          Shantineketan.

Given your pledge I would commute to service
Vessels once fit only for salvage bear my,
Our, libations fructile towards the altar
          Stone of this strophe.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

My translation of Catullus 51 and Sappho 31

Duncan

[Maryann Corbett]

Apologies if this has been posted above, and also if it's not kosher to revive this thread, but this poem is new to me this morning: "September Midnight" by Sara Teasdale. Lots of variation from the metrical standard!

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.