Many thanks to Tim and Carol, and especially to Richard Wilbur. It is indeed an honour.
I consider this to be bordering on light verse, which perhaps is why I allowed myself such rhymes as outback/shout back. When it was workshopped here, somebody remarked that the 8-line stanza form and the rhythm seemed similar to Swinburne’s in Chorus in Atalanta (“Now winter’s rains and ruins are over,/And all the season of snows and sins...”). I pleaded guilty, more or less. I did borrow the tetrameter ababccab stanza pattern from Swinburne — it’s one I’ve always liked. But I think my meter is rather closer to the anapestic end of the spectrum, with modulations: an attempt to suggest the rhythm of a train — consistent but not uniform.
I know some people take to these meters more easily than others. I agree that some of the nuts and bolts are showing here, and that some lines are a stretch. There is the one Richard mentioned, which is jammed as he says, and others that may seem wrenched through uncertainty of stress. I don’t think there’s any such uncertainty in lines like “fools on foot in the heat of day” or “this air-conditioned train is a palace” but there could be in “a thousand miles, as we used to say” (if you make it MI-yuls, that might throw a disruptive stress on “we”) or “from a three-billion-year-old wall of rock” (though I hoped the heavy rather monolithic middle there might echo the sense).
This has not been offered anywhere for publication. I’m conscious it can be improved, so perhaps I will now come up with some suitable changes.
My thanks again to Richard, Tim and Carol, and to the others who have commented.
Henry
[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited March 16, 2005).]
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