[mandolin]

Originally posted by robert mezey:
By the way, don't you think Yeats was a lousy reader, those of you who have heard the few things recorded? It takes a kind of genius to mess up as good a poem as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

Timothy Steele goes so far as to suggest that one of the motivating forces in the develolpment of free verse was the style of reading practiced by the late Victorians--and Yeats was one of 'em.

[Golias]

Bob, I heard these recordings of Yeats' readings just two days ago. I'm afraid I was so impressed by just hearing the great poet read that I listened quite uncritically. Someone told me that when asked why he so accentuated the beats -- in amplitude and duration, he said something to this effect: I went to a lot of trouble to arrange those accents, and I want them to be heard.

If you ever attended a Carl Sandburg performance then you may remember that he did something of the same kind -- deeply intoning the lines and dropping in sonorous UH's here and there. He sang about the same way -- growling.

I'm looking forward to your explanation of rhythm and meter differences. Does it suggest that if one adheres strictly to one or two types of metrical feet, choosing short and long syllables carefully, so that the "metrical rhythm" prevails, then the result is, in most cases, uninteresting, dull and mechanical? Aren't there quite a lot of famous examples to the contrary? I think of Hood's Bridge of Sighs and Gray's Elegy, as being most carefully wrought to the meter and foot-type -- dactylic and iambic respectively--and to me these do not sound monotonous or dull at all. What is it about the argument that I'm missing?

[Tim Murphy]

I have to agree with Bob that meter and rhythm are properly at war in the vast majority of first-rate poetry. And meter is simple, whether it be Homer's (and Virgil's) dactyllic hexameters or Murphy's iambic dimeter. Rhythms in poems are far more complex. The rhythm of the line, of the stanza, of the sentence, the much larger rhythm of the entire emotional argument of the poem. Rhythm follows argument, follows the complex thoughts of the human brain, accords with syntax and all the complexities of our speech. Meter, which gives all these rhythms their magic, is basically metronomic. It is the numbers. It is the net on the tennis court where Frost played to win.

[Golias]

Well, Tim, that's too deep for me, and I rather doubt that, without better guiding systems and methods than we have now, anyone can consciously control all the various elements you mention so as to produce an intentional result, which means, to me,if it means anything at all, that a lot of the end product must be accidental.

However, I think these subtle entities are, perhaps, being multiplied beyond necessity. Meter is number (measure) and rhythm is sound pattern (time), each with the same meaning in poetry as in music. That is all I know and all I need to know.

Pitch is another element of the resulting sound, but I think we discussed that before, and it is not under consideration here. Sydney Lanier wrote a book about it, which I couldn't understand either.

G.





[This message has been edited by Golias (edited January 06, 2003).]

[Tim Murphy]

Golias, the rhythms, micro- and macro-, those of phrase, sentence, line and stanza, are so apparent in your excellent little collection at The New Formalist e-books, that the inevitably happy struggle of meter and rhythm in your own work cannot be accidental.

[Golias]

OK, Tim, can we call it unconscious? The same kind of thing sometimes occurs in my oil paintings; the brushes and paints do things that are better than I can do intentionally.

Thanks for the ego boost, however.

G

[robert mezey]

Yes, of course, most of those beautiful rhythmical effects are not consciously plotted out, not in the sense that the poet thinks, "Ah, better have a trochee here, and this next vowel must be long &c &c"---but they're NOT accidental. Yeats and
most of us say the line or lines over and over, weighing and
judging---by ear---until it sounds right. (Of course, for those of us who aren't all that good, it may sound right but still be wrong.) I simply mean that one goes along line by line trying to get the sound, the whole sound, meter, vowel length, pitch, tone etc ad infinitum, and hopes for the best.
You're not thinking about vowel length, pitch, etc., or very
rarely---you're just listening intently, no?
More later.

[Golias]

Bob, you describe the writing process just as it has seemed to me, though I can't claim to have an ear that's very superior. After you, Tim, referred me back to my own poems in the New Formalist e-book, I started looking through that batch and some others among my papers, to see whether I could find a sufficiently clear example of a struggle between rhythm and meter.

What I have found is a sestet I had almost forgotten in which there are two or three lines I can't seem to scan with my usual methods, but which, nevertheless, sound exactly right to me.

But I'm still not sure this is what either of you mean.


Age and Sleep

Sleep, old man, in your recliner, dreaming, at peace.
In your rumbling dreams we cannot guess where you go.
Does your long nap give you forgetfulness and ease,
Or is it a movie where only you see the show?
A room where a perfumed teacher touches your hand?
Or somewhere we've never been and would not understand?


The first and third lines are the ones that sound right to me but don't seem to yield to a regular metrical scan -- possibly the second line as well.

Am I on the right path toward understanding your idea?

G.

[This message has been edited by Golias (edited January 07, 2003).]

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

When I read a poem that moves me through and through, it sounds to me as if the meter is coming from the desire to sing--the order-making, beauty-making part of what the poet does--but the rhythm, which includes all the substitutions and "wrenchings" of language, comes from the emotion feeding the poem, the matter itself. Poetry is a kind of singing, but often about something that doesn't justify singing: that's the tension I hear, and the source of what's moving in a good poem, or much of it, anyway: the fact that under the singing there is something else, barely controlled, with difficulty, but finally controlled.

[Roger Slater]

Rhina, that's a fine way of looking at it.

I think it may be related to a different notion that also appeals to me. That is, "meter" is a shared, public and communal way of talking, or singing, and "rhythm" is perhaps a more personal or private matter. One of the things poetry does is allow the merging of the public and the private, the universal and the individual. This merger elevates the individual into the universal (giving it meaning) while personalizing the universal (keeping it from being an arid abstraction). We may share meter and form, but we remain ourselves. When I read one of your poems, for example, I know that only Rhina could have written it, and it sounds just like her, and yet the poem is made up of publicly available, shared metrical figures. Meter is a concession to universal forms, and rhythm, perhaps, is an insistence on the individual.