[David Anthony]

I love this beautiful artefact.
This is the essence of the poem, I think:

'Today it seems
that all the world is gentling.
We have let go of clutching things.'

[Terese Coe]

"It is enough to fall in love."

Hmm. That's true if you're very young or simply youthful, but...if one has to ask whether "growing old" is involved, then one is probably growing old. One may, of course, fall in love while mature, but it's a different animal from falling in love earlier. I think. Whether it's "enough" depends upon a million factors!

Terese

[Robt_Ward]

I'm in agreement with the Carol camp on the short line. I can't read it naturally with any significant caesura, and in any case the caesura can't replace a beat. I ask myself what purpose could be served by deliberately missing a beat here, and in this case I can find no sound/sense rationale for it. I'd like it to be that The "sense" of let go is echoed in the "sound" of the line short one beat, but it doesn't work that way for me. In fact, the opposite is happening. We are trying to stress "LET GO" when the act of "letting go" would be more of a sussuration, I think. To wit:

The air is cool and sweet with change.
"Breathe in," it says, "breathe and let go."
It is enough to fall in love.

See how the line begins in emphasis now, and then falls off gently as we let go?

(robt)

[Henry Quince]

It’s a very nice poem on a mystical theme as Mark has said. Congratulations to the author.

But pish and pshaw and a pox on all your metrical hair-splitting! This wretched insistence on foot scansion so often leads to absurdity. If the poem works its effect and sounds good, what on earth does it matter if this line or that is a lone trimeter in a phalanx of tet? And if it does matter, why has nobody made a similar complaint about the single pentameter line at the end? [Edited to say I see Rhina did mention it.]

For what it’s worth, neither of those "controversial" lines gave me the least pause. To me, a tri reading is the natural one for both. Even if I said gentling as GEN-tel-ing (which I don’t) I couldn’t get another beat out of it. GENTelING? Surely not. Or suppose we substituted the word gentle:

The sego lily and the rose
have quieted. Today it seems
that all the world is gentle.

Isn’t the three-beat line there effective? I can’t agree at all that the meter “requires” a fourth beat. And surely if the author thought so, she (?) wouldn’t have relied on an unnatural promotion of -ING to supply it.

The other one I read as breathe IN, it SAYS, and let GO. Trimeter again — and again the sixth line of the stanza. To me those variations are pleasing, like the longer final line, and I assume the author introduced all of them deliberately.

Henry

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[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited November 30, 2004).]

[Carol Taylor]

Henry, I think the whole point is whether the irregular lines are pleasing to the ear and mind or not, a subjective call that varies from ear to ear and mind to mind and poem to poem. It is not metrical hair-splitting for me to say that one of those lines bothers me with its missed beat. If the poem "works in effect and sounds good," that's one thing, and apparently it does for you.

As I stated earlier, the long last line might have worked for me if I hadn't been thrown out of the rhythm by the short preceding line. Even that might have worked if the penultimate line hadn't intervened, leaving me with no place to put the other foot down. In short, the variation doesn't work in effect or sound natural for me, and that's what I'm trying to point out.

Carol

[Greek Streak]

If one might be interested in the opinion of a reader whose native language is not English and who has no training in metrical poetry, please let me congratulate the authors of my three favorite poems from this fine selection of 18.

This one comes first on my list.

Congratulations,

Tonia

[Rose Kelleher]

I read L6 as almost-tetrameter, with a very subtle middle syllable in "gentling," and "ing" just barely--maybe mentally?--promoted. If there were a metronome keeping time in the background, the fourth tick would come eeeever so slightly after the "ing".

Works for me...so Carol must be WRONG!

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

You know, what I took from this was a rare thing: a seasonal poem about young love in some other season than spring, because young folk do actually fall in love in other seasons and appreciate them for their beauty, not just their handy if somewhat threadbare symbolism.

Looking at autumn as the world unfolding instead of dying is a refreshing thing, and I'll say that having written autumnal poems festooned with all the shrouds and cobwebs I could lay my hands on. In fact, the poet rather carefully has the narrator mention the traditional symbolism and dismiss it item by item as irrelevant to what she or he is feeling at the moment.

Metrically, I'm with Henry. Read aloud, this sounds fine, and the extra length of the final line is deliberate.

[Carol Taylor]

Rose, I read line 6 as tetrameter, no almost about it. Line 15 is the only trimeter line.

Carol

[Michael Cantor]

Another vote with Harry and Kevin. I like this mystical, musical poem very much; my ear has only one problem with it, and I am particularly fond of the way the meter and line length vary at the end - a closing flair that works very well for me.

I would, however, be happier with an extra syllable in L15: Breathe in it says, and then let go.

I believe that the writer (and I have my guess) has a superb, rhythmical ear, but is not a metric fundamentalist; and that the poem deserves to be listened to, not defined and mirco-parsed into submission.

Michael Cantor