[A. E. Stallings]

Oh dear--I was hoping to avoid discussing any of my poems--but I will post one. (Bruce, thanks for your kind words.)

First, though, an example of how "loose iambics" if you will (basically the insertion of anapests into iambic lines) can work in a stricter ip context. Here again, it is often the article that makes this work. While an article can, as shown, occasionally be made to take a stress (usually mid-line), if a stressed syllable follows directly after an article, it will tend to shirk the accent--particularly in constructions such as "and a", "of the", etc. (as the Shakespeare example, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun"). It is almost as if the syllables are so slight, and the construction perceived as such a unit, that they count as an elision.

Consider this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Teh blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Strictly standard IP--the beginning initial trochee (Turning and turning) is a standard substitution. Otherwise, the variation is subtlely rhythmic rather than metric--promotions, elision, secondary stresses, demotions of heavy unaccented syllables (rhythmic spondee), etc.

It continues or a few lines in regular ip (with more metrical substitions, but still standard ones--initial trochees, a medial trochee, etc.):

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

And then starts to "come apart" (almost as if the centrifugal are widening the gaps between accented syllables by the insertion of extra unaccented syllables):

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man

or a syllable drops out:

a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Then back to more or less regular ip.

I find these hypermetric (and hypometric) rhythms quite pleasing, and am probably more liberal in anapestic substitutions in IP than many formalists would approve of. But I consider myself as working within the tradition--as exemplified in this Yeats poem--rather than breaking any rules.

[A. E. Stallings]

OK--I realize you folks have seen the bat poem before--here it is again.

(Actually, though this was discussed as being metrically quirky in another thread, there is nothing all THAT metrically exotic here, in my opinion):

Explaining an Affinity for Bats


That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,
And seem something else at first—a swallow—
And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,
Staggering towards an obstacle they yet
Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,
Somehow telling solid things from hollow,
Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,
Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

[Tim Murphy]

I don't think there's anything terribly exotic here. The Yeats, which I was thinking of posting for discussion, is much kinkier. In your poem, Alicia, the substitutions are wonderfully expressive of the flittering subject. For instance the back to back trochaic lines lend the poem a wonderful velocity we wouldn't get from two back to back IP's.

I think it was Davis who thought this pretty outre. But there is a school of Formalism, call them the Wintersians for want of a better term, who are very conservative metrists. With Edgar Bowers and Jim Cunningham deceased, the best practitioners of this school are Davis and Steele and Gwynn, all of whom are just marvelous metrists. Tim reads most of my poems and about twice a year he objects to something and proposes a change. I ALWAYS take his suggestions.

[Roger Slater]

Alicia's bat poem is less metrically "quirky" than I remember it for some reason. Apropos the discussion about stressing articles, it seems that L5 may locate a metrical stress on "a", or perhaps the article resists the metrical pull somehow and the second and third feet are one of those phyric-spondee pairings we hear about sometimes.

Also, L2 seems to be pentameter only if one gives a stress to the initial "And," which is plausible but not the first impulse a reader might have on first reading.

I'd be curious, if Alicia is willing to say, how Alicia goes about evaluating the metrical suitability of her own lines when she writes them and whether there's a "standard" that she shoots for in terms of following the "rules" as she understands them. Not just Alicia, but anyone. Does it ever happen that you write a line or two that please your ear but you go back and try to scan the line and find it breaks some rule or principle that you subscribe to as a general matter? Do you "fix" the line or do you honor your ear and just go with the line, carping metrists be damned?

[robert mezey]

Roger, I think line 5 in Alicia's poem is a
very good example of an ionic foot, two very
weak syllables followed by two very strong ones.
There are times when one can read such a sequence
in more than one way, but in this case, I think
that putting an accent on the article would be
just wrong.
As for composing a line that sounds good but
doesn't scan, I should say that that's not an
uncommon phenomenon. I have somewhere in a
notebook a dozen or so examples of such lines
from Frost. Another good example that springs
to mind is the last four lines of "Dockery and
Son"--after many lines of more or less regular
pentameter, you get

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes

(and then back to the pentameter)

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

I suppose one could argue that you could read
"Life is first boredom, then fear" with five
stresses, but it is not an iambic pentameter;
nor is the following line. But what a marvelous
effect.

In a strict iambic poem, I wrote the line,
"Who could be left to smile at the sound,"
which to my ear sounds like a pentameter,
though Don Justice pointed out, justly, that
"smile" has not traditionally been allowed two
syllables, as "fire" or "power" can be. But
still, I hear it as two, or at least one and
a half, and in the end decided to keep the
line as it was, liking the sound, even if it's
not strictly metrical. But in general I think
it's a good idea, for us who don't have the
easy command of Larkin or Justice or Frost etc,
to stick to the meter.

[Tim Murphy]

Cher maitre, I agree. The meters are so infinite in their variety that we mortals can do worse than abide by their rules.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Robert

About your line "Who could be left to smile at the sound", from "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)"…

I am pleased to learn how you read and hear this. As I pointed out to Tim a few months ago, when my UK ear, which took "smile" as a monosyllable, heard something different and irregular, my regard for your writing led me to credit you with a wonderful rhythmical finesse at this point in the poem. This is how I hear the verse (beats are in bold):

But they danced here sixty-five years ago! -
Almost all of them must be underground.
Who could be left to smile at the sound
Of the old-fangled dance tunes and each pair
Of youthful lovers swaying to and fro?

There is a progressive breakdown in the regularity of these lines after the sonorous exactness of the last line of the previous stanza ("And nothing further from their thoughts than death"). According to my ear, in lines 3 and 4, the prevailing iambic pulse is temporarily abandoned for triple rhythms suggestive of the rhythms of the long-silent dance music itself - an eerie but moving metrical effect, it seemed to me. In the fifth line, the iambic pulse is restored. So subjective can these matters be!

I am reminded of an incident reported in a British national newspaper perhaps forty years ago now. It seemed that Hollywood critics at a premier applauded what they thought was far-out, avant-garde technique for the title credits of a new Peter Sellers film. Then they realized a gaping ten-foot hole had accidentally been torn in the screen.

Thank you for your fine poem.

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

[robert mezey]

Clive,
I don't myself hear any breakdown of metrical regularity, though I don't mind a reader's taking the 3rd line of that
stanza as short a foot---it still sounds ok to me (though,
as I say, I hear "smile" as at least a syllable-and-a-half).
The first line has a trochee in the middle of the line, but
after a brief caesura---nothing very daring there. As for
line 4, it opens with an ionic, a common substitution, but
I don't think it ends with one---the fourth foot is what I
call an inverted iamb, the first syllable heavier than the
second but not enough to get the accent: because of the
falling rhythm of "DANCE tune," I hear a slight accent on
afticle. Thus:

Of the OLD-FANGled DANCE tunes AND each PAIR

I can't at all hear it the way you scanned it. And I'd
say that whole stanza, in fact the whole poem, is regular pentameter except perhaps for that "smile" business. (And
that's an anomaly---normally, I wouldn't permit that sort
of monkey-business.)
The most interesting line, to my ear, is

And some then dance off in the late sunlight

where the meter and speech rhythm dance a comlicated few
steps together. The middle foot is rather ambiguous.
And I like the way the rhetoric in line 10 enforces a
trochee not right after the caesura, but in the next foot.

SOME of them SINGle, SOME HUSbands and WIVES


say the stanza is quite regular except for that "smile"
business.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Robert

Thank you for your fascinating account of this verse. In fact, I believe we are saying much the same thing.

Pace your remarks, however, I do think the first two lines of the verse are less regular than the line which ends the previous verse, which is paradigmatically exact ("And nothing further from their thoughts than death"). What I mean is that the trochee to which you refer in the middle of the first line and the two trochees which open the second line are, as I think of it, variations - entirely common variations, of course - from the normative paradigm and to that degree are not rhythmiocally regular. They enact a slight disturbance against the underlying iambic pulse. As we agree, line 4 is unorthodox - I think delightfully so. This is what I mean by saying that at the start of the verse, there is "a progressive breakdown in the regularity of these lines after the sonorous exactness of the last line of the previous stanza". The hint of triple rhythms in lines 4 and 5, which I heard as a lovely finesse, take their lead, as it were, from the increasing incidence of metrical variation in the previous two lines. To one who finds it quite unnatural to hear "smile" as a disyllable, the whole effect - the perhaps inadvertent effect - seems very fine indeed. Indeed, it is the subtle and dynamic relationships of rhythm from phrase to phrase and line to line that is so enchanting.

About the ending of line 4, I suspect this is one of those cases to which Alicia has drawn attention on other occasions where the rhythms of the words seem to float lightly on the reading voice over the words themselves. The limited forms of notation available from a word-processor barely allow the delicate balance of stresses and the pace of the words in "and each pair" to be marked.

Thank you again for your illuminating comments.

Clive Watkins

[A. E. Stallings]

Another nice example of true "loose iambics" (I feel another term would be more useful, but can't seem to come up with one), this one by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

[b]Winter Night[/B}

Pile high the hickory and the light
Log of chestnut struck by the blight.
Welcome-in the winter night.

The day has gone in hewing and felling,
Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling
For the night of talk and story-telling.

These are the hours that give the edge
To the blunted axe and the bent wedge,
Straighten the saw and lighten the sledge.

Here are question and reply,
And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.
So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.

A lot of refreshing rhythmic variety here--from straight iambic (as the last line) and trochaic (line 3) to sprinklings of anapests, or two heavy stressed syllables back to back (bent wedge). She makes good use of the skipping ability of light little (anceps) monosyllabic words, also in combination with the light syllables of trochaic words. We even get a relatively rare three-light-syllables-in-a-row (a firey flickering, as it were) in the penultimate line.