First published in Poetry (October 1960).
WHAT DO I LIKE? LISTEN:
Hinx, minx, the old witch winks!
The fat begins to fry!
There’s nobody home but Jumping Joan,
And father, and mother, and I.
Now what makes that “catchy,” to use Mr. Frost’s word? For one thing: the rhythm. Five stresses out of a possible six in the first line, though maybe “old” doesn’t take quite as strong a stress as the others. And three—keep noticing that magic number—internal rhymes, hinx, minx, winks. And notice too the apparent mysteriousness of the action: something happens right away—the old witch winks and she sets events into motion. The fat begins to fry, literally and symbolically. She commands—no old fool witch this one. Notice that the second line, “The fat begins to fry,” is absolutely regular metrically. It’s all iambs, a thing that often occurs when previous lines are sprung or heavily counterpointed. The author doesn’t want to get too far from his base, from his ground beat. The third line varies again with an anapest and variations in the “o” and “u” sounds. “There’s nobody home but Jumping Joan.” Then the last line—anapest lengthening the line out to satisfy the ear, “And father, and mother, and I.” Sometimes we are inclined to feel that Mother Goose, or the traditional kind of thing, is almost infallible as memorable speech—the phrase is Auden’s. But this is by no means so. There is another version that goes,
Hink, mink, the old witch stinks,
The fat begins to fry:
Nobody’s home but Jumping Joan,
Jumping Joan and I.
Well, the whole situation has obviously altered, for the better perhaps from the standpoint of the speaker at least. But in his excitement he has produced a much inferior poem.
First, deleting the “x”s takes some of the force away from the three rhyming words—“Hinx, minx, the old witch winks,”—the triad. What’s more, he has become tiresomely naturalistic. “The old witch stinks”—hardly a fresh piece of observation. Stinks is a splendid old word, but here it is a bore. It is a prerogative of old witches to stink: part of their stock and trade as it were, and nobody mentions it. Take the change from minx, which means of course a pert little vixen of a girl, and carries with it overtones of tenderness; or, further back, a wanton, a roaring girl. And the mink—a wonderful little predatory animal with a characteristic odor. But if we keep that in mind, the line becomes an olfactory horror. It’s some fusty little cave these two have in the absence of father and mother. And their absence takes away the real drama from the situation. It’s a roll in the hay, and nothing more.
Allow me another I love:
I.N. spells IN.
I was in my kitchen
Doin’ a bit of stitching.
Old Father Nimble
Came and took my thimble.
I got a great big stone,
Hit him on the belly-bone.
O.U.T. spells OUT.
Here we see how light “i” and short “i” and feminine endings can make for speed, rhythmical quickness, and velocity, and then, with the words following the action, that truly awesome and portentous line with its spondees, “I gót a great bíg stóne… ”; and then the sudden speed-up in the action—the triumphant release from a frustration, I suppose the Freudians would say—“Hit him on the bellybone. / O.U.T. spells out.”
Take another, a single line, which is always a test:
Great A, little a, bouncing B.
There are three shifts of pace—it’s a triad again, lovely alliteration, the long full vowels combined.
Names themselves can be a love—and half the poem:
Julius Caesar Pompey Green
Wore a jacket of velveteen.
What’s my real point by these little examples? It’s this: that, while our genius in the language may be essentially iambic, particularly in the formal lyric, much of memorable or passionate speech is strongly stressed, irregular, even “sprung,” if you will. Now we see that the name itself, the direct address, makes for the memorable, for rhythmical interest; often it makes for implied dialogue. Take the ridiculous:
Oh father dear, do ships at sea
Have legs way down below?
Of course they do, you goosey you,
Or else how could they go?
But you may protest, these are the rhythms of children, of folk material, strongly stressed—memorable perhaps, but do they appear in poetry today? The answer is yes, certainly in some poems. For instance, Auden’s:
The silly fool, the silly fool
Was sillier in school
But beat the bully as a rule.
The youngest son, the youngest son
Was certainly no wise one
Yet could surprise one.
Or rather, or rather
To be posh, we gather,
One should have no father.
Then the cryptic and elliptical end:
Simple to prove
That deeds indeed
In life succeed,
But love in love,
And tales in tales
Where no one fails.
Not all Mother-Goosey to be sure. And the “rather-father” rhyme maybe comes from Sam Johnson’s:
If the man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
’Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.
Or take an example from myself: “I Need, I Need.” In the first section the protagonist, a little boy, is very sad. Then there is a jump-rope section in which two children chant in alternate aggressive dialogue. Then their aggression trails off into something else:
Even steven all is less:
I haven’t time for sugar,
Put your finger in your face,
And there will be a booger.
A one is a two is
I know what you is:
You’re not very nice,—
So touch my toes twice.
I know you are my nemesis
So bibble where the pebble is.
The Trouble is with No and Yes
As you can see I guess I guess.
I wish I was a pifflebob
I wish I was a funny
I wish I had ten thousand hats,
And made a lot of money.
Not you I need.
Go play with your nose.
Stay in the sun,
Snake-eyes.
Some of the poems I cherish from the dramatists have heavily pronounced, strongly stressed swat rhythms. They are written to be sung, or maybe danced to. Here from Ralph Roister Doister:
I mun be married a Sunday;
I mun be married a Sunday;
Whosoever shall come that way,
I mun be married a Sunday.
Roister Doister is my name;
Roister Doister is my name;
A lusty brute I am the same;
I mun be married a Sunday.
Notice that the shift in the second stanza, in tone, and feeling—how it goes into another speed rhythmically.
George Peele, that wonderful poet, abounds in incantatory effects with the same propulsion. Here is the opening of a dialogue:
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
The fairest shepherd on our green,
A love for any lady.
And later:
And of my love my roundelay,
My merry, merry, merry roundelay,
Concludes with Cupid’s curse:
They that do change old love for new,
Pray gods they change for worse!
Repetition in word and phrase and in idea is the very essence of poetry and particularly of this kind of poetry. Notice how these poets can and do change the pace, and the change is right, psychologically. We say the command, the hortatory, often makes for the memorable. We’re caught up, involved. It is implied we do something, at least vicariously. But it can also be very tricky—it can seem to have a factitious strength. The emotion must be strong and legitimate and not fabricated. Thus when Elinor Wylie writes:
Go study to disdain
The frail, the over-fine
I can’t get past the first line. There is no conviction, no natural rhythm of speech. I suppose there must be an element of the startling, or the strange, or the absurd. Yeats is magnificent, often, at getting the right tone, seizing the attention:
Call down the hawk from the air;
Let him be hooded or caged…
or:
Come swish around, my pretty punk,
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.
Or Donne’s
So, so, breake off this last lamenting kisse,…
In some more serious poetry we see again how the direct address can pull us up sharply. We are used to this in spoken language. Maybe we hark back to the condition of the child when we are being told. Almost invariably a dramatic situation, some kind of opposition, is indicated. Thus in Charlotte Mew’s:
Sweetheart, for such a day,
one mustn’t grudge the score;…
Or Donne’s:
When by thy scorne, O murderesse, I am dead,…
Or the action itself can be dramatic, as in Herbert’s:
I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
Or the situation can be given dramatically, as in Kunitz’s:
Within the city of the burning cloud,
Dragging my life behind me in a sack,
Naked I prowl,…
But what about the rhythm and the motion of the poem as a whole? Are there any ways of sustaining it, you may ask? We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem.
We’ve been told that a rhythm is invariably produced by playing against an established pattern. Blake does this admirably in “A Poison Tree”:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
The whole poem is a masterly example of variation in rhythm, of playing against meter. It’s what Blake called “the bounding line,” the nervousness, the tension, the energy in the whole poem. And this is a clue to everything. Rhythm gives us the very psychic energy of the speaker, in one emotional situation at least.
But there are slow rhythms, too, for we’re not always emotionally “high.” And these, as any practitioner will find, are very difficult to sustain in poetry without boring the reader. Listen to Janet Lewis’s “Girl Help”:
Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room,
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom.
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest.
And stops to breathe,
Amid the summer hum,
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.
Here we see particularly the effect of texture, especially the vowel sounds as well as the effect of the dentates, the “d”s and “t”s. The first line sets the pace. It can’t be said fast: “Mild and slow and young.” It’s a little vignette, very feminine, absolutely true emotionally—the drowsy adolescent; but the poem is not static: the girl moves, she stirs, she stops to rest, and stops to breathe. And the girl virtually embraced by the season that is part of herself.
It’s nonsense, of course, to think that memorableness in poetry comes solely from rhetorical devices, or the following of certain sound patterns, or contrapuntal rhythmical effects. We all know that poetry is shot through with appeals to the unconsciousness, to the fears and desires that go far back into our childhood, into the imagination of the race. And we know that some words, like hill, plow, mother, window, bird, fish, are so drenched with human association, they sometimes can make even bad poems evocative.
I remember the first time I heard Robert Frost read, in 1930. Suddenly a line, I think it was from Shakespeare, came into his head. He recited it. “Listen to that,” he said. “Just like a hiss, just like a hiss.” It is what Eliot has called “the auditory imagination”: the sinuousness, a rhythm like the tail of a fish, a cadence like the sound of the sea or the arbor bees—a droning, a hissing, a sighing. I find it in early Auden:
Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;
Shall the bird live,
Shall the fish dive,
And sheep obey
Can love remember
The question and the answer,
For love recover
What has been dark and rich and warm all over?
Curiously, we find this primitiveness of the imagination cropping up in the most sophisticated poetry. If we concern ourselves with more primitive effects in poetry, we come inevitably to consideration, I think, of verse that is closer to prose. And here we jump rhythmically to a kind of opposite extreme. For many strong stresses, or a playing against an iambic pattern to a loosening up, a longer, more irregular foot, I agree that free verse is a denial in terms. There is, invariably, the ghost of some other form, often blank verse, behind what is written, or the more elaborate rise and fall of the rhythmical prose sentence. Let me point up, to use Mr. Warren’s phrase, in a more specific way the difference between the formal poem and the more proselike piece. Mr. Ransom has written his beautiful elegy, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”; I’d like to read “Elegy for Jane” on the same theme, a poem, I’m proud to say, Mr. Ransom first printed.
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
But let me indicate one or two technical effects in my little piece. For one thing, the enumeration, the favorite device of the more irregular poem. We see it again and again in Whitman and Lawrence. “I remember,” then the listing, the appositions, and the absolute construction. “Her song trembling,” etc. Then the last three lines in the stanza lengthen out:
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
A kind of continuing triad. In the last two stanzas exactly the opposite occurs, the final lines being,
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
There is a successive shortening of the line length, an effect I have become inordinately fond of, I’m afraid. This little piece indicates in a way some of the strategies for the poet writing without the support of a formal pattern—he can vary his line length, modulate, he can stretch out the line, he can shorten. It was Lawrence, a master of this sort of poem (I think I quote him more or less exactly), who said, “It all depends on the pause, the natural pause.” In other words, the breath unit, the language that is natural to the immediate thing, the particular emotion. Think of what we’d have missed in Lawrence, in Whitman, in Charlotte Mew, or, more lately, in Robert Lowell, if we denied this kind of poem. There are areas of experience in modern life that simply cannot be rendered by either the formal lyric or straight prose. We need the catalogue in our time. We need the eye close on the object, and the poem about the single incident—the animal, the child. We must permit poetry to extend consciousness as far, as deeply, as particularly as it can, to recapture, in Stanley Kunitz’s phrase, what it has lost to some extent to prose. We must realize, I think, that the writer in freer forms must have an even greater fidelity to his subject matter than the poet who has the support of form. He must keep his eye on the object, and his rhythm must move as a mind moves, must be imaginatively right, or he is lost. Let me end with a simple and somewhat clumsy example of my own, in which we see a formal device giving energy to the piece, that device being, simply, participial or verbal forms that keep the action going:
BIG WIND
Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped?—
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap;
But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm,
Ploughing with her stiff prow,
That broke over the whole of her,
Flailing her sides with spray,
Flinging long strings of wet across the roof-top,
Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
She sailed until the calm morning,
Carrying her full cargo of roses.