Before, or while, writing a poem, the poet listens to himself as truly as he can to hear how the poem is trying to happen. After the poem is written, he has another chance to listen, not this time to himself but to the poem, to hear what has happened. By this unbiased, open listening, the means and use of himself as an instrument are brought more perfectly into knowledge.
I’ve noticed a few things in my verse lately that arouse my curiosity, and I wonder if they reflect important little real things that are happening to poetry or just willed nerve. Take these few lines:
and the mountain
pleased
but reluctant to
admit my praise could move it much
shook a little
and rained a windrow ring of stones
to show
that it was so
Here the box-like structure of rhymed, measured verse is pretty well shot. The emphasis has shifted from the ends of the lines (see German sentence structure, see the concluding emphasis that rhyme itself imposes) toward the left-hand margin. A slightly stronger than usual emphasis is given to and: mountain is played down, aided by its feminine ending: pleased, being one sound, has no beginning or end: to / admit fractures the movement so that an artificial emphasis is given to to but only so that even more weight can fall with admit at the beginning of the line: much ends the line emphatically, but after all both lines are suspended between pleased and shook, so that all the weight actually falls at the beginning of a line again. The last three lines have the emphasis at the end, though that in the last line receives more than normal stress.
What I think is illustrated by so tiny a fragment of verse is that both ends are being played against a middle. The center of gravity is an imaginary point existing between the two points of beginning and end, so that a downward pull is created that gives a certain downward rush to the movement, something like a waterfall glancing in turn off opposite sides of the canyon, something like the right and left turns of a river.
The caesura of traditional verse, the fact that it was consciously, magnificently employed, may suggest that it acted as a counterweight to the heavy-ended couplets, that it was a correction of the center of gravity, so that the lines would be poised in balance, instead of slanting down to heavy stops. Of course, the caesura could not balance the line: that would have destroyed the couplet effect. But it could echo the line-end and so shift some of the weight to the left.
A central poise suggests the pendulum: it is held in an instant of sight at either extremity of its swing, but what it is constantly operating around is the bottom point of its downward swing. Though there is an emphasis of light and “stillness” at either extremity, the real center is passed in rapid motion.
I think the quoted fragment and these thoughts suggest that a nonlinear movement is possible which uses both the beginning and the end of the line as glancing-off points, so that the movement is not across the page but actually, centrally down the page.