Lines follow the direction of time. All spatial and architectural analogies are suspect unless they are applied to purely typographical considerations. Some poets have – quite misguidedly, I feel – talked of the start of the line as being as important as the end, the opening word as important as the last, and have used this to justify the use of consistently disruptive line-breaks to facilitate the placing of ‘interesting’ words at the head of the line.

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,

I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept

creeping over the smooth plastic

to find your strong meaty little hand and

squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the

noble ribbing of the corduroy,

straight and regular as anything in nature, to

find the slack cool cheek of a

child in the heat of a summer morning—

(SHARON OLDS, ‘The Daughter Goes to Camp’)1

If this approach was more than a novelty, poets would have been employing this ‘ragged edge’ technique for considerably longer than they have. Asking the first word to be as important as the last is asking time to run backwards: the hiatus means that the last word in the line reverberates briefly in its silence. Regardless of whether the word is ‘elephant’ or ‘the’, it will inevitably gain in semantic weight. But if it’s ‘the’, and there is no good reason for the pause, the effect is one of a gratuitous disruption; compositionally, it seems a weak choice and a wasted opportunity. This technique most often gives these terminal function words an absurd and counterproductive salience, one its poets tend to deny; however, its consistent deployment can diminish the disruption, as the expectation of effective line endings are lowered. (Though why one would want to limit the power of the poem’s most important formal feature is another question.)

Because of its temporal linearity, the start of the line is the ideal place for cramming in the extra weak syllables of the function words needed to propel the syntax forward at the start of a new phrase. They will read more quickly here that at any other position in the line, because the high-to-low model of the intonational phrase (with which line-template broadly tends to concur, and from which it is partly derived) also starts its syllable count fast, and slows towards the end. The effect is identical to the pickup bar in music, which shares the term ‘anacrusis’: the listener perceives the initial short notes as still belonging partly to the previous bar – or in poetry, the w stresses to either the hiatus or the ghost metron, if one occurs:

Were one to sing the last line, ‘changed’ would be naturally placed on the downbeat, with ‘they had’ crushed into the end of the previous bar.

At an even more basic level – when the line begins, the reader’s attention is as much taken up with its breaking the silence as with its sense, and this makes for a good opportunity to slip in all the messy and unmetrical stuff. Together with the function-first and masculine-ending tendencies of English syntax, it is the main justification for cutting into the metre-wallpaper before the weak stress, and gives the impression of a rising iambic default in duple metre.

Regular lines with odd-count stresses tend to invite more end-stopping; this is because the alternate stress rule places a natural counted pause – which I refer to as a ‘ghost metron’ – at the end of the line to even the numbers. Enjambment between odd-stress lines is a far more radical gesture than it is between even-stress lines, as it elides the ghost metron which elongates the hiatus. Counting errors often occur after enjambment in odd-stress metres, but especially in i.p. Syntax and clause-boundary are often influential factors; but often when i.p. lines enjamb, a dimetron is formed from the last iamb of one line and the first of the next; this produces a strongly even feel, especially when the phrased is closed by an initial caesura. As a result, the remaining four stresses of the second i.p. line are felt to even out the stress count – when it’s the odd-stress line the reader feels they need to hear re-established. This means that under those conditions, lines of correct length often feel ‘wrong’:

Here, the ‘the roof / effect’ is felt as even, and the 3-stress ‘I liked the snuff-dry feeling’ does the job of restoring the odd-count asymmetry of the i.p. It’s still a miscount – and technically, I suppose, a goof; but Heaney’s line shows how so-called error can work entirely to the poem’s euphonious advantage. Only a fool would claim ‘Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof / Effect. I liked the dandruffed, snuff-dry feeling’ was a better line on the grounds of its acatalexis; my rotten addition apart, it simply sounds too long. The ‘mistake’ is likely to have been wholly intentional, or at least a triumph of sound instinct over rule.

1 Sharon Olds, Selected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). Olds, like a number of poets of the first rank, succeeds despite and not through her technical experimentation. (I suspect her refusal to be bound by the conventions of the line ending is symptomatic of her rebellion against her own ‘hellfire Calvinist’ upbringing.) Though one might make an argument that perhaps in her case it does work: perhaps her viscerally moving poetry needs to looked as if it was torn out from the book, for all its meticulous construction.

2 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), 299.

3 Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1988–2013 (London: Faber & Faber, 2014).