SO NOW WE KNOW THAT LINES OF POEMS ARE MADE UP OF METRICAL feet (or not) and arranged in patterns (or not) to achieve specific effects (I’m fairly sure this one applies universally). Admittedly, that’s not much to go on. So here’s the question: once words are arranged into lines, what are they supposed to do? I spent a number of years in a writers’ group with several friends. There were poets, fiction writers, memoirists—and me. What I added to the mix, aside from some dubious fiction, was one of the mysteries of the group, but it all seemed to work. And here is one thing I discovered fairly quickly. When discussing poems, we spent an inordinate amount of time on the question of line length: Why do you break the line here and not, say, over there? Are you looking for a specific rhythm in the line or the absence or even subversion of rhythm? And most of all, what do you want this line to do?
That’s always the real question: What do you want this line to do?
This question sounds like something that would only apply to free or open or nonmetrical verse, and of course it does matter there. But it also applies to metrical verse. Sure, the line has to work out correctly; if you’re writing iambic hexameter and your line suddenly works out to have seven rather than six beats, you’ve got yourself a problem. But we allow a certain amount of liberty—as we discussed, poetic license—to arrange words in ways that are not common in prose, precisely so that desired poetic effects can be achieved. These decisions, logically enough, involve some very technical and sometimes dry matters. Does the poet want a natural word order, for instance, that will involve, say, a comma or semicolon at the end of the line, or a slightly convoluted order that will allow the line to end freely with no punctuation (what is called an enjambed line)?
In other words, the poet has to decide to do this rather than something else that might be almost equally plausible:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Almost. It might be possible to end every line at the comma, so that we see:
April is the cruelest month,
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
Mixing memory and desire,
Etc.
Indeed, many lesser poets would likely do that. But this isn’t a lesser poet; this is T. S. Eliot beginning The Waste Land (1922), and he knows he needs something to propel readers forward into this daunting poem full of unexplained allusions and untranslated quotes, to say nothing of its sudden leaps from place to place and time to time. He casts about and finds that the answer is . . . participles. Seriously? Participles? Yes, present participles, those magical little verb forms (“-ing” words, in this case) that end every line lacking a period: “breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring,” “covering,” “feeding.” Residing at the beginnings of lines, they simply open participial phrases that are contained by those lines. At the ends of lines, they create suspense: What is April breeding, what was winter covering, and with what? My alternatives just lie there, inert; Eliot’s lines drive across the line break, vaulting us over the gap as we seek answers to questions we didn’t know we had.
Here’s the point: grammatically and semantically, nothing changes from one version to the other. As sentences, the lines read and mean exactly the same thing. What changes is the reader’s relation to the poem. Eliot causes us to become more active; each of those participles acts as a springboard from which we dive ahead toward the next surprise. That is what well-placed line breaks, at their best, can accomplish. Obviously, not every enjambed line will have the propulsive force of Eliot’s. We should understand, rather, that there is (or should be) a reason for choosing to either end-stop or enjamb a line, and that there are always consequences connected with that choice, whatever it is.
That choice, in this instance, arises from an open-form or free verse poem, but it presents the same issues for traditional, closed-form poets. If we look at poems from the last chapter, we can see the logic of other choices. Here’s Longfellow again:
By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,
Hiawatha stood and waited.
What, every line end-stopped? As you can probably guess, this can’t go on indefinitely. The result, after a few thousand lines, would be a little choppy, yes? But just for now, for getting this section started, it works. Each line here is a self-contained prepositional phrase, until the final line, which is an independent clause, a sentence that can stand on its own. The first four lines simply identify where Hiawatha did his standing and waiting: by the Big Lake, in his doorway, at a certain season and time of day. And it is customary when stacking prepositional phrases to separate them by commas.
Could Longfellow pull an Eliot here, maybe putting the prepositions on the previous lines? No. First of all, it simply isn’t in his nature. A chickadee can’t become a hawk. More to the point, however, the prepositions don’t lend themselves to that sort of separation. I suppose you can have a “by” on the line before its noun, “by / The shining Big-Sea-Water,” but it comes across as just dumb, and Longfellow is anything but that. More to the point, the single-syllable prepositions provide the downbeat for the first trochee, so their presence up front is essential.
Very different approaches, then, yet both instances possess that sense of inevitability that characterizes great poetry: “Of course it is like that; how else could it be?”
SOMEWHAT FREER VERSE
YOU KNOW WE’RE talking about literature, right, poetry being one of the founding members? And one of the rules of literature is that there are always exceptions. Even the exceptions have exceptions. So you shouldn’t be too shocked to discover that the whole metered poetry business has some opt-outs. Free verse would be one of the obvious examples. “Free verse” is a not-terribly-accurate term for the sort of open-form poetry (many critics of it spoke of it as formless, but that’s not necessarily true) that declined to be governed by rules of line and meter and stanza (the rule-governed type being called in this pairing closed-form). Taking nineteenth-century Walt Whitman as spiritual father, the free verse movement or impulse took off in a big way in the twentieth century, so much so that in the 1980s I was told by someone who should have known better that she couldn’t really handle contemporary English poetry because whenever she saw poems with traditional versification (the closed-form type), she assumed they were parodies or jokes. I can promise you that even at his jokiest, sneaky-sly best, Philip Larkin means business. So free verse or open-form poetry is one sort of reaction against the prevailing trend of seven or so centuries.
Free verse found its footing during the days of Imagism in the mid-1910s. That movement sought to cut the flab out of poetry by focusing strictly on the presentation of an image, as in one of its most famous poems (1923):
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
There’s really no inherent reason for those stanzas not to be single lines: “glazed with rain water” reads at least as well as “glazed with rain / water.” And there is certainly no metrical imperative at work here. We might make the argument that each first line has two beats, each second only one. But is it true? Is that very first line, “So much depends” to be read as “Só mŭch dĕ-pénds” or “Só múch dĕ-pénds”? I incline toward the latter. And beyond that, those stressed syllables aren’t offset by unstressed syllables in a regular metrical pattern. So let’s think about what is gained by arranging it the way Williams does.
For one thing, this more vertical arrangement causes the poem to last just a little longer. Each one of those line endings forces our eye to travel down the page, and that takes time. Yes, it’s fractional, but fractions count. Then, too, those line breaks introduce drama. Suspense, even. The drama might be less suspense than tension between an expectation he has set up and the thing he delivers. In the third “stanza,” “rain” does not have to be followed by “water,” although we might well expect that. Could be “droplets” or “sheen” or something of the sort, although, this being Williams, there is every likelihood that the plainspoken “water” is the answer. The real payoff is in the fourth stanza. Would you be expecting “chickens” when the card was pulled away in the big reveal? This could easily be a four-line poem, and even then, none of the lines would contain over six syllables. Yet by playing line breaks against readers’ expectations, Williams creates something new and very surprising. And, as history will have it, very famous. Not exactly Sonnet 73, but it serves its creator’s purpose as well as that sonnet serves Shakespeare’s.
So that’s one way to wave bye-bye to metrical feet.
But only one. Perhaps you’re a poet who wants to get beyond all those iambs and trochees and such but who still wants the challenge of working within restrictions. What then? How about counting syllables? The haiku and related forms, thought exotic not that long ago, are instances of strict syllabic verse, and we have grown accustomed to them. Since the Middle Ages, French poets have practiced syllabic verse, which is to say, they have counted syllables exactly. Whereas Anglophone poets sometimes play fast and loose with added (or omitted) syllables, especially of the unstressed variety, the Francophone have been held to a more exacting standard. Happily, we’re talking here about poems in English, where, especially in the twentieth century, poets can make their own rules. Now, French poems are overwhelmingly (from a historical perspective) written in either ten- or twelve-syllable lines, which is fine for them. But if you were a young American poet in the nineteen teens, and if you were something of a freethinker in matters of poetics, you might decide to reject three things: standard English metrical verse, free verse (where almost no rules apply), and French assumptions about how syllabic verse is supposed to behave. You might just do that, as Marianne Moore does:
The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
That is the opening stanza of “The Fish” (1921) plus the first two lines of the second. I couldn’t very well leave you with an unfinished sentence, could I? We’ll talk about the stanza structure a bit later, when we move on to such matters. For now, however, I just want to focus on the line lengths. First, let’s grant that each stanza has five lines, something you can’t yet tell since you have only part of the poem. And all five lines are distinct. The first line has one syllable; the second one, three; the third, nine; the fourth, six; and the fifth, eight. So that’s the first stanza. And the second one? 1–3–9–6–8. Same with the third, fourth, and so on. When you see the whole poem on the page, after a moment or so your eye adjusts and tells you, “Hey, these all look alike.” That’s because, I think, of the staggered starts: the first two are flush left, the second two indented three spaces, the fifth indented another three. Some people claim that the ragged beginnings of lines emulate the rough face of a coral reef, which is the subject that the poem really describes.
Admittedly, syllabic verse is a fairly small subset of all poetry in English, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done or won’t be done again in the future. As with most things artistic, we are limited only by the range of our own imaginations.
RADICAL SHIFTS
IN HIS FIRST four books, W. S. Merwin followed conventional, even classical models for poems, and he was very good at them. His first volume, A Mask for Janus (1952), won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and he received numerous fellowships and grants. The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) seemed like the arrival of a major voice in American poetry; it was, but not in the way it promised. With his fifth volume, The Moving Target (1963), he abandoned punctuation. And with it, capitalization, aside from the first words of poems and the occasional proper noun. Then, having turned his back on punctuation, he never turned back. Remember our earlier discussion of how to read poems, where I told you to read sentences; that sentences, not lines, were the basic unit of meaning in poetry? That injunction relied on one certainty: we can recognize the contours of a sentence and can therefore know where a sentence begins and ends, and the basis for that knowledge is a single punctuation mark, the period. Oh, sure, you can end sentences with a couple of others, but that’s the one that sets the standard. So here’s the question: If you remove the period from your writing, and with it the various siblings and cousins that cause us to pause, proceed, and stop in our reading, how do we know when a statement has ended? In other words, if you don’t have sentences in the normal sense, what do you have?
The line:
Early One Morning
Here is Memory walking in the dark
there are no pictures of her as she is
the coming day was never seen before
the stars have gone into another life
the dreams have left with no sound of farewell
insects awake flying up with their feet wet
trying to take the night along with them
Memory alone is awake with me
knowing that this may be the only time
This poem is from his 2016 volume, Garden Time. That’s sixty-four years of poetry books, which in itself boggles the mind. Most of the volume was composed at a time of failing eyesight when Merwin had to dictate poems to his wife, making the achievement all the more remarkable. “Early One Morning” represents his late mode quite well: clear, direct, simple, unadorned even, yet touched with magic. “Memory” behaves like a Greek goddess. Like her ancient predecessor, Mnemosyne, she is female, and attendant on one party only (at least from his perspective); there are no pictures of her “as she is,” so she can only be seen as perceived by the speaker.
Excepting of the lack of punctuation, the poem is quite conventional. Each of the nine lines has ten syllables, giving it a familiar look. Those syllables sometimes group around four beats, sometimes around five. Merwin is not always quite this regular in line structure, but a great many poems do adhere to a consistent length. Most lines are more or less self-contained statements, with two (lines six and eight) spilling over onto the next. This format permits him to show what he can accomplish with short, simple statements. For instance, “the coming day was never seen before” exudes a sneaky profundity; our first impulse may be to slough it off as obvious, but if we recall that this is a poem in which Memory stalks the house, we realize that she has no access to that day—yet. And those last two lines contain a minor mystery: Is it Memory or the speaker who knows that “this may be the only time”? Syntax suggests the former, but there is just enough ambiguity in the lines to leave the matter open.
Critics could have been forgiven for dismissing Merwin’s eschewing of punctuation as just another literary stunt, akin to novelist Henry Green dropping nearly all use of definite and indefinite articles (“the,” “a,” “an”) from his second novel, Living. Unlike Green, however, Merwin never went back nor looked back, so that it went from an experiment to a mode of poetic being for him. Indeed, the practice became so identified with him that it would be hard for anyone else to take it up without seeming derivative.
BEFORE WE FINISH, WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THERE IS A TINY but determined body of poetry for which this discussion holds no meaning because they have no lines. Our customary term for such works is prose poems, although the writers who commit them are as likely as not to disavow the name. Perhaps the earliest instances come from the haibun, a form that blended prose elements with traditional haiku (you know, 5–7–5), which was developed by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho. In the West, the form originated in nineteenth-century Europe, where poets such as French Symbolists Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud experimented with its possibilities. It makes appearances at intervals throughout the twentieth century, often among writers who reject conventional literary assumptions, as with Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Three notable volumes from the nineteen seventies and eighties are Robert Bly’s The Morning Glory, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, and Charles Simic’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The World Doesn’t End. Bly’s book began as an overt homage to Basho, so he was obviously accepting of the term, and Charles Simic never disavowed it, but Hill, ever the contrarian, strenuously rejected it, claiming the thirty numbered sections were “versets of rhythmical prose.” Versets are small verses, particularly those drawn from Scripture. Hill’s poems are about the mythical King Offa of the English Midlands—sometimes mixing in more modern stories—and are usually brief, wry, even sardonic, but for all that still frequently moving. None of those poems care a farthing for line length or structure.
All of this is a rather roundabout way of saying that lines are what you make of them. They can be long or short, metered or not, rhymed or not. However they appear, they are the critical feature separating poetry from prose (prose poems notwithstanding), the essential building blocks of verse. If we wish to honor the effort a poet makes, we need to look carefully at the way she marshals her lines.