1. After about 1540 or so the English accentual syllabic metrical system was in place—worked out first, as we’ve seen, by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, who drew on Italian and classical as well as native models, and a remarkable explosion of poetry followed—the sonnet sequences, the pastorals, the satires, the songs, odes and elegies and epigrams, the elaborate dream-allegory of the Faerie Queen, and the blank verse of the Elizabethan theater. Some of the verse is extremely elaborate and inventive, but almost all of it aims for effects that the smoothness of the new meter makes possible. So in 1610 or so, seventy years after Wyatt’s first translations from the Italian, something new begins to happen in the verse of John Donne. It shows up in the stanza and the metrics of “The Sun Rising”:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
If you look at the rhyme scheme, it’s rather neatly worked out: abba cdcd ee—two quatrains, they don’t repeat their pattern—followed by a couplet. But the indentations—that altered rhyme pattern, and the changing line length, and the contrast between the vivid naturalness of the speech and the willfulness of the stanza pattern—give the poem terrific energy and made it somewhat disconcerting to the ear of Donne’s audience, and later audiences. It’s well known that Ben Jonson said Donne should be hanged for his not keeping the meter. Clearly, without going into the details of the scansion, Donne was aiming for something else. In another early poem, this tendency was more pronounced:
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bare,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more;
When a tear falls, that Thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.
A quatrain made from lines of different lengths, followed by a dimeter couplet, followed by a triplet that ends with a fourteen-syllable line. And the intricacy is intensified by the difficulty of the thought and the strange intimacy of the voice. This also nettled—even a hundred and fifty years later when Samuel Johnson gave this kind of poem a name by complaining that Donne had no business “perplexing the wits of the fairer sex with metaphysics.” Shakespeare’s plays, some of the sonnets, are, of course, full of difficult thought, difficult feeling, but these poems had for the first time made the unexpectedness of the form a gesture of that difficulty. It’s this I mean by the term difficult form.
2. Looking at kinds, fixed forms, genres, stanza patterns, we have been using the term form as if it meant the set of preconditions that made a kind of container for the writing. In this sense the sonnet is “a form.” But in the deeper meaning of the term, every sonnet has its own form. Every poem is its own form. When we speak about form as a container, it is as if the stanza pattern and the rhyme scheme and perhaps the meter, if it has one, are the form, and the sentences of the poem are the content, and formal imagination is therefore a matter of (1) deciding what preconditions are going to obtain, and then (2) making the matter fit those preconditions. But of course that isn’t how it works. Our experience of the relation of the sentence to the pattern is just where we experience form:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
is graceful; it sounds like a sentence born to be uttered in iambic pentameter. This line:
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
seems awkwardly, furiously trying to strain against it. And look at these lines by George Herbert. As we enter the poem, he is explaining the attitude dissolution, dust, and earth take toward handsome gravestones:
These laugh at jet and marble put for signs,
To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent, that when thou shalt grow fat
And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayest know
That flesh is but a glass which holds the dust
That measures all our time, which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.
To say the form is a six-line stanza of pentameter with an abcabc rhyme scheme hardly does it. And of course the poem is about—among other things—the stupidity of that idea of form.
3. The sentences of the poem, their shape, their relation to line and stanza pattern, are at the heart of the formal experience of the poem, its particular gesture, and its expressive force. Probably one could work out a kind of grammar of possible, or at least typical, expressive relations between the sentence and the line. Easy fit:
I read much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Overflow:
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
This is actually a complicated example because the latter part of the second line is what I mean. Hopkins could have written “with warm breast and ah! bright wings” and gotten a magical fit; it is the second “with” that gives the feeling of overmuch. But the enjambment “bent/World” that scandalized Robert Bridges and opened the way to all those adjective-noun enjambments in twentieth-century verse, repeated until a hundred years later it has worn down the sense of the line so that it has no power to scandalize anyone, is an example of what I mean by difficult form, form strained against and toward. Which would be another type in our grammar: uneasy fit. Another would be inevitable arrival:
I am too dumbly in my being pent.
Perfect iambs. The meter mimics entrapment. And so on. I don’t want to work out such a grammar. Only to make the point that it is one of the things, perhaps the main thing, in play when we speak about formal imagination.
4. Difficult forms got invented and elaborated by the metaphysical poets in the seventeenth century and they were buried by the desire for classical smoothness, intricacy, regularity, and subtlety in the style of the eighteenth century. That style came to seem so affected that in the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a return to “naturalness,” to easy and magical fit. Toward the end of the century, with Hopkins, with some of Browning, with Hardy, difficulty reemerged and it was the characteristic formal gesture of some of the modernists. Nothing expresses it as well as the invention of syllabics, particularly the syllabics of Marianne Moore, a reader of Herbert:
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
And the impulse has continued to assert itself, alongside others, all through the century. Look at the beginning of Jorie Graham’s “Self-Portrait As the Gesture Between Them”:
1.
The gesture like a fruit torn from a limb, torn swiftly.
2.
The whole bough bending then springing back as if from sudden sight.
3.
The rip in the fabric where the action begins, the opening of the narrow passage.
4.
The passage along the arc of denouement once the plot has begun, like a limb,
the buds in it clinched and numbered,
outside the true story really, outside of improvisation,
moving along day by day into the sweet appointment.
And at the beginning of—the appropriately titled—“On Difficulty”:
It’s that they want to know whose they are,
seen from above in the half burnt-out half blossomed-out
woods, late April, unsure as to whether to
turn back.
The blossoming is not their home. Whatever’s back there
is not . . .
5. There seem to be two formal qualities of difficult form. One is that the form is invented, or, if received, resisted. How does resistance to received form show itself?
There’s a certain slant of light
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are—
Dickinson is writing in the most conventional and popular form of her age—for the small magazine poem written by women. The common meter, 8-6-8-6, with an abcb rhyme scheme. And she is picking her way through it like a blind person feeling for rifts in a wall. The dashes do this, but the commas do it even more, especially the last one, placed where no grammar would put a comma.
The second characteristic seems to be that the sentence is usually, or crucially, out of sync with the line and/or the stanza pattern. Robert Creeley:
What I took in my hand
grew in weight. You must
understand it
was not obscene.
These two devices make the form difficult; of course, they don’t by themselves make the poem interesting. And, in a way, these two propositions are inconsistent. If you are going to invent a form, why invent one that doesn’t fit? There is an expressive answer to this question that would square it with theories of organic form—that it enacts the matter of the poem. But there are also other kinds of answers. Philosophical, even theological ones. In any case, there is perhaps a third characteristic of interesting poems in difficult forms: that they do not seem ingenious, that something in the voice or the matter of the poem has to render this way. It has to seem willed, but it also has to seem necessary. Or—in the case of someone like John Ashbery in some of his work—to take up the whole arbitrary activity in some earnest, even if it’s a determination to play.
FURTHER READING:
John Donne: “The Sun Rising”
“The Canonization”
“A Valediction: Of Weeping”
“A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day”
“The Funeral”
“The Relic”
“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”
George Herbert: “Easter Wings”
“Affliction I”
“Church Monuments”
“Denial”
“The Temper”
“Life”
“The Collar”
“The Pulley”
“The Flower”
“Death”
“Love III”
Richard Crashaw: “The Weeper”
“On the Name of Jesus”
“A Hymn for the Epiphanie”
“On the Assumption”
“Caritas Nimia”
“An Ode Prefixed to a Prayerbook Given to a Young
Gentlewoman”—which ends with the following stanza:
O let the blissfull heart hold fast
Her heavnly arm-full, she shall tast
At once ten thousand paradises;
She shall have power
To rifle and deflour
The rich and roseall spring of those rare sweets
Which with a swelling bosome there she meets
Boundles and infinite
Bottomles treasures
Of pure inebriating pleasures
Happy proof! she shal discover
What ioy, what blisse,
How many Heav’ns at once it is
To have her God become her Lover.
“A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint
Theresa”—the Norton Anthology misprints the first two lines.
They should read:
Love, thou are absolute sole lord
Of life and death. To prove the word,
Andrew Marvell: “On a Drop of Dew”
“The Coronet”
“Eyes and Tears”
“A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body”
“A Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers”
Henry Vaughan: “Regeneration”
“Resurrection and Immortality”
“The Waterfall”
“The Night”
“The Shower”
“The Morning Watch”
“The Evening Watch”
“The Passion”
“The Relapse”
“The Resolve”
“The Match”
Thomas Traherne: “The Salutation”
“Wonder”
“Eden”
“The Preparative”
“On News”
Edward Taylor: “Meditations Before My Approach to the Lord’s Supper” (He wrote hundreds of them in the Connecticut Valley while serving as pastor and surgeon to a little frontier town in the middle of King Philip’s War.)
“Upon a Spider Catching a Fly”
Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi”
“The Bishop Orders His Tomb”
Emily Dickinson: 216, 258, 280, 305, 341, 640, 754
Thomas Hardy: “Thoughts of Phena”
“In Tenebris”
“The Convergence of the Twain”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The Windhover”
“Binsey Poplar”
“The Wreck of the Deutschland”
“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”
“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire”
Gertrude Stein: “Susie Asado” for starters
Ezra Pound: Cantos
Marianne Moore: “Poetry”
“The Steeple-Jack” for starters
T.S. Eliot: “The Wasteland” for starters
—and this can be tracked through the Objectivists, particularly Zukofsky’s A, then Olson’s Maximus through Creeley, Robert Duncan—the Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oath; Barbara Guest, May Swenson, some of Elizabeth Bishop, the early Robert Lowell up to Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty; Michael Palmer’s Notes for Echo Lake, much of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, much of Brenda Hillman, and some of the work of the language poets. See The Norton Anthology of Post Modern American Poetry.