1. Old English, threo, var. of thrio, fem., neuter of thri(e); Greek, treis; Latin, tres; Sanskrit, tri, trayas. Two often regarded as an aspect of one, so that with three number as such, the many, begins. And is infinite. Oddness. Not divisible. So that—trinity, for example—mystery begins here.
THREE-LINE STANZAS
2. Triplets: There is something of imbalance and excess in threes. Especially where rhyme is concerned. About two-based forms something hovers of natural complementarities: binary systems, the bilateral symmetries in nature, male and female, lover and beloved. Hence the closing down of two-based rhyme. It seems to secure a completion and emphasizes at once the orderliness of rhyme and its root in sex, in coupling. Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The animals are sick with love,
Love-sick with rhyme.
Rhymes in threes—triplets, the prosodists call them—express too much, overflow, play, as in the move from the two-step to the polka. One of the early three-rhyme lyrics from Middle English, very French and courtly in mode, has a startling sweetness:
The Rose Entwined
“I love a floure of swete odour.”
“Margerome gentill, or lavendour?”
“Columbyne, goldis of swete flavour?” (goldis = marigold)
“Nay, nay, let be!
Is none of them
That lyketh me.”
“There is a floure, where so he be,
And shall not yet be named for me.”
“Primrose, violett, or fresh daysy?”
“He pass them all
In his degree,
That lyketh me.”
“One that I love more enterly.”
“Gillyflower gentill, or rosemary?”
“Chamomyle, borage, or savory?”
“Nay, certenly,
Here is not he
That pleseth me.”
“I chose a floure fresshist of face.”
“What is his name that thou chosen hast?
“The rose, I suppose? Thine hart unbrace!”
“That same is he,
In hart so fre,
That best lyketh me.”
“The rose it is a royall floure.”
“The red or the white? Show his colour!”
“Both be full swete & of lyke savour:
All on they be,
That day to see,
It lyketh well me.”
“I love the rose both red & whyte.”
“Is that your pure perfite appetite?”
“To here talk of them is my delite!”
“Ioyed may we be,
Our prince to see,
And roses three.”
(The subtext is the War of the Roses: Londoners were notorious fence-sitters, so there is also a slyness in the song; it was composed for three voices.)
And, here, later, is Robert Herrick:
Upon Julia’s Clothes
Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration, each way free,
O, how that glittering taketh me.
But this triplet stanza is mostly an oddity in English. Probably because, as is so often said, it’s not a rhyme-rich language. The poems composed in it all have an air of being curiosities, like Robert Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”:
As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
And Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain”:
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
And Robert Frost’s “Provide, Provide”:
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
3. Terza rima: Terza rima is the other three-line rhymed stanza in English. Borrowed from the Italian, it is, of course, the one Dante used in the Commedia. It is even more demanding, in terms of rhyme, than the triplet stanza—the pattern is aba bcb cdc, and so on. It is a braiding or weaving form. Osip Mandelstam—see his essay on Dante—has argued that it grew up in Tuscany with the art of fine weaving. There’s not a lot of it in English, but what there is is impressive. The best-known example of it is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark, wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
See also Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life.” W. B. Yeats used the form in “Cuchulain Comforted.” It was the second-to-last poem he wrote and returns to the figure from Irish myth who had so preoccupied him and it evokes the Inferno:
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.
Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.
A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three
Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
‘Your life will grow much sweeter if you will
‘Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.
‘We thread the needles’ eye and all we do
All must together do.’ That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.
‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all by kindred slain
‘Or driven from home, and left to die in fear.’
They sang but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before,
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
Frost’s beautiful “Acquainted with the Night” makes a sonnet out of it, as a few Renaissance poets had done:
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over fences from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
And T. S. Eliot evokes, without imitating, both Dante’s and Shelley’s terza rima in the second section of “Little Gidding,” in which, during a blackout of the London blitz, the ghost figure of Yeats appears to the narrator:
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattle on like tin
Over the asphalt where no sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown toward me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And, as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
I had known . . .
And Seamus Heaney, in his turn, evokes both Dante and Eliot, in the twelfth section of “Station Island,” in which James Joyce appears to him. The limitation of the stanza in English has been, of course, the incessant rhyme. Look what Heaney has done with it.
Like a convalescent, I took the hand
stretched down from the jetty, sense again
an alien comfort as I stepped on ground
to find the helping hand still gripping mine,
fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide
or to be guided I could not be certain
for the tall man in step at my side
seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush
upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite—
Finally, compare these to Robert Pinsky’s translation of the passage in Canto 2 of the Inferno in which Dante gets his first glimpse of the souls in hell:
As winter starlings riding on their wings
Form crowded flocks, so spirits dip and veer
Foundering in the wind’s rough buffetings,
Upward or downward, driven here or there
With never ease from pain nor hope of rest.
As chanting cranes will form a line in air,
So I saw souls come uttering cries—wind-tossed
And lofted by the storm. “Master,” I cried,
“Who are these people by black air oppressed?”
And imagine sustaining it for 3,300 or so lines.
4. The tercet in free verse: One of the great surprises of the prosody of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is the strength and delicacy and suppleness with which he manages an almost-independent three-line stanza among the different stanza shapes. Freed from rhyme, it looks like something altogether new.
Here are some stanzas from “Song of Myself”:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
*
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
*
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
*
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery, here we stand.
*
. . . Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
*
. . . I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
*
. . . The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck’d my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time,
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
*
. . . Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-bye kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.
*
. . . And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.
*
. . . The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
It’s worth looking at these stanzas for a moment to notice that threes are a lot more complex than twos. In the first stanza above Whitman uses a basic three-part structure from formal logic, the syllogism. The syllogism, like the metaphor, effects a category shift. Yeats:
Love is a lion’s tooth.
But logic is slower; it begins with a proposition involving a particular: Aristotle is a man. Subsumes it to a general proposition: All men are mortal. And reorganizes the particular: Aristotle is mortal. A three-step dance. (It is probably not incidental that the classical instance demonstrating how the mind achieves certitude has death as its subject.) Whitman rearranges the order: the last line is his middle term.
Formally, you can get to three at least three ways: 1 + 1 + 1 (as in the third of Whitman’s stanzas); 1 + 2 (as in the second and last of the stanzas—an image, then two related statements); 2 + 1 (as in the fourth and sixth stanzas). These patterns are easy to see in the haiku, with its 5-7-5 syllabic structure—I won’t try to keep the syllable count:
1 + 1 + 1:
Noon—
orioles singing,
the river flows in silence.
Three images, one per line, though one might describe this as 1 + 2, because “Noon” is the kigo, the set-up season phrase, and the next two lines are joined by strong contrast, the birds singing, the river silent.
2 + 1:
On a bare branch
a crow just settled—
autumn evening.
1 + 2:
Coolness—
the sound of the bell
as it leaves the bell.
5. In modernism: The tercet turns out, freed from the constraint of rhyme, to be such a supple instrument, less orderly looking than the couplet, less final than the quatrain, that it is not surprising that it turned out to be a favored form of the modernists when they began to experiment with free verse. Again the best way to study it is to look at instances. Williams used it in with very short lines, lines of middle length, and long lines. From “Porous”:
Cattail fluff
blows in
at the bank door.
Listening to Williams read on old recordings, you’ll notice that he doesn’t register a pause at line end, or no more pause than each of the three phrases might receive in ordinary speech. Here, as in most instances, three is a weaving form, but you also hear strongly the two beats per line—“cattail fluff,” “blows in,” “bank door.” A play of twos and threes. So that you sense whenever he writes about the crafts, he is thinking about his own craft, as in “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper”:
Now they are resting
in the fleckless light
separately in unison
like the sacks
of sifted stone stacked
regularly by twos
In free verse stanza, patterning is partly visual, but it’s also partly aural. “Now they are resting”—a two stress line; “in the fleckless light”—another. Also with more syllables muting the effect—“separately in unison.” The three two stress lines invite enough of a sense of patterning to make one hear a stress on “like” in “like the stacks.” And to hear the stresses stacked up in “of sifted stone stacked.” And a return to the two stress order on “regularly by twos.” This play of visual and aural elements, the patterning of accents in relation to lines—especially when the lines are mostly end-stopped by natural pauses—seems to have been exactly the way the work of formal imagination operates in all of Williams’s abundant experimenting with free verse. Famously, he came at the end of his life to flowing triplet stanzas, as in “The Ivy Crown”:
The whole process is a lie
unless,
crowned by excess,
it breaks forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement
and in “Asphodel.” The “variable foot,” he called it, in which the accentual patterning is more complex, the enjambments more unpredictable.
Stevens, experimenting alongside Williams for forty years or more, wrote three-line epigrammatic poems, free verse tercets, rhymed and unrhymed metrical tercets, and the three-line stanza became the favored form for his long poems like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Early, in Harmonium, his short-line tercets have a quick gaiety of movement, compared to Williams’s in which the lines measure out perception. See, for example, the lovely movement of two- and three-line stanzas in “The Load of Sugar-Cane” and the use it makes of repetition and rhyme, which gives a slight poem, a sort of watercolor, serious magic. In the longer line he weaves. Take a look again at the one long sentence from which “The Snow Man” is made. The most spectacular tercets early, and the ones nearest to terza rima, are in “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” in which the use of repetition gives each section of the poem something of the feel of a sestina. The rhyme in the first stanza suggests that he had the terza rima in his ear:
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck.
In the late short poems, it is a fascination to watch his mind and ear move from the measure couplets give him—“The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda,” “Nuns Painting Water-Lilies,” “Dinner Bell in the Woods,” “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”—to the poems in three-line stanzas, the long lines of “The Sick Man,” for example, which feel like Stevens near to Whitman and almost delirious:
Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the south bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth-organs in the night or, now, guitars.
(The psychology of race in his poems: subject for another time.) Also the long line in “The Course of a Particular.” And the shorter lines in “A Child Asleep in Its Own Life” (which also moves from a tetrameter stanza to a free verse stanza and back to a tetrameter stanza) and the poem that seems like a summation of his art, “Of Mere Being.”
H.D. seems not to have been drawn to the three-line stanza in her early experiments with free verse. In the 1940s, in those violent years, she experimented with short-line free verse stanzas, sometimes rhymed, as in “Ecco Sponsus”:
The lonely heart,
the broken vow
have no place now—
And “Archer”:
Fall the deep curtains,
delicate the weave,
fair the thread:
clear the colours,
apple-leaf green,
ox-heart blood-red:
For another echo of Dante’s underworld, notice how H.D. uses the three-line stanza in the opening section of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” which describes the bombing of London in World War II.
6. Variations: The three six-line stanzas of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” are built up from pairs of tercets. The scheme is a pair of rough pentameter lines, then a dimeter or trimeter line, and then the same again, with irregular rhyme. Look at #14:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
And there is the six-line stanza of modified tercets so characteristic of Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Look at the beginning of “Masaccio’s Expulsion”:
Is this really the failure
of silence,
or eternity, where these two
suffer entrance
into the picture
plane,
a man and a woman
so hollowed
by grief they cover
their eyes
in order not to see
the inexhaustible grammar
before them—labor, judgement,
saints and peddlers—
the daylight hopelessly even
upon them,
and our eyes. But this too
is a garden
I’d say, with its architecture
of grief,
its dark and light
in the folds
of clothing, and oranges
for sale
among the shadows
of oranges . . .
It is a ghost of terza rima passed through the modernist stanza.
7. The blues stanza: If there is a classic American folk form, this is it. The standard blues stanza is a couplet in which the first line is repeated, presumably to give the singer time to improvise a third, which rhymes with it. It emerges at the beginning of the twentieth century, or even earlier, though there is no evidence that it reaches back to slavery times. Its seedbed was Jim Crow, the ferocious terror and repression unleashed against emancipated African Americans that began after the brief openings of Reconstruction and lasted at least until the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. Scholars think the form probably came from the field holler and from the call-and-response pattern of slave work songs.
Of course, it is more complex than its verbal form. Musically, the traditional blues is a three-line, twelve-bar sequence. The form is a dialogue between music and voice—and, as in all transcriptions of song—the blues lyric as a poem is only half of that dialogue. And all the elements of technique in performance, the flattened and shaded notes that produce their unnerving and mournful sound, the qualities of timbre in the voice typical of African singing, the growl and rasp of the vocal techniques, the suspensions and asides get lost on the page.
Another thing that makes transcription and literary presentation of the blues lyric difficult and in some way falsifies it is that it was improvised, so that each recording—recording began in the 1920s—arrests a thing in motion. And the particular versions that got recorded may or may not have been attending to things like narrative shape that the aesthetic of the page highlights. For all of these reasons, the transcribed blues lyric is much less a poem than the poetry that’s in it. But the poetry is often so powerful that it is worth having it in print nevertheless. A good source is Eric Sackheim’s The Blues Line, published by Ecco Press. The best book about the culture of the blues is Amiri Baraka’s Blues People. The invaluable anthology of the uses of the blues form is Kevin Young’s Blues Poems.
Almost as soon as the blues began to be disseminated by small recording companies aimed at a black audience—race records, they were called—African American poets began to experiment with literary adaptation of the blues form. The most interesting, I think, is the work of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown.
EXPERIMENTS WITH THE BLUES FORM
Langston Hughes: The first blues to be published was W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues. The first recording, by Mamie Smith, appeared in 1920. Hughes began publishing his experiments with the blues form in 1925–1926. His poems are wildly expensive to reprint, so it’s best to go to the collected poems. The early experiments with taking the oral, improvisatory blues lyric into the territory of the printed poem include “Midwinter Blues,” “Gypsy Man,” “Ma Man,” “Listen Here Blues,” “Lament over Love,” “Fortune Teller Blues,” “Wide River,” and “Suicide.”
By the 1930s Hughes’s poems became more militant. Here is a blues he wrote in collaboration with the novelist Richard Wright. It was published in New Masses in 1939 when “red” was a buzzword for revolution:
Red Clay Blues
I miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
Says miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
I want to get to Georgia cause
I Got them red clay blues.
Pavement’s hard on my feet, I’m
Tired o’ this concrete street.
Pavement’s hard on my feet, I’m
Tired o’ this city street.
Goin’ back to Georgia where
That red clay can’t be beat.
I want to tramp in the red mud, Lawd, and
Feel the red clay round my toes.
I want to wade in that red mud,
Feel that red clay suckin’ at my toes.
I want my little farm back and I
Don’t care where the landlord goes.
I want to be in Georgia, when the
Big storm starts to blow.
Yes, I want to be in Georgia when that
Big storm starts to blow.
I want to see the landlords runnin’ cause I
Wonder where they gonna go!
I got them red clay blues.
In the 1940s Hughes experimented with shorter versions, the epigram buried in the blues, in “Curious,” “Evil,” which is too good not to quote—
Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you—
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy too.
—“Hope” and “Wake”:
Tell all my mourners
To mourn in red
Cause there ain’t no sense
In my bein’ dead.
Sterling Brown: Sterling Brown published his remarkable Southern Road in 1936, after the Harlem Renaissance had lost its charm for white readers and the book disappeared with hardly a trace. His versions of blues are, I think, subtler and darker than those of Hughes.
Kentucky Blues
I’m Kentucky born,
Kentucky bred,
Gonna brag about Kentucky
Till I’m dead.
Thoroughbred horses,
Hansome, fas’,
I ain’t got nothin’
But a dam’ jackass.
Women as purty
As Kingdom Come,
Ain’t got no woman
’Cause I’m black and dumb.
Cornland good,
Tobacco land fine,
Can’t raise nothin’
On dis hill o’ mine.
Ain’t got no woman,
Nor no Man O’ War,
But dis nigger git
What he’s hankerin’ for—
De red licker’s good,
An’ it ain’t too high,
Gonna brag about Kentucky
Till I die . . .
See also “Old King Cotton,” “Tin Roof Blues,” “New St. Louis Blues,” which makes a triptych of “Market Street Woman,” “Tornado Blues,” and “Low Down.” Here is a little of “Market Street Woman”:
Market Street woman is known fuh to have dark days.
Market Street woman noted fuh to have dark days,
Life do her dirty a hundred ornery ways.
Let her hang out de window and watch de busy worl’ go pas’,
Hang her head out de window and watch de careless worl’ go pas’,
Maybe some good luck will come down Market Street at las’.
Put paint on her lips, purple powder on her choklit face,
Paint on her lips, purple powder on her choklit face,
Take mo’ dan paint to change de luck of dis dam place.
Whatever is so haunting in the basic form—say it, say it again, give it a twist and secure it with a rhyme—has echoes in other forms. Something of the 4-4-3-3 of the sonnet. The say-it-and-turn-it is a bit like the haiku. Sterling Brown, who read Hardy and Yeats and Scottish ballads at Williams College and at Harvard, came to the South as an outsider. And, in “Memphis Blues,” he makes a ballad, almost a nursery rhyme rhythm, out of the blues sensibility:
Memphis go
By flood or flame;
Nigger won’t worry
All de same—
Memphis go
Memphis come back—
Ain’ no skin
Off de nigger’s back.
THE THREE-LINE POEM
8. In English: There aren’t many three-line poems in English poetry. They thought of the short poem as an epigram and used the couplet or the quatrain for that purpose with its neat and final-sounding rhymes. Occasionally in Ben Jonson, Richard Crashaw, and others the epigram got stretched to three lines, but with no memorable results. Robert Herrick wrote one lyrical triplet:
See’st thou that cloud as silver cleare,
Plump, soft & swelling every where?
’Tis Julia’s bed and she sleeps there.
And Emily Dickinson wrote a few:
An Hour is a Sea
Between a few, and me—
With them would Harbor be—
Then there are the fragments in Coleridge’s journals. Images that gathered themselves as blank verse and never found their way into poems. He did not call them poems, having no theory of poetry that would allow it, but they suggest what he might have done if he had:
The swallows
Interweaving there, mid the pair’d sea-mews
At distance wildly wailing!
*
The Brook runs over sea-weeds.
Sabbath day—from the Miller’s merry wheel
The water-drops dripp’d leisurely.
*
A long deep lane
So overshadowed, it might seem one bower—
The damp clay-banks were furr’d with mouldy moss.
*
The subtle snow
In every breeze rose curling from the Grove
Like pillars of cottage smoke.
And Whitman, who experimented with everything using his new line, experimented with the three-line form:
I am he that aches with amorous love;
Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know.
A Farm Picture
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.
A Child’s Amaze
Silent and amazed even when a little boy
I remember hearing the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements
As contending against some being or influence.
And there is, of course, Ezra Pound:
Coda
O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
Alba
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
T’ai Chiu
The petals fall to the fountain,
the orange-colored rose-leaves.
Their ochre clings to the stone.
Here are some more recent three-line poems.
Michael Palmer:
Purples of Barley
And all of the time you are seeing these things she
sings “not
loudly but with authority”
Carol Snow:
And Another
“massacre of the innocents,”
And that there is a form
even for that.
Brenda Hillman scatters brief remark poems in three lines in her books; they seem to comment on her process:
—Nice going but you don’t
have to decide anything that leaves
anything else out—
(And you thought
you had learned health
but had only met some of the characters)
(agonized
by the glazed multitude
of unusable lines—)
and the mistake wasn’t that heavy
but it had ropes tying it to
all my other mistakes!
My friend called;
she was telling
the pain “what to think”—
Unfinished Glimmer
(Look, you. You’re getting
most of them. If there are more
we’ll write them later—)
9. Haiku and renga: Haiku is of course the classic three-line unrhymed form. As we’ve seen, it is sometimes thought of as a three-phrase one-line poem. And we have seen above how it deploys the possibilities of the three-part structure. Because its impulse is metonymic, pictorial, direct, it had some influence on imagist poets. I don’t think I need to give more examples here.
There are two things to understand about it formally. The first is the importance of the kigo, or seasonal reference, that each haiku contains. These phrases—autumn evening, spring rain, harvest moon, plum blossoms—are so packed with associations to classical Japanese poetry and to Japanese social life that they anchor the poem and give it, almost always, a two-part structure within the three-phrase sequence. The poem is almost always a commentary on its kigo. It would be as if we had developed a popular form in which one line was a quotation from Shakespeare and the other two a subtle comment on it drawn from direct, spontaneous observation:
To be or not to be—
she’s walking to the store
in the raw spring wind
Out, out, brief candle—
he has a toothache,
he’s working on a poem—
So the basis of the form in a way is to rub two sticks together, one that floats into the mind and one that comes up from the world.
The second thing is that the haiku evolved from the renga, which evolved from the tanka. From the point of view of form, the renga may be the most interesting thing, at the moment, about haiku. In a renga, the first poet writes a haiku. I’m going to use a famous one, Matsuo Bashō’s and his group’s Monkey’s Raincoat, as an example. A poet named Mukai Kyorai began the poem:
The kite’s feather
cleaned up a bit
by the first winter rain.
To which Bashō added a couplet, making the two verses a tanka:
The withered leaves, stirred
by a gust of wind, then still
A third poet, Nozawa Bonchō, writes another haiku, which, taken together with Bashō’s lines, produces a completely new tanka, entirely independent of Kyorai’s verse:
Since morning
his trouser drenched
from fording streams
The next poet, Nakamura Fumikuni, writes a couplet to make a new poem with Boncho’s haiku:
In the fields bamboo traps
to ward off badgers
Notice that the season has changed. In the first it is the very beginning of winter. In the second it’s sometime in the fall. In the third it’s sometime in the summer. And notice that each of the verses, after the first, both begins one poem and ends another. These combinations of things—the constantly shifting seasons, the beginnings that are ending—are formal expressions of a deeply Buddhist attitude toward time and change.
We have so far three five-line poems:
The kite’s feathers
cleaned up a bit
by the first winter rain.
The withered leaves, stirred
by a gust of wind, then still.
Since morning
his trousers drenched
from fording streams—
in the fields bamboo traps
to ward off badgers
Here’s a little more of it. Bashō:
Through the lush ivy
crawling over the lattice door
an evening moon
Then Kyorai:
He won’t share the pears
The place is famous for
Then Fumikuni:
He’s playing at sketching
with ink and brush
at the end of autumn
Then Bonchō:
How pleasant it is, wearing
stylish & expensive knitted stockings
Then Kyorai:
Wordless all morning
and nothing happens
to break the inner quiet
Then Bashō:
Just as the village comes into view
they sound the noontime horn
And so on. One way to get the rapidity of this is to see it as a series of prose sentences:
The kite’s feathers cleaned up a bit by the first winter rain. Withered leaves, stirred by a gust of wind, then still. Since morning his trousers drenched from fording streams. They’ve set bamboo traps in the fields to scare off badgers. Through the lush ivy crawling over the lattice door an evening moon. He won’t share the pears the place is famous for. He’s playing at sketching with ink and brush at the end of autumn. How pleasant to be wearing stylish and expensive knitted stockings. Wordless all morning and nothing happened to break the inner quiet. Just as the village comes into view, they sound the noon horn. Frayed at the edge, the straw sleeping mat is getting moldy. The lotus petals falling one by one. At Suizen temple very good soup. He pleads off—he’s got another eight miles to travel. This spring too the servants, loyal as Lu T’ung’s, stay on. New growth on the tree’s graft in the hazy moonlight. Covered with moss, the old stone basin by the flowering cherry. By midday his anger had subsided. In just one sitting: bolts down two days’ rations. North wind on the island, and the feel of snow in it. Every day, dusk falling, he climbs the temple hill to light the lamp. The wood thrushes are finished with their summer songs. Weak, bone-thin, he can’t get out of bed. Her visitor finds the place cramped and borrows carriage-space next door. My faithless lover: let him crawl to me through the quince hedge. At parting she helps him put on his sword. Restless she combs her hair out carelessly. He musters himself the night before the battle. What moon there is dissolving in the dawn. Autumn to Biwa Lake and to Mount Hira a first frost. Somebody stole his cache of buckwheat, he goes on writing poems. Winter wind: heavy jackets for awhile. Jostled by others, having slept badly, he sets out again. Clouds from tatara still crimson in the sky. A cottage: they’re repairing harnesses, the window onto cherry trees. Among old loquat leaves, new buds.
The form is a kasen, thirty-six stanzas. Solo, the renga suggests a form—in verse or prose—for catching both the rapidity of the mind and the phantasmal solidity of the world.
Readers may want to consult Eliot Weinberger’s essay on Octavio Paz and the renga, and his translation of a very rare instance in which a poet wrote a solitary rather than collaborative renga, a one-hundred-stanza verse by the medieval poet Sora.