How Poems Get Made

by James Longenbach

  In the second line, the multisyllabic word petals is necessarily pronounced petals, and, once again, the function words following this noun remain unstressed (“Petals on a”). This little string of unstressed syllables throws us forward into the more semantically charged adjectives and noun concluding the line (“wet, black bough”), which turns out to sound nothing like the first line.

  Petals on a wet, black bough

  This density of stressed syllables feels emphatic in itself, and the density is reinforced by the rhyme of “wet” with the first syllable of “petals,” the alliteration of “black” with “bough,” and, most importantly, by the way in which the second line’s irregular rhythm (tum ti ti ti tum tum tum) disrupts the regularity of the first (ti ti ti tum ti ti ti tum ti ti ti tum). The whole poem delivers us into the concluding triplet of stresses.

  Describing this delivery, I didn’t presume Pound’s poem to be metered or unmetered; I listened to the relationship of its stressed and unstressed syllables, noted patterns where patterns emerged, and concluded that the poem was more invested in disrupting rhythmic patterns than sustaining them. But when I listen to a poem Lord Byron wrote in the winter of 1817, when the extravagances of the Venetian carnevale had given way to the deprivations of Lent, I conclude that the relationship of stressed and unstressed syllables follows a metrical pattern sustained line by line: every line contains three beats, and most lines are iambic (ti tum ti tum ti tum), though many lines begin with an extra unstressed syllable (“And the moon be still as bright”) and some lines both begin and end with an extra unstressed syllable (“Though the heart be still as loving”).

  So, we’ll go no more a roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a roving

  By the light of the moon.

  Sometimes the pattern of these three-beat lines asks us to stress syllables we might not ordinarily stress (such as the second syllable of the preposition “into” in “So late into the night”); other times the pattern asks us to withhold the stress on syllables we might ordinarily emphasize (such as the verb “wears” in the line “And the soul wears out its breast”). In these lines, the pleasure of the repeated pattern threatens to trump the way in which we’d more naturally pronounce the phases containing these words: the poem, as Robert Frost said memorably of metered poems at large, breaks “the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent against the regular beat of the meter.”

  But if pattern sometimes threatens to subsume variation, the final line of Byron’s poem is so rhythmically irregular—

  By the light of the moon

  —that our ears are able to hear it as a three-beat iambic line only by stressing the function word “of” and by inserting a pause [x] where an unstressed syllable should appear.

  By the light [x] of the moon

  Our ears crave this way of hearing the line, but the rhythm of the line itself (ti ti tum ti ti tum) forces us to resist this way of hearing it—especially because Byron’s syntax, working with his lineation, helps to generate the rhythm. While his more metrically regular second stanza features four independent clauses connected paratactically, each clause complete on its line (for the sword . . . and the soul . . . and the heart . . . and love itself), the final stanza shifts to hypotaxis: the opening subordinate clause (“Though the night was made for loving”) suddenly propels us toward the stanza’s concluding independent clause, which is itself energized by enjambment, throwing us into the final line’s disruptive rhythm.

  Yet we’ll go no more a roving

  By the light of the moon.

  Experienced within the context of Byron’s meticulously managed sonic decorum, this small rhythmic variation feels momentous. Just as our experience of a poem depends not simply on the presence of different kinds of syntax, diction, or figuration, so does our experience depend not simply on the presence of rhythmic variation but on the way in which we move through the poem to discover the variation. There are as many paths to discovery as there are poems.

  Both Byron’s and Pound’s poems look the way we’ve come to expect poems to look on the page: line-endings provide visual cues for the sonic duration of the lines. Not only were Old English poems written down without line-endings, however; as M. B. Parkes reminds us in his history of punctuation, they were written down without punctuation, and punctuation remained wildly erratic for centuries to come. Today, we’re used to read ing the sixteenth-century poet Sir Thomas Wyatt in editions in which punctuation offers visual cues for the syntactical relationship of clauses and phrases, just as it does in Byron or Pound, but Wyatt’s original texts often contain no punctuation at all.

  It may be good like it who list

  but I do dowbt who can me blame

  for oft assured yet have I myst

  and now again I fere the same

  Despite the lack of punctuation, it’s easy to hear that this quatrain is written in four-beat, mostly iambic lines (“But I do dowbt who can me blame”), lines that sometimes contain the same kind of run-on syntax we found in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s unpunctuated “Sleep”: “I am exhausted a coma looks good to me.” But that rhythmic momentum is due to the line, working against the syntax, not to the lack of punctuation as such. Were the syntax lineated this way, with or without punctuation—

  It may be good

  like it who list

  but I do dowbt

  who can me blame

  —the poem’s animating rhythmic life would disappear: the duration of the lines and the duration of the clauses and phrases are in every case identical.

  Wyatt was following the conventions of his time, not flouting them, in his eschewal of punctuation. Notoriously, Emily Dickinson ignored the conventions of her time, avoiding print publication and setting down her poems by hand in unconven tional ways. This is how one of her poems first appeared on the page after her death: spelling, punctuation, and lineation have been regularized, the first line altered, and the final two lines of the poem deleted.

  He fumbles at your spirit

  As players at the keys

  Before they drop full music on;

  He stuns you by degrees,

  Prepares your brittle substance

  For the ethereal blow,

  By fainter hammers, further heard,

  Then nearer, then so slow

  Your breath has time to straighten,

  Your brain to bubble cool,—

  Deals one imperial thunderbolt

  That scalps your naked soul.

  This editorially imposed punctuation and lineation attempt to provide visual cues for the poem’s rhythmic life. While some lines are inevitably more regular than others, the metrical pattern asks us to hear four beats in the third line of each stanza (“By fainter hammers, further heard”), while the first, second, and fourth lines contain three (“Then nearer, then so slow”). The generally iambic meter inevitably fights the natural rhythms of the syntax in some lines (“As players at the key”), and in the penultimate line this tension rises to its greatest intensity: that is, our ears want to hear the line not as “Deals one imperial thunderbolt” but as “Deals one imperial thun derbolt,” the opening monosyllabic verb begging to be stressed and the proliferation of unstressed syllables in the concluding noun begging to fall away. Because the two lines preceding this dramatically disruptive line begin with the same unstressed function word (“Your breath”—“Your brain”), our urge to stress the semantically charged verb deals becomes all the more prominent: “Deals one.”

  In what ways do Dickinson’s idiosyncratic punctuation and lineation change the w
ay we hear the poem’s language? This is how a recent edition of her poems attempts to replicate Dickinson’s lines as she wrote them: the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is unemphasized by stanza breaks, and the punctuation is not generally grammatical (organizing the sense) but rhetorical (marking the rhythms of the syntax as it is organized in lines).

  He fumbles at your Soul

  As Players at the Keys

  Before they drop full Music on—

  He stuns you by degrees—

  Prepares your brittle nature

  For the Etherial Blow

  By fainter Hammers—further heard—

  Then nearer—Then so slow

  Your Breath has time to straighten—

  Your brain—to bubble Cool—

  Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt—

  That scalps your naked Soul—

  Reading this more accurate transcription of the poem, our ears still want to hear the penultimate line’s rhythm as a dramatic disruption of an established pattern (“Deals one imperial thunderbolt”), and Dickinson’s punctuation makes the disruptive rhythm of the line more emphatically clear: the grammatically unnecessary dashes separating the first three syllables (“Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt”) alert us to this line’s bold turn from the previous lines’ more regular iambs (“Your brain—to bubble Cool”). But however powerful Dickinson’s punctuation, what we are hearing is the rhythm of English diction and syntax organized in lines, just as we hear it in the line “Petals on a wet, black, bough” or in the line “By the light of the moon.”

  As a medium for poetry, the English language is distinguished by the contrast of words with etymologically distant roots, by a syntax requiring lots of unstressed function words, our nouns and verbs having long ago lost most of their inflections, and by the fact that the meaning of our nouns and verbs depends on syllable stress. Because of the nature of the medium, lines in our poems came to be organized by the relationship of stressed to unstressed syllables, and, over time, our ways of noting that organization visually have become part of the poetic medium as well. But while it’s possible to write a poem without line-endings or punctuation, it’s impossible to write a poem without deploying diction and syntax. The rhythmic power of any particular line depends on how we’re asked to hear its diction and syntax in the dynamic context of a particular poem, no matter if it looks like prose on the page, no matter if we call it formal or free. The medium is more powerful than the maker, as every maker knows.

  VI

  ECHO

  Listen again to the second quatrain of Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet.

  When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

  Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

  And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

  Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard . . .

  The syllables at the ends of these metrical lines sound like one another, though leaves sounds closer to sheaves than herd does to beard, at least to twenty-first-century ears. At the same time, syllables echo one another within the lines. In the line “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,” the syllable beard shares an initial consonant with borne and bristly and, more forcefully, beard shares an initial consonant and vowel sound with bier; the syllable white stands alone. Why does Shakespeare hold back from extending the pattern of repeated sounds? Why not borne on the bier with bright and bristly bier?

  Poets revel in the interplay of similar and dissimilar sounds in part because the effectiveness of any language as a method for communication depends on such interplay. We recognize the meaning of the word bed because we’re able to differentiate its sound from the sounds of the words beard and dead and board and red, and sometimes words may sound so similar that their meaning is obscured. A slip of the tongue or a distracted ear might encourage us to mistake bed for board or beard for bier; only the context of a particular utterance will tell us whether we’re hearing the word board or the word bored. Infamously, the line “oh no, me gotta go” in the ’60s pop song “Louie Louie” was heard as “grab her way down low,” prompting a lengthy FBI investigation into the song’s possible obscenity.

  In daily conversation we might find such slippage merely confusing, but when we hear similar-sounding words echoing one another in poems, often (but not always) we call it rhyme. We don’t generally refer to bier and beard as rhymes because, by long consensus, a rhyme involves the repetition of a vowel sound and a concluding consonant. By similarly long consensus, we’ve come to expect that kind of echo at the ends of a poem’s lines.

  But not by very long consensus. Though the lines of Old English poems were organized by the kind of echo we call alliteration, they were not rhymed. Neither were Greek and Latin poems rhymed. Beginning in the eleventh century, however, as the new French fashion for rhyming poems began to enter English, the challenge of rhyme came increasingly to distinguish English-language poems as poems. By the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost without rhyme in the seventeenth century, some intelligent readers didn’t know what to make of it.

  Today, unrhymed and unmetered poems have been accept able in English for more than a century, but a certain proportion of our words of course continue to echo one another; the word bed still sounds like the words beard and dead, and the vitality of our poems still depends on such echoes, whether they’re rhymed or not, just as the vitality of our poems still depends on the relationship of stressed and unstressed syllables, whether they’re metered or not. To say that this quatrain rhymes—

  He fumbles at your Soul

  As Players at the Keys

  Before they drop full Music on—

  He stuns you by degrees—

  —and that this quatrain also rhymes—

  So, we’ll go no more a roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright

  —is not to have said very much about the sonic life of these poems. But to notice that four of the seven words in the first line of Byron’s quatrain play on the same vowel sound (so, go, no, roving) is to recognize that, even if Byron’s quatrain were not rhymed at all, its syllables would echo one another more densely than Dickinson’s. While every poem is made from syllables that sound like one another and syllables that sound different, Dickinson’s leans slightly more toward difference. Byron’s leans toward similarity, which is why one might say that his quatrain sounds a bit more like song and a bit less like prose.

  Strictly speaking, I’m using the word echo metaphorically, since the word refers to the reflection of sound waves off solid surfaces; certainly I’m using the words song and prose metaphorically, since a prose sentence may be packed with syllables that echo one another, making it seem songlike—as this passage from a sermon by John Donne reveals. Donne is making here a comparison between Greek and Christian attitudes toward the afterlife.

  The Gentils, and their Poets, describe the sad state of Death so, Nox una obeunda, That it is one of everlasting Night; To them, a Night; But to a Christian, it is Dies Mortis, and Dies Resurrectionis, The day of Death, and The day of Resurrection; We die in the light, in the sight of Gods presence, and we rise in the light, in the sight of his very Essence.

  The final twenty-five syllables of this sentence are made from twenty-three words; only two words, “presence” and “absence,” have more than one syllable. If you lineate these twenty-five syllables by paying attention to the natural rhythm of the syntax (which features a sequence of prepositional phrases) and by paying attention also to the way in which the more highly stressed nouns and verbs echo one another (die, light, sight, rise), you get an eight-line poem rhymed abbc abbc, a poem mostly in anapestic monometer (ti ti tum / ti ti tum).

  We die

  in the light,

  in the sight

  of Gods presence,

  and we rise

  in the light,

  in the sight

  of his very Essence.

>   These syllables are as rife with echo as comparable passages from many poems, rhymed or unrhymed.

  In fact, they are so rife with echo that the effect, when emphasized by lineation, may feel a little overdone: once our ears register the metrical regularity of Donne’s sentence, the fact that every prominently stressed syllable rhymes with other stressed syllables feels overly predictable. Similarly, if all five stressed syllables alliterated with one another in Shakespeare’s line “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,” the line would lose its vitality: “Borne on the bier with bright and bristly beard.” If the density of sonic echo in Byron’s first line (“So, we’ll go no more a roving”) continued in the second line (“In the morning all aglow”), the poem would sound sentimental rather than poignantly sincere.

  Sometimes a poet may covet such effects, as in these self-consciously excessive lines from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Nephelidia”—

  From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a

  notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine

  —or from Wallace Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine-Woods.”

  Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

  Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

  An abundance of echo tends to reduce discourse to incantation, song to jingle, sense to nonsense, and sometimes a poet may covet this effect as well.

  Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la,

  Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wella-wah.

  These are the first two lines of Robert Pinsky’s “Gulf Music,” a poem occasioned by the devastation of the city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. These are the second two lines.

  The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated