Poetic Methods I: Meter as Communication Protocol

Stillness of Meter and Constraints for Reliable Effects of Beautiful Sounds

During my Christmas break, I found a doorway into the structure and intricacies of english poetry: the book "Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry" by Brad Leithauser.

I had read english verse before, and skimmed a couple of books about poetry. But Rhyme's Rooms entranced me by its focus on methodological questions: what are poets aiming for, which issues and constraints do they run into, what tricks and setups and techniques have they developed to handle these challenges.

Here's a sure sign that this book unlocked some new shards of understanding: before, whenever I read a formal english poem, I liked it or I didn’t, but I couldn't start making sense of how it worked, or mine some greater depth; now I see inklings of patterns I've heard about, sometimes catching a structure or an effect that would have escaped me beforehand. And where I had a vague feeling that poetry was interesting and worth digging into, I now own a rudimentary and high-level map delineating vast swaths of methods and their relations to other methods in various fields.

So I'm sharing some of these methodological reflections here, in a couple of posts. This is the first one, centered on meter (the formal structure of lines of poetry) and its role for empowering the poet.

But before digging into the methods themselves, we need to start with the first question in any methodological cartography: "What are the goals of this field and its practitioners?"

The Goals of Poetry

Without a goal in mind, we can't really judge the methods. All of them will compress, will throw away information, and miss opportunities. These tradeoffs can only be understood from the perspective of the practitioners.

So, what are the goals of poetry?

Although it's a fraught question, let's focus on an answer that is both simple and traditional to formal poetry: to express some thought, feeling, experience, in language, but express it beautifully — create an effect in the reader/listener through how the poem sounds.

The message of most poetry, including the greatest poetry, is usually commonplace or even banal. We treasure it not for its what but its how.

(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, p.77)

Though there are other learned and expert opinions (notably by the modernist poets and many free verse writers), I'll take the how to be anchored mostly in how the poem sounds and feels when pronounced. As Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky expresses more poetically than I can:

The theory of this guide is that poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

Moreover, there is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an expert's body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audience's body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist's medium is my breath. The reader's breath and hearing embody the poet's words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.

(...)

I hope to focus on the way an extraordinary system of grunts and mouth-noises evolved by the human primate has been used as the material of art. Poetry in this vocal and intellectual sense is an ancient art or technology: older than the computer, older han print, older than writing and indeed, though some may find this surprising, much older than prose. I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensual appeal; to express feeling and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those that come after us.

(Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, p.8-9)

What jumps to my methodologist's gaze here is how the goal requires another human being. The poet aims to create an effect through the sounds of the poem, and this effect resonates or falls flat in the body and mind of another person — not an inert thing but another active agent trying to receive whatever has been sent.¹

This reveals a core methodological problem: how can the poet guarantees that the reader will get it? This doesn’t have to be a scholarly understanding of every nuance of the poem, but the goal is still to create the intended effect through the sounds. This requires both the poet to find sounds that produce this effect among all the possible combinations, and the reader to interpret them in such a way as to feel the intended effects. All of this amidst so many possible misunderstanding and confusions.

Communication Protocols and Meter

Clearly, the simplest possible way to solve this problem is with a communication protocol: a clear set of instructions for how to encode and decode the required information. Such protocols underly the internet and all the ways in which different computers and different programs can exchange information while having been built independently — the protocol coordinate computers and programs.

Communication protocol usually specify a format for communication and how to interpret it: in an internet packet, the layout of the different relevant info (address to deliver, meta-data, actual content); in morse code, the meaning of short and long signals.

Yet this obvious answer doesn’t fit perfectly the case of poetry, for a handful of reasons:

• The poet intends to communicate feelings and effects to the reader, not only information. And this additional content cannot just be rationally reconstructed, it must be experienced emotionally and sensually.

• Both poet and reader cannot reasonably follow extremely complex and minute instruction, which creates limitations to how big the protocol can be.

• The protocol cannot be arbitrary, but must fit within the boundaries of a specific language.

Historically, the way poets have tackled this design problem across language is through establishing meters: abstract repeated structures on lines of poetry, that prominently leverage particular features of the language. For example, in ancient greek and latin had meters based on syllable length, since the language themselves have systematic difference between long and short syllables. Languages with accentuation (such as english, as we’ll see), have meters based on the repeated patterns of accents. And languages without any of these features, like my native french, generally have meters based on number of syllables.

Still, it’s probably not clear yet why having a set of constraints on how lines of poetry are written would really solve the communication problem outlined above.

To get it, let’s dig deeper into the english answers to these questions.

The One True English Meter

English poets organically agreed on one core meter, called iambic pentameter: it is made of 5 iambic feet, sequences of two syllables where the first one is less accented than the second one.

Shakespeare uses the iambic meter, in the pentameter line, in both the plays and the sonnets:

       This above all: to thine own self be true,
       And it must follow, as the night the day
       Thou canst not then be false to any man.

(Hamlet)

or

       A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

(Richard III)

or

       When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
       I all alone beweep my outcast state....

(Sonnet 29)

And here is Wordsworth:

       The winds that will be howling at all hours,
       And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers;

and Keats:

       The poetry of earth is never dead...

and Marvell, on a shorter line:

       The grave's a fine and private place,
       But none, I think, do there embrace.

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.19-20)

Note that the point here is not to force a regular up and down in diction of these lines, but that, when pronounced normally, they follow the constraint. As we will dig into below, there are many small subtleties of pronounciation, notably when words can be enunciated in different ways. For example, in the above lines from Wordsworth, “flowers” is pronounced as a single syllable; yet in the line from Keats, “po-e-try” is pronounced as three distinct syllables to fit the iambic pentameter.

This structure, with its lolling ups and downs, is the background assumption around which the vast majority of english formal poetry live.

Iambic pentameter is a jack-of-all-trades. It has been employed for high school dramatic pageants and lengthy, bibulous after-dinner toasts, for biblical catechizing of the young and for political remonstration. Last wills and testaments have been solemnized within it. So have recipes and prophecies and Christmas lists and municipal injunctions. Unlikely though it may seem, all English readers today commonly descend from a literary community convinced that anything worth remembering might reasonably be slotted into the handiwork of an iambic pentameter line.

In some eras, so ubiquitous was the form as to become synonymous with poetry itself. A number of our greatest poets led peaceable and prolific lives within its measured compass. If iambic pentameter is a tent, beneath which poets have gratefully huddled, it has been less like something made of canvas than like the Earth’s atmosphere itself; you can gather underneath it while feeling that nothing but openness lies overhead.

If you held in your hands the standard one-volume edition of Alexander Pope’s poems (880 pages) and you excised from it every line of iambic pentameter, your door-stopper volume would abruptly, magically transform into an airy pamphlet. Pope, like many a prolific writer, envisioned more than he accomplished: an Opus Magnum, of which An Essay on Man would be but a portion. But wherever he ventured, however far his imagination might take him, it seems no new creative enterprise would ever repudiate his companion in arms, the iambic pentameter line.

Pope is one of the immortals, and his self-chosen interment within a single meter is less a reflection of his narrowness than a testament to the richness and resourcefulness of this bare-bones, elementary-seeming structure. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. It looks so simple, but this chain of five identical links happily enveloped one of England’s most sophisticated literary minds throughout his lifetime.

We might suppose Pope’s devotion to be mere idiosyncrasy, if so many others didn’t resemble him. Apply the same test to Byron or Keats or Shelley, expunging from their collected poems every pentameter line, and again and again we would behold a miraculous dwindling, a bricklike book transformed into an airy hand fan.

Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays. In how many did he decide to branch out formally, to forsake iambic pentameter for some alternative meter? Exactly none. If pressed to explain why he returned so often to harvest the same field, he might have replied, echoing Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, that the pentameter “works a miracle in nature.”

(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, p.96-97)

Around this baseline, there are various alterations permitted, which change the flavor and the effect of the iambic pentameter.

First, some iambic foot can be replaced by another type of feet, of which there are many:

• the trochee, which inverses the iamb by starting with the more stressed syllable, followed by the less stressed one.

• The anapest, which adds another less stressed syllable at the start of an iamb, turning it into a two less stressed and one more stressed sequence.

• And others, like the dactyl, which is a trochaic foot with an additional less stressed syllable at the end...

Replacing an iamb can shift the emphasis, quicken the pace or slow it, and in general allow the monotony of iambic pentamer to be broken down in ways that reinforce the intended effect and meaning fo the poem.

For example (where u marks an less stressed syllable and / a more stressed one):

       A sweet disorder in the dress
            /    u  u            /   u       /    u     /
       Kindles in clothes a wantonness

[...]

Here I want to draw attention not only to the dramatic emphasis placed at the beginning of the line by the variation in the meter, but to the effect of the two light stress which are thereby put together. Between 'Kindles' and 'clothes there occurs, with this twinning of light stresses, a levitation, a leaping, an instant of nimble high-spiritedness, as the syllables arc between the two heavier strokes. It feels very different from the sooth riverbed of the regular iambic. This is a dancing part of the forward motion, the briefest yet most pleasant upward pitch of spirits, led by the pattern.

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.21)

It's also possible to add or remove less accented syllables from a pentameter:

• When a less accented syllable is added after the last foot, it creates what is called a feminine ending, altering the normally powerful resolution of the iambic line to make it unfinished, pensive, debated...An example of the effect is one of the most well-known line of verse (where | separates distinct feet, and you can see that “tion” is in surplus):

                |          |          |           |              |
       to be or not to be, that is the question.

• When the first less accented syllable of a line is removed, The first unaccented syllable of a line might be removed, leading to a start with an accented syllable and a more forceful start to the line.

• Less accented syllable can also be added to pad foots (which are still separable as they must have only one more accented syllable each)

What these tweaks offer is a change of pace with regard to the metronomic regularity of the iambic pattern. Indeed, what is fascinating methodologically speaking is how the constraint of the iambic meter throws into relief these minute changes. Against such a regular background, the subtle variations become salient, and their effect can be better guaranteed.

All of these (iambic) lines, whatever their length, proceed steadily, without pause and without flourish.Their pace is a kind of neutral flow. There is enough pattern for the reader to feel the ongoing motion, yet this pattern is simple enough that contemplation can accompany its felt pressure.

Against the simple and the smooth, vivacity flashes the most brightly. So, when lines are not altogether iambic, but ar engaged with variety, a nice disturbance is created and felt — a bounce, a flounce, a turn, a change — before the restoration of the original pattern takes place, which it does, usually, very quickly, an instance of pattern-drivenness.

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.20)

Beyond alteration of the iambic character, the pentameter part can also be tweaked by adding or removing feet, creating either a quickening or a slowing down.

Lines shorter than pentameter leave the reader feeling slightly hurried and, thus, agitated. You might think that the opposite, a sense of relaxation, would be felt, since there is more breath left with the shorter line. But it is not so.We speak briefly when a sense of urgency is upon us, when we are pitched to some emotion sharper than contemplation.We reach, in ceremony or thought, for the complete; we reach, in emotion, for the succinct.

[...]

Even as pentamer is suitable to the construct of meditation, an ordering of emotion, so tetrameter (line with four feet) is well suited to 'story' poems — poems in which there is movement, confrontation, action."

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.31)

Adding to the line length, increasing it from pentameter to hexameter, heptameter, octameter even, creates very different effects, as one might suppose. Gone, again, is that sense of calm intelligence, of a construct exactly right for eloquent and unhurried meditation.

Instead, the longer line gives a feeling of abundance — sometimes with a sense of energy and brimming over, at other times with a feeling of extraordinary authority and power.

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.33)

Here, it is the pentameter part of the pattern that provides a baseline, a lively but not overpowering under-rythm from which small variations can be created and heard much more clearly.

Both the iambic and the pentameter part play the same role, as constraint that simplify the search space. And by taming it, they also linearize it: now minute changes in either rhythm or length will catch the ear and get noticed and processed. Whereas it takes much bigger efforts to create a noticeable effect with the full range of structures available, the iambic pentameter baseline silences enough the rough edges of language to give the poet a fine combinatorial scale to play with.

Such small shifts: add a foot here, subtract one there... Formal poets rely on what might be called one-armed arithmetic: The accounting in their verse can be done on the fingers of one hand.

(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, p.36)

Still, too much constraints and restrictions would make it impossible to truly reach the goal of poets: create personal and deep beauty from the way thoughts get expressed in verse and sounds.

What saves formal poetry from this fate is the significant difference between meter and rhythm.

Richness Inside The Grid

Whereas the meter is the structure we discussed above, logical, regular, with small variations and massive constraints, the rhythm is instead the actual ebb and flow of sounds when the poem is spoken aloud, the minute subtleties of variation in accent, duration, pitch, loudness.

For example, the abstraction of iambs throws away a lot of the information: the only relevant property of a pair of syllables is their relative accents. There are no constraints about how low the accent is in the first syllable, or how high the accent is in the second, or how much difference between the two (beyond some minimal distinction).

This tells you that two iambs can be quite different, while still preserving the core structural property that makes them iambs. So iambs provide a structure that is both constraining, and yet accommodates a range of variations.

In The Sounds of Poetry, Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky dissects some of the effect produced by this freedom in the constraints in "Now Winter Nights Enlarge"by Thomas Campion:

       Now winter nights enlarge
       The number of their hours,
       And clouds their storms discharge
       Upon the airy towers.

I think that if a reader understands that accent is relative, and that it comes in degrees, and understands, moreover, that accent is sometimes reinforced by quantity (a synonym for "duration"), and sometimes not, then the reader will better perceive the attractive, dance-like rhythm in these lines.

Here is a specific analysis to show what I mean. In the the first line, the three pairs of syllables [...] create a pleasing effect of crescendo: changes in degree of accent, changes in the difference between the unaccented and accented part of each foot, changes in quantity, and the way the verb "enlarge "swells or reaches over the line ending toward its object "The number" — all of these elements contribute to the process of crescendo over the three feet, in three corresponding stages.

More minutely: in the first foot, the difference between the unstressed and stressed syllables is relatively slight, with the longer but unstressed syllable "Now" preceding the shorter but stressed vowel in the first syllable of "winter." The effect is a kind of acceleration from the long, unstressed syllable to the short, stressed one, with maybe some sense of tension in what might be called the "interference pattern" between quantity and accent. Then, in the second foot, the difference between two halves is more distinct, with maybe a less strained or tense movement, because here the duration and accent are in less conflict, though the unstressed syllable of the foot (the "ter"of "winter") is pretty long in quantity. And in the final, third foot, which consists of the word "enlarge," the difference between the two halves is quite distinct: duration and accent both emphasize the second syllable of the word.

This little movement is from quick and tense toward increasingly slow and luxuriant.

(Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, p.18-19)

And there are others places where the subtlety of rhythm opens doors to the poet — for example how the syntax plays with and against the lines.

A big insight for making iambic pentameter not feel stilted is to ensure lines are not always full prepositions, with commas or stop at the end. Instead, you want to alternate, with lines where sentences stop in the middle, or run over lines (what is called an enjambement), or snake through multiple commas.²

There are as many different kinds of line ending as there are ways one word can follow another: sometimes the line is violently trying to slow down the sentence, while the sentence is trying to speed up the line, as in this extreme run over of the syntax in Hart Crane's ecstatic, mystical poem "The Dance":

       I learned to catch the trout's moon whisper; I
       Drifted how many hours I never knew

And sometimes the line ending reinforces the syntactical divisions, calling attention to the thrust and arrest of a sentence, as in the opening subtleties of Elisabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses":

       Although it is a cold evening,
       down by one of the fishhouses
       an old man sits netting,
       his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown,
       and his shuttle worn and polished.

Just as no two iambic feet are alike, so no two grammatical joining between words are alike; every foot is a little different and every line ending slices into the sentence a little differently.

(Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, p.29-30)

Why does this matter?

Because this interplay of constraints and freedom exemplifies a core methodological trick: the art of reducing your options to a manageable amount, simplifying composition and becoming legible to your reader, while still retaining the room to accomplish what you want.

In this sense iambic pentamer is an incredible communication protocol, able to convey so much subtleties and changes while throwing into contrast any variation, and rendering such variations supremely legible for anyone who gets used to the baseline rhythm.

Still, english poets did find themselves constrained at times, and wished to try other baselines, other structures, other protocols.

Generalized Meter and Prosodic Contract

The huge value of iambic pentamer and variants is that anyone who has read historical english formal poetry knowns about it, feels it in their body, catches variations, if only intuitively.

But if we want to move to another baseline, another structure, this means that both writer and reader need to discover anew how the poem behaves, how it is meant to be read, how its effects can be communicated.

In between the strict rigour of iambic pentamer and the full freedom of free verse lies the spectrum of constraints and structures that are more or less common, repeated, obvious, visible. What these constraints need to do is to teach the reader how to read the poem, in some way.

Leithauser calls this the prosodic contract:

In its simplest form, the poet is asking you, as the reader, to demonstrate your interest: to continue reading. In return, the poet is pledging to behave in a certain fashion.And the particularities of his pledg are the term of the poem's prosodic contract.

Let's supposed you chance upon a poem dressed in skillful and witty rhyming couplets — Jonathan Swift's "A Description of the Morning,"say. After six or so lines, you're confident about what lies before you:

       Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach
       Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach.
       Now Betty from her master's bed had flown,
       And softly stole to discompose her own;
       The slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door
       Had pared the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.

I will give you witty and sophisticated iambic pentameter couplets, Swift is pledging.

[…]

Having once created a formula, a pattern of expectations, most formal poems pursue it to the close. Poems that begin by sounding and looking like a sonnet wind up becoming sonnet. Most poems that begin as limericks end as limericks.

(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, p.17-19)

That is, the prosodic contract enables the poet to set up the expectations for what the rest of the poem will be like. No longer is the meter constant — to be iambic pentameter with some variations; now the poet can set up various patterns and structure, from the form (sonnet, vilannelle...), the kind of rhymes being used and their patterns (I will discuss rhyme in a future post), the baseline meter…

For example, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven is in trochaic octameter — a baseline that is much more complex, composed, and literary than the iambic pentameter. Here are the first few lines:

       Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
       Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
           While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
       As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
       “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
                   Only this and nothing more.”

Not only does the prosodic contract opens the door to more baseline and meters, but it also creates a new mean of interaction with the reader, in how the expectation is respected or not.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), for instance, was an inveterate, if careful, infringer of contracts. She delighted in creating patterns that she would dishevel or distress in a penultimate stanza and restore intact in the final stanza ("Cirque d'Hiver,""Large Bad Picture,"Manners,"Twelfth Morning").Alternatively, she enjoyed maintaining formal regularity throught a poem and surprising the reader with some twist at the very close, as in "Sleeping Standing Up,"a poem of exact rhymes that terminates with a casual off rhyme:

                                         ...Sometimes they disappeared,
          dissolving in the moss,
             sometimes we went too fast
       and ground them underneath. How stupidly we steered
             until the night was past
          and never found out where the cottage was.

(...)

Sometimes, the surprise in a poem lies in its [sic] pattern's not being broken, as with Frost's "Provide, Provide." The poem begins with iambic tetrameter triplets, the meter sharply etched and the rhymes exact:

       The witch that came (that withered hag)
       To wash the steps with pail and rag,
       Was once the beauty Abishag,

       The picture pride of Hollywood.
       To many fall from great and good
       For you to doubt the likelihood.

Rhymed triplets of this sort usually come undone; they typically relax into off rhymes, simultaneously moderating their harsh hubbub and relieving the poet of the task of producing natural-sounding rhymes so close together. The surprise in this poem is that Frost never lets up. He concludes five stanzas later with all prosodic requirements duly, triumphantly, exclamatory met:

       Better to go down dignified
       With boughten friendship at your side
       Than none at all. Provide, provide!

(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, p.20-22)

Note how the concepts and abstractions used to describe the various prosodic contracts are the ones designed for expressing the variations in the iambic pentameter (and the variations in exact rhyme, as we’ll discuss in next post). Although the history of various forms is more complicated that this sketch, it definitely feels like a exaptation, where the material of the original communication protocol is used to describe new protocols, still built in the same idea of underlying repeated structure.

Lastly, what happens when we go all the way towards unconstrained poetry, where the prosodic contract is singular to this specific poem, and voluntarily eschews any classical metered or rhymed structure? We get free verse.

The Difficulty of Free Verse

Honestly, I really don't know how free verse works, methodologically speaking. It strikes me as a particular difficult exercise, because every poem must recreates fully anew the protocol through which it is interpreted.

When I read a free verse poem, I can say if I like it or not, but I can't find a starting point to dig into the structure, the effect, how it's provided. Or rather, I feel like all the tools we discussed before (variations in rhythm, enjambment, likeness and difference in sounds) play a subtle role, but I still feel almost as lost as I was in front of formal poetry before starting to get the protocol.

Meter itself can play a small role in free verse, as Mary Oliver, an accomplished free verse poet, points out:

Sustained metrical design does not exist in free-verse poems, of course, but often some meter is employed briefly for effect. Especially one finds meter "happening"at the conclusion of the poems. Such practice is simply evidence of the almost natural usefulness of meter with its repeated rhythms and their reliable effects — the absolute certainty that is created by design.

[…]

       Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
       Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
            In the moon that is always rising,
                 Nor that riding to sleep
            I should hear him fly with the high fields
       And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
       Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
                 Time held me green and dying
                   u      u    /    u     u        /      u      u     / 
            Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

[Where the last line is made of three anapests, two unstressed syllables and a stressed one]

Thomas uses the anapest with frequency throughout the poem, and indeed he must, for it is a common pattern appearing, for example, whenever there is a one-syllable preposition followed by an article followed by a one-syllable noun — "in the moon," "to the farm," and "in my chains" are all anapests. But when repeated, the anapest creates something more — a design, an intent Here, at the end of Thomas's rich, lyric lamentation, the three anapests slow down the final line of the poem; they formalize it; they bow to artistry rather than to the patternless running, playing, rising, and falling that are part of the natural physical actions celebrated in the body of the poem.

(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.62)

Aside from its occasional use of meter, free verse tries hard to avoid meter, to not fall too much into neat iambs or crisps pentameters. The formal patterns so essential to most prosodic contracts become here signpost to avoid.

Hearing those units of two, three, and four feet, and hearing the iambs, light or heavy or in between, in some counterpoint or resistance to the idiosyncratic utterance, is good preparation, I think, for hearing lines that often can't quite be divided into feet, and clusters of syllables that pull away from the iambic pattern—as in a late, free-verse poem by Wright, "The First Days" (the epigraph is "Optima dies fugit"):

       The first thing I saw in the morning
       Was a huge golden bee ploughing
       His burly right shoulder into the belly
       Of a sleek yellow pear
       Low on a bough.
       Before he could find that sudden black honey
       That squirms around in there
       Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
       The pear fell to the ground,
       With the bee still half alive
       inside its body.

The first two lines alternate clusters of relatively stressed syllables packed together—like the four syllables "first thing I saw," and the spondaic-sounding "huge gold" and "bee plough" —with clusters of relatively light syllables, like the last syllable of "morning" and the first two syllables of the next line. Yet "Was a huge golden bee," isolated by itself, could be one of the threes in "To Earthward," or part of a pentameter. The movement of the opening lines, in other words, mediates between a kind of allusion or echo of iambic verse and a refusal of that movement. Similarly, the line "Before he could find that sudden black honey" teases toward a pentameter and declines to be one, while "Low on a bough" and "That squirms around in there," on either side of the longer line, are units of two and three feet —or would be in a poem that maintained an iambic norm.

To hear these lines avoiding pentameter is to hear more about them.

(Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, p.103-104)

There might still be deep methods here; I've just failed to find an entry point that would make it legible to me. And similarly, I struggle with most free verse poems, simply because I don't have the key to start unlocking their riches (or realizing the absence of such riches).

In the next post, I'll turn to another powerful source of methodological insights in formal english poetry: rhyme.

1. Of course, the reader might also not even try. But then they wouldn’t read, and so fall out of relevance for the poet.

2. My understanding is that one of the big innovations of Shakespeare was introducing this sort of variations, and using them brilliantly.