No.14 - April 2021
Don't Try This at Home
Imitation is a wonderful tool for an artist. It's why you see young, and even not-so-young artists in the Uffizi or the Louvre, copying old masters, striving to understand what they did, how they got certain effects, what the young or not-so-young copyist can learn from the experience.
One of the most painfully powerful movie scenes occurs in Amadeus, when the dying Mozart, unable to pick up a pen, asks Salieri to transcribe a piece of music for him. F. Murray Abraham, as Salieri, captures the pain and rapture of the mediocre composer writing down the notes of genius that he would never be able to create on his own, but are now taking form under his hand, in his penmanship. The moment is complicated by the facts that (a) Mozart is dying because Salieri has murdered him, and (b) he plans to steal the piece of music and pass it off as his own. But these monstrous facts are subsumed, in that moment, to the glory of creativity that is and is not his.
I don't recommend trying this at home, not that the occasion would ever be likely to arise.
But there are other things I would recommend not trying at home. I often used to give assignments that involved one sort or another of imitation, of a poet or a poem. I would frequently assign taking one line from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and writing your own poem around it. Or the old chestnut that everyone has taken a crack at -- write your own version of William Carlos Williams's "This is just to say." But there are others....
For example, W. B. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
OK, I'm going to talk poet talk for a while, so if your eyes glaze over, I'll understand. If you don't want to read it all, that's OK. Just read the poems, because they're just about as good as it gets.
For the purposes of scansion, I’ll put the stressed syllables in all caps, the unstressed in all lower case.
I will / aRISE and / GO now, / and GO / to INN / isFREE,
AND a / small CABin / BUILD there, / of CLAY / and WAT / tles MADE;
NINE BEAN- / rows WILL i / HAVE there, / a HIVE / for the HON / ey-BEE,
And LIVE / aLONE / in the BEE / -LOUD GLADE.
Three hexameter lines, followed by a tetrameter line. But what hexameter lines! Here's how I would scan them. The first line sets a pattern. A trochaic foot, followed by an amphibrach, followed by another trochee. At that point there's a caesura, and then the pattern changes. We have three iambic feet to end the line.
Second line follows the same pattern.
Third line there's a variation. It starts with an iambic substitution...or does it? "Bean" has to be stressed, but "nine" is almost as important, and the pattern of stress on the first syllable of the line has been established, so maybe it's pyrrhic foot. And the strictly regular iamb-iamb-iamb that finished off the first two lines is varied. There's an extra unstressed syllable, which doesn't seem strange, because we're used to the lilt of those amphibrachs in the first half of each line. So this could be another amphibrach -- a HIVE for -- but there's a breath pause after "hive," isn't there? Not a full caesura, but a breath pause. So the substitution is an anapest for the second iamb.
The fourth line is shortened to tetrameter, mostly regular iambic, after all the subtle and supple gymnaastics of the first three lines...except where it isn't. Another anapestic substitution in the third foot, and the fourth foot, though it can be read as an iamb, can also just as easily be called a pyrrhic foot, with two equally stressed syllables following the stress at the end of the previous iamb.
As Yeats says in another poem.
A line may take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
What makes this poem so magical is that it doesn't seem complicated at all. You can read it a hundred times, and fall in love with it every one of those hundred times, and never notice that it's metrically complex.
And you can also disagree with my scansion. An essay by Marit MacArthur and Lee Miller points out that
One student might argue that Yeats’s speaker is resolute, determined to escape some unnamed unsatisfactory locale; “I WILL aRISE and GO[,]” he declares iambically! On this interpretation, the metrical expectation of iambs, in the opening line, would coincide with the emphatic rhythm, reinforcing the speaker’s ardent wish.
Yeats recorded this poem and three others, and, introducing the recording, he says “I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm," so that should be the definitive interpretation, right? Well, no, it shouldn't. Never count on poets for the definitive interpretation of their work. But worthy of consideration, at least. Does Yeats read the first metric foot as an iamb. reinforcing his ardent wish? Or is it a trochee, carrying the slightest breath pause after "I," giving a hesitant tone to the whole venture? A critic -- it might have been Stephen Spender, but memory fails me on that score -- said that the mature Yeats never would have written a line like "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" -- there would have been a clap of thunder, and he would have been gone.
So which syllable does Yeats emphasize in his reading of the poem?
Neither, really.
He doesn't hit a heavy stress until "rise."
If you've followed this all the way through, my advice is...now, forget it. Just let the poem work its magic. And that magic is powerful enough that, by the time you're halfway through the poem, you will forget it. I already have.
How do poets find just the right form for a poem that doesn’t exist yet, that will only find itself inside that sonnet, or that rondeau, or that complex mix of syllabic lines, as in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”? More amazing yet, how does a poet choose a form that doesn’t exist yet as the armature for this poem that doesn’t exist yet? Robert Frost did a nice variation on the standard quatrain with his AABA rhyme pattern in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where the B line ending became the A rhyme for the following stanza. Then what was he going to do for the last stanza of the poem when it was time for that last stanza to come into existence? He made it AAAA, with the last line a repetition of the penultimate line. Did he plan that all along, or did it suddenly occur to him, when he got to the last stanza, that there was a problem he’d have to solve? And that once having chosen his solution, that he’d need a line strong enough to hold up under repetition?
Or how about a form that’s never been tried before, so the poet has no guideline for imagining how it will work? Ready to try that at home? Thomas Hardy was.
Philip Levine wrote a wonderful, heartfelt, illuminating analysis of this poem and its effect on him, and I go back and read it every now and then, to stay in touch with both Hardy and Levine. Levine’s analysis mostly follows the New Critical school, an approach to poetry that has much to offer and is sadly maligned these days.
He does offer the suggestion that Hardy is using a “stanza form which he seems to have invented,” which strays a little outside the text-only boundaries of the New Criticism, but is an important observation, continuing that it “allows for both the merry, swinging movement of the beginning lines of each stanza, with their undercurrent of futility, and the sure counterpunch delivered in the closing lines.”
What is this stanza form? Well, it has a refrain. Today’s formalist poets are much in love with repetition, from pantoums and ghazals to sestinas and villanelles, but you don’t see many refrains, and I’ll probably be devoting a column to this ere long. But the refrain doesn’t come at the end of the stanza, as is usually the case. Instead, it’s the penultimate line. Levine’s “sure counterpunch” is, in prizefighting or streetfighting terms, the old one-two: the refrain line that announces the end to the merry, swinging dance (fight fans would call it a waltz), and sets the reader up for the haymaker that will be delivered in the closing line.
But the poem is saved by the bell with each stanza end, and the waltz continues, only to be knocked off balance by the old one-two again and again, until it, and the family, and the reader, are finally down for the count.
And the refrain varies, but the variation is reined in—refrain line, variation, back to the original, back to the variation. Why? I don’t know, but it’s another part of Hardy’s formal invention, and I know this much: he was right.
And there’s another sort of refrain. I say sort of, because it’s only one word, and you expect a refrain to be a little longer than that, and it’s not the same word every time, which sort of runs counter to the whole idea of a refrain. But refrain it is, a refrain of affirmation, from “yea” to “aye” and back again. Odd, especially when you consider that the other thing which makes the second line of each stanza sort of a refrain is the repetition – only in the first and last stanzas – of “He, she, all of them,” and that is followed once by “yea” and once by “aye.”
What else can we say about this invented form? It’s mostly in trimeter, except the fourth line of each stanza, which is dimeter, and the last line, which is tetrameter. That’s a little odd, although not unheard of. In poetry as well as prizefighting, the knockout punch is more likely to be a short, efficient uppercut than a big roundhouse swing. The ballad form, one of the most tried and true in English prosody, and with good reason, uses this technique – set ‘em up with tetrameter, finish ‘em off with trimeter.
But is it really mostly in trimeter? The refrain lines have the right syllable count for trimeter, but would you really scan it ah NO / the YEARS / the YEARS
Or would you make both AH and NO not only both stressed syllables, but both separate metric feet? This is not uncommon in song, where one word can take up a whole measure, but a lot more unusual in poetry.
So put it all together and you have a poem that feels, like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” not to be complicated at all – that feels traditional. But it’s wholly invented, and it’s a one-off, even for Hardy. He never used it again, that I know of. And you would be wise to follow his example.
Don’t try this at home.
Imitation is a wonderful tool for an artist. It's why you see young, and even not-so-young artists in the Uffizi or the Louvre, copying old masters, striving to understand what they did, how they got certain effects, what the young or not-so-young copyist can learn from the experience.
One of the most painfully powerful movie scenes occurs in Amadeus, when the dying Mozart, unable to pick up a pen, asks Salieri to transcribe a piece of music for him. F. Murray Abraham, as Salieri, captures the pain and rapture of the mediocre composer writing down the notes of genius that he would never be able to create on his own, but are now taking form under his hand, in his penmanship. The moment is complicated by the facts that (a) Mozart is dying because Salieri has murdered him, and (b) he plans to steal the piece of music and pass it off as his own. But these monstrous facts are subsumed, in that moment, to the glory of creativity that is and is not his.
I don't recommend trying this at home, not that the occasion would ever be likely to arise.
But there are other things I would recommend not trying at home. I often used to give assignments that involved one sort or another of imitation, of a poet or a poem. I would frequently assign taking one line from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and writing your own poem around it. Or the old chestnut that everyone has taken a crack at -- write your own version of William Carlos Williams's "This is just to say." But there are others....
For example, W. B. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
OK, I'm going to talk poet talk for a while, so if your eyes glaze over, I'll understand. If you don't want to read it all, that's OK. Just read the poems, because they're just about as good as it gets.
For the purposes of scansion, I’ll put the stressed syllables in all caps, the unstressed in all lower case.
I will / aRISE and / GO now, / and GO / to INN / isFREE,
AND a / small CABin / BUILD there, / of CLAY / and WAT / tles MADE;
NINE BEAN- / rows WILL i / HAVE there, / a HIVE / for the HON / ey-BEE,
And LIVE / aLONE / in the BEE / -LOUD GLADE.
Three hexameter lines, followed by a tetrameter line. But what hexameter lines! Here's how I would scan them. The first line sets a pattern. A trochaic foot, followed by an amphibrach, followed by another trochee. At that point there's a caesura, and then the pattern changes. We have three iambic feet to end the line.
Second line follows the same pattern.
Third line there's a variation. It starts with an iambic substitution...or does it? "Bean" has to be stressed, but "nine" is almost as important, and the pattern of stress on the first syllable of the line has been established, so maybe it's pyrrhic foot. And the strictly regular iamb-iamb-iamb that finished off the first two lines is varied. There's an extra unstressed syllable, which doesn't seem strange, because we're used to the lilt of those amphibrachs in the first half of each line. So this could be another amphibrach -- a HIVE for -- but there's a breath pause after "hive," isn't there? Not a full caesura, but a breath pause. So the substitution is an anapest for the second iamb.
The fourth line is shortened to tetrameter, mostly regular iambic, after all the subtle and supple gymnaastics of the first three lines...except where it isn't. Another anapestic substitution in the third foot, and the fourth foot, though it can be read as an iamb, can also just as easily be called a pyrrhic foot, with two equally stressed syllables following the stress at the end of the previous iamb.
As Yeats says in another poem.
A line may take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
What makes this poem so magical is that it doesn't seem complicated at all. You can read it a hundred times, and fall in love with it every one of those hundred times, and never notice that it's metrically complex.
And you can also disagree with my scansion. An essay by Marit MacArthur and Lee Miller points out that
One student might argue that Yeats’s speaker is resolute, determined to escape some unnamed unsatisfactory locale; “I WILL aRISE and GO[,]” he declares iambically! On this interpretation, the metrical expectation of iambs, in the opening line, would coincide with the emphatic rhythm, reinforcing the speaker’s ardent wish.
Yeats recorded this poem and three others, and, introducing the recording, he says “I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm," so that should be the definitive interpretation, right? Well, no, it shouldn't. Never count on poets for the definitive interpretation of their work. But worthy of consideration, at least. Does Yeats read the first metric foot as an iamb. reinforcing his ardent wish? Or is it a trochee, carrying the slightest breath pause after "I," giving a hesitant tone to the whole venture? A critic -- it might have been Stephen Spender, but memory fails me on that score -- said that the mature Yeats never would have written a line like "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" -- there would have been a clap of thunder, and he would have been gone.
So which syllable does Yeats emphasize in his reading of the poem?
Neither, really.
He doesn't hit a heavy stress until "rise."
If you've followed this all the way through, my advice is...now, forget it. Just let the poem work its magic. And that magic is powerful enough that, by the time you're halfway through the poem, you will forget it. I already have.
How do poets find just the right form for a poem that doesn’t exist yet, that will only find itself inside that sonnet, or that rondeau, or that complex mix of syllabic lines, as in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”? More amazing yet, how does a poet choose a form that doesn’t exist yet as the armature for this poem that doesn’t exist yet? Robert Frost did a nice variation on the standard quatrain with his AABA rhyme pattern in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where the B line ending became the A rhyme for the following stanza. Then what was he going to do for the last stanza of the poem when it was time for that last stanza to come into existence? He made it AAAA, with the last line a repetition of the penultimate line. Did he plan that all along, or did it suddenly occur to him, when he got to the last stanza, that there was a problem he’d have to solve? And that once having chosen his solution, that he’d need a line strong enough to hold up under repetition?
Or how about a form that’s never been tried before, so the poet has no guideline for imagining how it will work? Ready to try that at home? Thomas Hardy was.
DURING WIND AND RAIN
They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all --
Men and maidens -- yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them -- aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Philip Levine wrote a wonderful, heartfelt, illuminating analysis of this poem and its effect on him, and I go back and read it every now and then, to stay in touch with both Hardy and Levine. Levine’s analysis mostly follows the New Critical school, an approach to poetry that has much to offer and is sadly maligned these days.
He does offer the suggestion that Hardy is using a “stanza form which he seems to have invented,” which strays a little outside the text-only boundaries of the New Criticism, but is an important observation, continuing that it “allows for both the merry, swinging movement of the beginning lines of each stanza, with their undercurrent of futility, and the sure counterpunch delivered in the closing lines.”
What is this stanza form? Well, it has a refrain. Today’s formalist poets are much in love with repetition, from pantoums and ghazals to sestinas and villanelles, but you don’t see many refrains, and I’ll probably be devoting a column to this ere long. But the refrain doesn’t come at the end of the stanza, as is usually the case. Instead, it’s the penultimate line. Levine’s “sure counterpunch” is, in prizefighting or streetfighting terms, the old one-two: the refrain line that announces the end to the merry, swinging dance (fight fans would call it a waltz), and sets the reader up for the haymaker that will be delivered in the closing line.
But the poem is saved by the bell with each stanza end, and the waltz continues, only to be knocked off balance by the old one-two again and again, until it, and the family, and the reader, are finally down for the count.
And the refrain varies, but the variation is reined in—refrain line, variation, back to the original, back to the variation. Why? I don’t know, but it’s another part of Hardy’s formal invention, and I know this much: he was right.
And there’s another sort of refrain. I say sort of, because it’s only one word, and you expect a refrain to be a little longer than that, and it’s not the same word every time, which sort of runs counter to the whole idea of a refrain. But refrain it is, a refrain of affirmation, from “yea” to “aye” and back again. Odd, especially when you consider that the other thing which makes the second line of each stanza sort of a refrain is the repetition – only in the first and last stanzas – of “He, she, all of them,” and that is followed once by “yea” and once by “aye.”
What else can we say about this invented form? It’s mostly in trimeter, except the fourth line of each stanza, which is dimeter, and the last line, which is tetrameter. That’s a little odd, although not unheard of. In poetry as well as prizefighting, the knockout punch is more likely to be a short, efficient uppercut than a big roundhouse swing. The ballad form, one of the most tried and true in English prosody, and with good reason, uses this technique – set ‘em up with tetrameter, finish ‘em off with trimeter.
But is it really mostly in trimeter? The refrain lines have the right syllable count for trimeter, but would you really scan it ah NO / the YEARS / the YEARS
Or would you make both AH and NO not only both stressed syllables, but both separate metric feet? This is not uncommon in song, where one word can take up a whole measure, but a lot more unusual in poetry.
So put it all together and you have a poem that feels, like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” not to be complicated at all – that feels traditional. But it’s wholly invented, and it’s a one-off, even for Hardy. He never used it again, that I know of. And you would be wise to follow his example.
Don’t try this at home.
©2021 Tad Richards
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article please tell Tad. His email address is tad@opus40.org. Letting authors know you like their work is the beginning (and continuation) of community at Verse-Virtual.