No.37 - February 2025
Down to the Last Syllable
As a keen student of poetic forms, I was first struck by Dylan Thomas’s intricate use of syllabics in “Fern Hill” when…
Well, never.
I became aware of Dylan Thomas’s use of syllabics in “Fern Hill” when I read about it somewhere. Then I had to go and count each line, each stanza, and sure enough, there’s a syllabic pattern, and an elegant one: two lines of 14 syllables each, then the line length shrinks to nine syllables, then six. Then the pattern reverses. The short 6-syllable line is the wheel. The next line is nine syllables, then two more of fourteen. Each stanza then ends with a coda: seven syllables, then nine.
Count it for yourself:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams…
But I had never noticed its formal rigor when I first fell in love with the poem as a teenager, or when I continued to love it as an adult, or even when I taught it in college intro to poetry classes over the years.
Of course, once having found out that Thomas used syllabics, not just Welsh metrics (actually Thomas, a somewhat lazy student of his native culture, never really wrote in strict Welsh metrics), I had to find out more. “Poem in October” is written in syllabics, though not quite as symmetrical a pattern: 9, 12, 9, 3, 5, 12, 12, 6, 3, 9:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke…
“Especially When the October Wind” is written in syllabics, but the structure is completely different—each line is ten syllables long:
Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words…
Of course, a line that’s ten syllables long is also likely to be a pentameter line, and most of these are, with certain striking exceptions, like the first line. So maybe it’s just a pentameter poem with some incredibly careless lapses – which, of course, Thomas could cover up with his sonorous voice and bravura reading style.
So…what if Thomas had failed the form in “Fern Hill”? What if one of the 14-syllable lines had 15 syllables? Or only 13? Would that have ruined the poem?
Don’t be ridiculous. No one reads “Fern Hill” for the syllable count. And in fact, “Especially When the October Wind” has a few 11-syllable lines, and this is not something anyone reading the poem is going to notice.
A rhymed or metered poem is held to different standards. Mangle one of the rhymes in “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” or “Stopping by Woods” and you would hamstring the reader’s enjoyment. I remember once getting a student poem that was light and funny and promising, but the rhyme and meter were a little off. I sent it for a critique to a friend who was a successful writer of light verse for a critique, and she sent it back with a note saying “I can’t read this. Light verse has to rhyme perfectly and scan perfectly. Let your poet fix that before I say anything else about it.” (Of course Ogden Nash, the greatest of all light versifiers, had his own unique approach to scansion, but he had his own sort of unerring ear.) I wrote a poem once that included the stanza
But since I embraced mimesis
Of paideia and poesis,
Tossed barbarism over to the dugongs and the whales,
Now my private parts are private,
And my meter – I derive it
Half from Guido Cavalcanti, half from the bards of Wales.
Which scanned if you tortured the last line a bit. But when I posted it on a poetry listserv, a generous acquaintance suggested, “Why ruin a good poem with tortured scansion? You could fix it easily with ‘ancient bards of Wales.’”
Which I did, with gratitude.
People who like formal poetry like it because there’s a sensual pleasure to the rhymes and the regular meter. People who like free verse like it because it removes the distractions of form, and allows them to engage directly with imagery and ideas.
So who likes syllabic verse?
Nobody.
Not because anyone dislikes it, but because nobody notices it’s there, Nobody except that familiar group of whipping persons – people in MFA programs. A form that does not call attention to itself is an odd contradiction in terms. Isn’t the whole point of form to call attention to itself?
Maybe not the whole point. For the reader, it’s the whole point. But for the poet, as for a painter working with a limited palette, the restriction is an important part of the process. It forces you to focus your thinking, to make choices you might not otherwise have made. Maybe Dylan Thomas knew that he wanted to say that even though, to his childhood self, the farm seemed eternal, actually it was ephemeral. But if he hadn’t had to say it in exactly 14 syllables would he have come up with “As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away”?
Richard Hugo, in “The Triggering Town,” talks about setting an arbitrary rule for himself that “when I made a sound…I liked specially, I’d make a similar sound three to eight syllables later…Why three to eight? Don’t ask. You have to be silly to write poems at all.”
Certain Welsh forms like the cywydd set up much more stringent rules for internal rhyme, but Hugo was having it both ways – the fluidity of free verse, but with a self-imposed formal stricture that that had to be followed.
And so with syllabics. The poet is working with a set of self-imposed rules; the reader doesn’t have to bother with them, or even notice them.
As a young unformed would-be poet who had somehow blundered into the Iowa Workshop, I was part, one day, of a discussion of Henri Coulette’s then-new The War of the Secret Agents. One stanza of one of the secret agent poems read:
What was an amusement is now a danger.
Africa, Russia –
what I delayed must begin:
we will come in the night like bad dreams.
I look forward to meeting them, as I might
the authors of my childhood.
I suggested, trying to sound intelligent and critical, two attributes to which I had no claim, that “Africa, Russia” was kind of a flat line, not really doing much. Donald Justice, with what I recall as an arched eyebrow, said he wasn’t so sure about that – that there was something satisfying about the way that the two major fronts of the war fitted neatly into Coulette’s syllabic pattern. And a door opened up for me – a hitherto secret portal into a world where syllable count was part of what you could use in structuring a poem. A world that my hero, Donald Justice, was a part of, and I was being invited to enter.
And since then, I’ve always loved that line.
©2025 Tad Richards
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