Rhyme and Meter in Poetry

When I lectured on the subject I exhorted my students to do one thing above all else: have fun with the text, work and rework, but never lose your love for the text. I also told them that poems about how their boy/girlfriends fucked them over are the enemy of all that is pure and holy, and they seemed a bit miffed.

Watch Haikunym spit out haiku:
A simple form we all can do
As easily as sucking thumbs.

But something in free verse's cup:
With bad free verse, you don't end up
With DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM.

In part it's because it seems like people who write formal poetry nowadays are doing so to be fascistically devoted to the rhythm and form, and people who wrote it in the past seemed to be using it more as a guideline and gathered a lot of kinetic energy from trying to break the form (without actually breaking it). That doesn't seem to be an interesting tension to work with nowadays (the tension between sense and nonsense seems much more vital) (go ahead, plot parallels to social structures if you must).

This type of stuff is the only metered/rhymed poetry I listen to much these days, but I listen to a lot of it, an awful lot!

I remember someone mentioning that he thought it was ironic that though rhymed poetry began to seem sort of fey at some point in the 20th century, the stuff of blinkered nostalgics, most people really doing it to make a living now are rough-neck street dudes.

It's true my "haiku" are easily spat,
But it is not as facile, quite, as that:
If they were truly haiku they'd be full
Of seasonal words ("kigo"), and would cull
Their meaning from their ancestors in books,
Depend on subject by how nature looks.

As in most things, I urge the middle path:
If syllables rule heart, the poem is Math;
If feeling gets all sloppy, we need Rule
Which helps, although it smacks too much of School.
A poem's a po-em then, for a' o' this--
One cannot overanalyze a kiss,
Nor is a freak explosion true romance.
We dance the way we want RIGHT NOW to dance.

Staying close: Eliot, Stevens.
Too far away: Williams, Pound (throughout much of the Cantos anyway).

On the other hand, I don't find much 20th century poetry written using more or less conventional meter and rhyme all that exciting either.

Incidentally, I am finally getting rid of my Collected Poetry of William Carlos Williams, my Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, and several other poetry collections.

Somewhere, silently,
someone will begin to weep,
without knowing why

Better not, yo.

(xpost, that was re: WCW, Asphodel you greeny flower 4evah, spring & all rah rah rah!!!)

surrendering, slowly, silently, to the
percussion of the abundant precipitation
i let the concrete shutters down
technicolor reality becomes an ebony canvas
drifting slowly, silently, as the
rooftop dance lures me away --
away to worlds of my own making
automatons dance under neon skies
david bowie dines with mother teresa
the sun gives its glorious approval to
brilliant blades dotted with yellow smiles
no more burdens, no more tears
just the soundtrack of the heavens' crying
vaguely in the background of
the scenes of my own design
i am my own director, writer, producer
i play whatever character i want to be
or, if i choose, i can stay behind the scenes
witnessing giggling children gulping down grapes
or frolicking in a shimmering azure lake
forever young, forever free, without worry
marching to the beat of the distant timpani
cool breezes circling, blanketing, comforting
i am safe from reality's harsh glare
in the worlds of my own making
and the rooftop dance marches on.

I suppose there's a sort of slowly chugging rhythm to it. But none of it is concerned with rhythm, just with symbolism and a message, which I do think is highly important to a poem. I'd feel awfully silly if I wrote, oh, for example:

This poem is just meant to rhyme,
And maybe keep some inner time.
There's no symbolism in here --
That's too hard to do, I fear,
While being concerned about the end
Words and if they'll bend
And twist and rhyme together,
A task I feel is harder than leather
To do and make the poem sound nice
And not use the same rhyme twice.
So let me finish up this little bit --
That's the end, this is it.

And I think I just wrote the Worst Poem Ever. ;)

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

If rhyme and meter were the sum
And whole of all a poem had going,
Ten men could feast upon a crumb
Or farmers prosper merely sowing
One handful of grain. More's needed
To make a poem stand up and dance -
A point I think that must be ceded.
Good poems exceed such circumstance.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

is swingier than

the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them.

? Because there are certainly differences between the two, and they're conveying entirely different things, but it seems clear that whatever its metric and euphonic merits, the Eliot isn't swingy, especially compared to the bounce and bluster of the WCW.

[...] the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.

We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'free-est' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.

I'm not a fan of Carol Anne Duffy's recent work, but I can see the ghost of Eliot's formulation used to impressive formal effect in her poetry:

But then I was young -- and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thoughts of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

Williams could not be
overrated. Neither could
Edgar Allan Poe.

I think I agree with the Eliot quote about free verse, and I think that more poets writing free verse at that time (or from that generation--writing a bit later even) tended to approximate a simple metre. Some of H.D.'s late poetry works this way for me. Maybe it just is metrical? I like "Winter Love," for instance.

I don't know why I am starting so many sentences on this thread with "I think" and "I feel."

(Sorry to be so U.S.-centric in my examples, but that's the modern poetry I know best, the stuff that mattered to me the most, at least at one time.)

Summer surpried us, coming over the Stanbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in the sunlight, in the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
[Okay, so I don't know how to say that]
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

[Maybe it's just a first impression thing, but I am completely attached to that as well as much of the rest of the poem. It's funny too because I genuinely clicked with it at the time, but did not get Williams then, and I still like the Eliot, but don't get Williams, though I gave Williams the benefit of the doubt for a long time. Maybe I even liked him, in a way, for a while, but I can't remember ever really liking him on a rhythmic level. It was more a matter of a certain way of observing the world.]

I don't like H.D.,
really, although I have tried.
she's all full of shit.

Eliot for me
is reactionary tripe,
full of gas and pomp;

and I THINK I FEEL
more honesty in Williams,
viscerality,

than in all 'Cantos'
or Eliot's poetry--
but I can't force YOU

I suppose Eliot's complaint would be that formal freedom loses its poetic resonance when not juxtaposed/contrasted with some form of restriction.

This can certainly be true, although regular meter and rhyme are not the only forms of restriction.

I think I agree.

(Parenthetically, this touches on another of my peeves - the fact that poetry has been grosslu oversold by megalomaniacs as the nearest thing to The Voice of God, cleverly assisted by a gang of academic acolytes who gain their bread by mediating the Voice of God to the People, but that is a subject for another time and another thread.)

The human need for poetry is basic, primal. Sadly, in the present age, "serious" poetry has become a fetish for the few, and the poets for the masses are ad jingle writers and 50-Cent. Because the "serious" poets have, in the main, a jaded, narrow audience, they will always try to shock. Ugliness is beauty, etc. It's happened in all artistic expression. Dead animals floating in plexiglass boxes full of formaldehyde isn't art. But most people don't go to contemporary exhibitions. The ones who do, go in order to be horrified.

But because the need for poetry is so basic, I think rhyme and meter will always circle back into vogue. It's a richer palette and harder to work with. But as Matt observes above, the real goal of the poet is to create compelling images through whatever mode, to engage the reader. And that's not easy to do well.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn
I can hear from the car park teh dance has begun.
Oh! Full surrey twilight! Importunate band!
Oh strongly adorable tennis girl's hand.

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car
And here by my right is the girl of my choice
With the tilt of her nose and the sound of her voice

And the scent fo her wrap and the words never said
And the omminous, omminous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one,
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Betjeman is the BOMB when it comes to writing with metre. Poe knew where it was at as well.

The total exclusion of rappers here is seriously fucked-up. You might have thought I was just cracking jokes, or scoring points, or whatever it is that allows you not to take rappers "seriously." I wasn't. More people listen to rhymed and metered poetry now than probably any other stage in human history. These poems touch on almost every aspect of human existence. Expressions of non-violent protest, the mean streets of Flatbush, VIP rooms of the most exclusive clubs, anti-Oedipal revenge fantasies, or the tough negotiations of career and success: kids (and adults) from Phoenix to Kyoto study and memorize these poems intensely. Spare me the long coffees on the Stanbergersee. Really.

Most popular songs since the mid-50s have averaged about 3 minutes in length (obv. I know there are exceptions). The typical "poem" consists of verse 1/chorus/verse 2/chorus/bridge/verse 3 or 1/chorus. Or about 15-20 lines of poetry. This is tantamount to reducing all poetry to the haiku form. Rather limited.

I love popular music; I agree it's the poetry of our age. But our age sucks.

Spare me the long coffees on the Stanbergersee.

Ha ha ha!

Virgil--Aeneid BBBBOOOOOOOORRRRRRRIIIIINNNNNGGGGGG (at least in translation)

Homer--Odyssey Moving, heartbreaking, funny, lucid, colorful, sharp, brilliant. (even in translation)

Sometimes the test works, sometimes it doesn't.

vs

There's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand gray to the sun,
Singing: -- "Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer's done."

Huhhuhuh</beavis>

I call shenanigans on your 20-line haiku!

How about "nijuu-ku?"

That's an interesting way of putting it.

seems much more vital

But there's still no substitute for sense, not in the sense of meaning, but in the sense of, in this case, sound and rhythm.

Anyway, that's one "no" vote from me, but I am just repeating myself without adding anything.

I teach poetry to high school students. These are, almost to a student, serious fans of the rap form. Invariably I have students bring me rap as a response to poetry they have read.

I believe rap is poetry because it has the qualities we associate with poetry: a desire to express the speaker's view / emotions, a condensed form that heightens the emotional value of the writing (that is versus its length), a discrete musicality to the shape / form of the writing, and a sense of communicated meaning. OTOH, I don't believe very much rap is GOOD poetry, any more than very much of any of the lyrics of modern pop music is good poetry.

I do not believe any GOOD poetry can exist without sound effect based on rhyme, rhythm, consonance, and/or dissonance, but the importance of the sound to the overall effect of the poem will, naturally, vary. Many coloured halo's poem [the first one] depends a lot less on the rhythmic effect than it does on, say, alliteration, but even there parallel ideas are related in lines of similar length and structure, and new ideas are introduced with changes in rhythmic pattern. IMO, it's an intuition about poetry that good poets have internalized.

Nightfall - Patrick Rahming

The early evening finds me
tired
but not broken
hungry
but not angry
without a friend
but not afraid
alone
but not lonely
the early evening finds me
seated
at my meal
with the thought of friendship
and the joy
of a day’s work
well done
the evening meal finds me
quietly enjoying
my own uniqueness.

Simplistic? Yes. But powerful because its structure and diction effectively communicate meaning that is accessible to us all.

I don't find metred poem to be less powerful because of its structure. The value is in the whole, not in one aspect of the parts.

An effective meter first of all adds emphasis at all the proper places. Secondly, meter provides a mechanism for setting up expectations and pulling the reader along; da DUM da DUM may be plodding (like 4/4 time in music) but it lets the reader anticipate and participate. Lastly, once you have set up those rhythmic expectations, you can play off them to add further dramatic emphasis, humor, or anti-climax to certain words or lines. Of these three effects, the first is the most valuable.

Rhyme, OTOH is a less vital tool than meter. Meter inheres in speech, even if it is a wholly broken meter or even a repellent one. You can't escape it. You can only ignore it - and that at your peril. Rhyme is much more artificial and imposed. It is excellent for setting up expectations and for making poems stick more easily in memory. And since it sets up ironclad expectations, it also can be a superb vehicle for emphasis, humor and anti-climax. But that's about it.

I think that assonance and internal rhymes, if well-managed, can provide subtler effects that are less jarring than end-rhymes. However, there is something attractive in jingling end-rhymes that satisfies us as humans. If you want to gratify a large audience at a basic level, always go for rhymes (see rap - case closed). Taste is overrated anyway. There will always be more hamburger stands than five star restaurants.

But better rap is a lot more dependent on assonance and internal rhyme, or on structural repetition for effect than might at first appear.

I believe rap is poetry because it has the qualities we associate with poetry: an interest and delight in the qualities of language outside of its strictly connotative meanings.

Spring

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring --
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. -- Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

So a sheep floating in preservative fails all but #2.

Momus said something in the Vice thread (OH NO!!!! INVOKED!!!!!) to the the effect that anything can be rendered ironic basically by the mere application of " " ...and that is generally true, but some things aren't art. They're sheep. And they're certainly not good art.

But then, I'm a fuddy-duddy. And yeah, that first line of "Spring" is wretched. I'm hoping it's "ironic." For Gerry's sake.

WHIRL up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.

now hopkins i love, but he doesnt swing, and i dont really find him "vigourus", but robust, english in that roast beef, pudding and ale way...added of course with catholic sex guilt.

i think what we are forgetting is that free verse, with its stanza structure, etc, has been formalist forever.

Pre-Victorian? I beg your pardon, but as Jeremy Irons/Klaus von Bulow says, "You have no idea." I'd peg it closer to Minoan!

It's true that they often would be more interesting with the dust intact.

That doesn't seem like a particularly useful definition of art -- it seems like you're missing out on a lot of interesting things with that definition. But ah well.

The cop-out answer to this is of course "not if it's done well." The only aspect of rhyming that I see as dead in contemporay poetry is the hard rhyme. And I think a lot of poets like the challenge of writing a sestina in the post-Elliot world.

I do think symbolism is part of the reason how poetry lost its way from the masses. By abandoning or encrypting so much of the rhythm and rhyme, the immediate joy of reading or hearing poetry was diminished. On top of that, of course, every high school student in the country was taught that poems were puzzles they had to solve. So instead of seeing the imagery of a Wallace Stevens poem, they're busy guessing what the "real meaning" is. ("I know, the birch tree is Jesus!")

Basically I think in a modernly compressed poem there's still room enough for vivid imagery and rhythmic twists to keep the reader's mouth happy.

Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

the same thing happens at uni though, for example my favourite marvell poem Bermuda being absoultely(sp) ruined for me by a post colonist who wanted me to know of the sufferings of the firsts nations there.

which made mark sinkers contrubtion to this thread heartning, in that he resurcted kippling for me, one that i had dismissed.

So someone like Housman I can never quite appreciate -
I hoed and trenched and weeded,
and took the flowers to fair:
I brought them home unheeded;
The hue was not the wear.
(a shropshire lad, LXIII)
- because it's a little perhaps, obvious: the metre's too pat, you can anticipate the stresses and the rhymes without really thinking about it, and spoken it falls into sing-song.

Whereas in, say, Donne's poetry, there's often a huge tension between the apparent metre and the words themselves, and the poem tends to follow the cadence of spoken word far more than the metre -
Graius stays still at home here, and because
Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws
Still new like fashions, bid him think that she,
Which dwells with us, is only perfect, he
Embraceth her, whom his godfathers will
Tender to him, being tender, as wards still
Take such wives as their guardians offer, or
Pay values.
(satire three)

There is, of course, a huge difference between a satire - by nature a rant - and a set of poems which might well have been based on folk-songs: but Donne doesn't make half as much of a habit of ending his lines and his clauses at the same point, so there's not the ponderous gap in line & meaning & punctuation that makes so many other metred poems tedious.

It's like the difference between many pop song lyrics and many rappers' verses. Because rap is attuned to the rhythms of speech *and* uses tricks of assonance, internal rhyme and so on, it can be much more interesting listen - definitely much more interesting as a text form. It's got a verbal art to it that song lyrics often lack: which not only makes it poetry, to my mind, but makes it better poetry than most.

Latin and Greek verse, perhaps because they don't depend on the end-of-line rhyme as much as English poetry does, perhaps because they're syllable-length rather than syllable-stress based, seem less prone to turning into doggerel. There's also often more fluidity in Latin and Greek metres - am trying to avoid talking too much classicist-shop here, but the first half of a line of hexameter (iliad, aeneid, odyssey, catullus 64) can have a differing number of syllables, so long as the overall line conforms to the metre. So you can get the rushed line -
dum didi, dum didi, dum didi, dum didi, dum didi dum dum
- or the slow one -
dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum didi dum dum
- or any of the ones in between. You get variety of expression while keeping the metre intact, which is difficult if you're limiting yourself within the bounds of a rhymed English metre rather than straining against them.

Anyway, these are guidelines, not rules, as we learned from Pirates of the Caribbean, in response to Mitch's saying, rightly, that you just can't say "this is" and "this isn't" with out a rubric.

Except for #5. There can be no exceptions.

there's a little bit of momus in skottie but plz don't overdo it.
-- Julio

Ouch! Now you've gone too far!

Still classic despite carpet bombing and bad 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s architecture:
http://osheamurphy.com/jls/graphics/brandenburg.jpg

Some serious knowledge is getting dropped here. I love this out-of-my-league feeling though!! Bring the noise!!!!

I guess freeverse is actually closest to freestyle. You lose the beats, the rhymes get more complex, etc. The improv thing though, rappers are crazy to do that shit.

also i wonder about free verse that is tight and self contained (creeley, some plath) and free verse that is epic and spastic (ppound, berryman)

what if the cantos were prose ?

chris and haikunym can
find common ground in that
hyperdogmatically
penned verse is banal.

The second stanza's content serves as its own justification for said stanza's syntactical surplus.

And then the general shittiness of this malformed double dactyl disproves the second stanza's contention, because in some cases it is the severe, almost dogmatic restrictions of a form that bear responsibility for the beauty of compositions in that form. I'm not much of a poet-tologist (or whatever the word is for poetry's equivalent of a musicologist) so I apologize if using such a light-hearted form as the double dactyl to clumsily make such a point is anathema.