Measure For Measure
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
I was recently the subject of a ruthless and quite unprovoked attack by A Stream of Words, a Substack publication run by the very accomplished poet
, regarding my last post concerning meter in poetry.While I would normally never gratify such baseless accusations with the beneficence of my response, I felt nonetheless compelled, given the nature of the complaint, to maintain my good name.
For not only was it suggested I might be one of those poetic luddites who despises and fears the radically new mode of vers libre, but, more to the point, my Francophone heritage was unjustly besmirched.
Therefore, I feel the need to clarify several points to Ms. Marstall and her audience, if not for the sake of good-natured pamphleteering, then at least to rescue my honor from the clutches of Teutonic barbarity.1
Why Use Meter in Poetry?
To summarize briefly, my post argued for a return to a study and practice of meter. Meter has, since the rise of modernism in the early 20th century, fallen out of favor in poetry. It has largely been replaced with Free Verse, or vers libre, as Ms. Marstall calls it, which I can only assume is another one of her Frankish slurs.
Meter is studied in poetry units and MFA programs across the country rarely if at all. If at all, it is most commonly thought of as an archaic form of verse, something that poets used to practice, but no longer do. This is a shame, I said, because meter is essential to verse, and has much to teach us if we are to become good poets.
Ms. Marstall took issue with, among other things, my claim that meter is “essential” to verse. Essential, meaning that, without it, verse is not verse. I stand by this statement, as does Ms. Marstall, in fact, who is of the same opinion as myself and T. S. Eliot, who believe that even the freest verse should be “explicable in terms of prosody.” In her previous post on Free Verse she quotes from Eliot the following:
[The] ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse.2
Eliot’s point is that even in so-called free verse there should be something like an underlying sense of rhythmic structure. And it turns out to be the case with most modernists who turned to Free Verse that behind their work lurks the ghost of some simple meter. I think this was understood implicitly by the modernists, who were, despite their innovations, still students of the poetic tradition. Eliot, being the poet-critic, makes these principles explicit, but it’s not hard to see such rhythmic structure in any of the greatest modernists. Certainly there are the traditionalists, like Frost and Robinson and Auden and Yeats and Tate. But even in Williams and Pound and H.D. and Stevens you find a unity of rhythm characteristic of verse. But as time went on, the assumptions of one generation were lost by the next. Without an explicit defense of the value of meter, such considerations were not inherited but lost, so that nowadays we cannot differentiate verse from prose beyond declaring that verse is something that is “broken up into lines.”
I fundamentally disagree with such a statement. I believe, as the 20th century Scottish critic T. S. Omond believed, that “When a line ceases to be rhythmical it ceases to be verse.”
What is Meter? (Redux)
The practice of meter falls under the craft of poetry known as prosody. Prosody is taken from the Greek prosōidia, which means “towards song” or “in the manner of song.” Any consideration of the patterning or figuring of sound would be the study of prosody. Repetition of sound, word, phrase, line, the use of rhyme scheme, meter itself, all are aspects of prosody.
Meter is the consideration of structural rhythm. Meter means measure. When the measure of a line across successive lines is regular, such that the reader is conditioned by its pattern, you have meter. There are many ways one can go about measuring their lines, and many more ways we have yet to discover. The measures that have become popular over time in English verse have been taxonomized. Iambic pentameter. Trochaic tetrameter. Dactylic hexameter. Readers no doubt are aware of all the different ways one can measure syllable or accent or alliterative repetition. Still some of the more general principles of measure out of which such styles have grown are as yet unknown or underdeveloped. The study of meter is not merely the explication of the forms that have already been discovered and systematized (although they are certainly instructive) but an investigation into the underlying principles that govern the relationship between rhythm and sense.
I brought up Omond’s A Study of Metre in my post as an example of the ways in which we might look at meter with a fresh pair of eyes. For it’s not meter that’s grown stale and outdated, but rather our approach to it. His theory of periodicity, as opposed to accentual-syllabic verse, reorients an understanding of meter, so that we can once again focus, not on counting syllables or stresses, but on more general concerns of using words to create temporal movement, to emphasize, to pause, to build up and to rest, to aid in all the ways in which we talk about the aesthetic qualities of sound. His theory returns us to the nature of shaping rhythm in verse, which is a good thing for the study and practice of poetry.
Is meter the only technique in prosody for creating rhythm and regularity? No. But it is one of the most useful, for several reasons which I touched on, and which I hope to expand on in the future. To ignore it, because it seems old-fashioned or outdated, is to have a hammerless toolbox because a hammer is not electric. Worse, because it is so fundamental to verse, without an understanding of meter, we can often lose the sense or meaning of a poem entirely.
What To Make Of Wild Geese?
To illustrate this point, let’s return to Ms. Marstall’s vicious attack on me.
In order to demonstrate the ways in which free verse poets can use aural elements other than meter to “create unity and emphasis,” she analyzes a famous poem by Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese.”
Here’s the poem
Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Her analysis is worth going through in some detail, as I find it illustrative of several points regarding free verse.
She begins by identifying the ‘soft’ sound of the poem, a consequence of the use of many long, slow vowels and soft consonants in the initial two lines.
“You” “do” “good” “You” “do” “walk” “knees” are all long, slow vowel sounds, with “swallowed” consonants: the soft “d” in “good”, the “k” in “walk” that’s tempered by the “l”.
I agree with Ms. Marstall here about the sound of the poem. Whether or not this is an effect of the initial sound of the first two lines, however, I’m skeptical of. What is conditioning the reader, to me, seems more a matter of the sentiment expressed (“you do not have to be good”) than the sound used to express it. If we’re going to get that granular in our analysis of sound, why not observe also the hard ‘g’ in “good,” or the harshness of “not”? Still, I don’t disagree with her about the overall quality of mood and tone suggested by the sounds in the poem.3
Yet she goes on to say there is a change, a turn, in the poem’s initial idea with the introduction of multisyllabic words like “hundred” and “repenting.”
The first two lines are all short, simple words of one syllable, until the interruption of “hundred”, which is both multi-syllabic and a more staccato sound than we’ve heard yet, telling us—by the mere sound of it—that a new idea has been introduced. Same thing with the sibilant “desert” and “repenting”, where we reach three syllables for the first time in the poem, at the close of the third line.
Now is it really the case that the word “hundred” is telling us, by the mere sound of it, that a new idea has been introduced? The word “hundred” sounds equally as soft and pleasant as the single syllable words. So do “desert” and “repenting.” Are they not as easy in their sounds as “walk” or “do”? Does the mere fact that they’re multisyllabic indicate anything to us about a change in the quality of the idea? What new idea do they signal? Are not the first five lines part of the same idea? The repetition of “You” suggests that much.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
They’re not intellectually difficult multisyllabic words, like “penitence.” Nor are they very emotionally charged words, like “wasteland” or “rueful.” They seem rather neutral in sound and connotation.
While I think we both hear something of the softness of this poem, I can’t seem to follow Ms. Marstall on this other point. I think she wants to say more about the sound in this poem than there really is to say.
She rightly points out the use of anaphora, the repetition of “Meanwhile” in the middle section (there’s also repetition of “You” in the first section which she doesn’t mention). She says that the effect of the repetition of “Meanwhile” is to “draw our attention back to the text for a further development.” I’m not sure exactly what she means by this, but my impression of the poem is quite the opposite. The repetition of “Meanwhile” takes us away from the development in the first part of the poem. It doesn’t draw our attention back to that despairing person being addressed, the “You” suffering self-persecution, but rather away from it, to pastoral scenes. The effect is to reorient that suffering within the larger scope of the world and Nature.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Finally, Ms. Marstall notes the juxtaposition between line lengths.
Oliver moves between long, spun-out lines—“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”, “Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain”, “Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air”—and short, sparse ones— “Meanwhile the world goes on”, “are moving across the landscapes”, “are heading home again”—to create an antiphonal back-and-forth that echoes how the poem postures itself as a question-and-answer with the reader, an effect created by varying the beats in each line.
This seems like more grasping. Is there anything antiphonal going on here? Many of the lines are enjambed, which implies continuation and not point-counter-point, not a structure of question-and-answer. Nor is there any regularity to the alternation of short and long lines, such that we could say with confidence that this was the intention and this the result.
There is no varying of beats, since there’s no regularity, either of accent, syllable, or period. Consider, for example, where the emphasis might fall in the first line. I instinctively put it on “have,” as in “You do not have to be good,” as if the speaker were replying to the addressee’s sense of failure in the face of suffering. In this sense the speaker is offering grace. They’re saying, “You don’t always have to be good.”
But it’s also possible that the stress could fall on “good,” as in “You do not have to be good,” which might imply that the speaker is saying, “You don’t have to be good at all. Goodness is not a prerequisite for making it through life.” This reading might better suit the theme of the poem, although it’s not intuitive for me.4
Or perhaps there are three beats in the first line. “You,” “have,” and “good,” separated by two pairs of unstressed syllables. You do not have to be good. Now the effect of the line is playful, semi-serious.5 One of the advantages of meter is the interplay of lexical and prosodic stress, which can be used to various effects including as an aid to interpretations of emphasis, and hence to meaning. Without this, we have to do a bit more guesswork.
Now, in playing this game with the first line, I’m being a bit ungenerous to the poem as a whole. The effect of an entire poem is always more than the sum of its parts. But it’s also true that, since there’s no ‘average’ that can be taken of the poem’s rhythm, there’s really nothing that can be said about it. If there’s no measure, then no measure can be taken. In this case, I don’t believe there is a ghost lurking behind the arras. Ms. Marstall would agree with me on this point. The poem isn’t constructing its sound through the use of measure. It’s using other elements of prosody, like anaphora and word sound. I don’t see the larger structural points Ms. Marstall makes about alliterative verse replacing traditional meter, or the alternation between long and short lines, or the antiphonal, call-and-response structure. Considerations of rhythmic structure are left on the table.
What we can gather of the poet’s voice comes, not through the sound, but through the expression of sentiments, through the logical content of the poem. A vague compassion for the suffering of others (“Whoever you are”). An imprecise spiritualism and its tenuous connection to the natural world. It seems consoling at first, but the imagery is anything but. The world offers itself to us, but also it goes on without us?
I’m not a fan of Oliver, but she does have much better poems than this one, despite its popularity. “Song for Autumn,” off the top of my head, is a much better poem. It has all the hallmarks of Oliver you’ll find in “Wild Geese,” but at least she’s personified nature and made it more lively and engaging. It actually feels like a nature you’d want to abandon yourself to.
Missing the Mark
Besides the impersonal imagery, something I find very odd in the poem is the line
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
The line builds up to “clean blue air,” three words of almost equal stress. The effect of the cluster is such that the line races toward it, then recedes in the following line. I admit that I quite like it, except for the fact that she seems to have left the geese behind in the image that culminates, and thus the line feels out of sync. Shouldn’t you see the geese and not the empty sky? Shouldn’t an image impress in your mind by the end of this poem, at least, of three or four black specks in the sky, perhaps in V-formation, disappearing into the blue? The rhythm of the line is out of sync with its image. The rhythm of the poem, too, feels out of sync. A mere series of impressions which don’t add up to anything like a strong idea. Only the “harsh and exciting” call of geese announcing our place in the “family of things.”
Consider the following excerpt, which is from a poem that also deals with nature and the smallness of our troubles in relationship to it.
The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man.
It, too, includes three equally stressed words. “great tomb of man.” Yet how much more satisfying it seems than Oliver’s “clean blue air,” not only because the imagery itself is more vivid, more inventive6, but because it has built up to such a culmination through the steady beat of its rhythm. There’s variability, yet an underlying unity. As Omond points out:
Variation is successful only when it brings into relief, not obscures, our perception of underlying uniformity.7
Conclusion
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Oliver’s line seems to me a clear example of the disadvantages of not studying meter, an obvious lack of consideration of the relationship between sound and sense. As a poet I don’t find her particularly compelling. It doesn’t, anyway, seem like she gives much thought to the construction of lines, or to the structure of her poems as a whole. The page is merely a place for her to write down her thoughts as they strike her. Which is fine, and perhaps it’s this very style that makes her appealing to many readers. For my part, when I want to read about the everyday transcendence of the natural world, I pick up Annie Dillard instead. She does it better in prose than Oliver in poetry. What Bryant does in “Thanatopsis,” however, cannot be gotten elsewhere. His poetry is good verse. It makes use of all the tools of prosody available to him.
My original point is that meter is a useful yet neglected tool. The writer who studies it and makes use of it will greatly improve his writing, even if he is not a great poet. He will have understood something about the nature of rhythm, which will aid him in speaking and writing well.
I’d like to extend my appreciation to Ms.
for responding to my post with a careful and inspecting eye. Despite my opposition to some of her points, it’s clear that we agree about these things more than we disagree. She demonstrates in her poetry an attention to the craft at every level. I recommend you check out her work, and do not hold her rougher, Germanic tendencies against her.
“Marstall” is an old Germanic word meaning “Hostler,” a keeper of horses.
“Reflections on Vers Libre” Eliot. The New Statesman. 1917.
It doesn’t hurt, either, that Oliver uses the word “soft”.
What is the theme of this poem? While it might appear at first to be consolatory, that it might be telling us to look outside ourselves and find solace in nature, it also seems simultaneously to view nature as cold and indifferent. The imagery is blank and distant, and yet the speaker tells us that our “place in the family of things” is in this rather inconsolate world.
Omond notes that, while triple time (dactyls and anapests) were considered heroic in Ancient Greek, in English they sound almost the opposite. Our heroic verse is naturally double time (iambs and trochees).
Consider how each aspect of nature is individually characterized, and compare this to Oliver’s “prairies and deep trees”, “mountains and rivers.”
A Study of Metre. p 75.
I love it when poetry becomes a contact sport! Why should hockey players have all the fun? Having said that, when I saw the superscript 1 next to "Teutonic barbarity," I was afraid Mr C was going to prove in a footnote that Ms. Marstall is descended from Hitler. I'm glad he didn't! That would be going too far. Even hockey players are pulled apart after a few teeth get knocked out.
I agree that the little "Wild Geese" exegesis was silly. Open the Tax Code at random, and behold: soft sounds and monosyllables and long sounds and multisyllabic words (oh, look, there's that inspired "hundred"). Mary Oliver must've taken time off from her mania for "nature" to help out with IRC Section 7 a(iii). Well, if she did, it's the least insipid thing she ever wrote.
Mr. C, I hope the Teutonic barbarity hits back hard. I'm ready to pile on you, too, if given the opportunity. This is how poetry should be conducted: Not with a whimper but with a bang. (Seems to be required in these discussions to back up every claim with an Eliot quote. There's mine.)
this is what substack is for