The Objective Sense in Poetry
A Coda on Meter
A final thought on meter.
I first started writing about it in a previous post, Why Use Meter in Poetry? by commenting on the fact that metered poetry by and large has fallen out of favor since the early 20th century, both with the general public and within the poetry community (with exceptions of course). I argued that this was to the detriment of poetry, because we ignored one of the essential ways in which poetry figured language and so distinguished itself as an artform.1
Meter bestows a unique temporal experience to poetry. To write in meter is to ‘keep time,’ as I wrote in How Poetry Figures Time. When we write in meter, we’re figuring time by means of the regularity of rhythm we give to lines. The words in a line, as Omond says in A Study of Metre, are used as “indices of time.” And the poem ‘keeps time’ even when variation is introduced.2 We expect the reader, too, to read the poem according to the time in which it is set. The verse itself, by virtue of its rhythm, insists upon it. Thus time is an integral part of the experience of verse.
We often say, when reading poetry, that it must be spoken aloud. So too, when we write it, the common advice is that it should be regularly read aloud to hear how it sounds. What are we listening for? If we’re writing in meter, part of what we’re listening for is the rhythm, the timing of the thing. Our listening is like a counting. Do the words keep the time? Do they work even when they’re not always keeping it? When we’re reading, too, we’re being conditioned by the timing, such that we read the piece in a certain way.3
This is something poetry does that prose cannot.4 And by figuring time in this way, we’re made aware of it. By writing with a regularity of rhythm, the reader is constrained to read the poem in a time not of their own making. This ‘not-of-their-own-making’ reveals time. It makes time apparent, as suddenly it becomes something other than the water in which we swim, something other than the experience we have of it when we say that it ‘slipped away’ or was ‘lost.’ No longer faded into the background of experience, when reading verse time is uniquely present, and one is aware of its flow and its passing.
When I made the comment in Why Use Meter in Poetry? that meter restores a sense of objectivity to poetry, this is what I meant. The experience of time, as a thing inherent in the poem itself, is precisely that objective sense. The perception of an underlying uniformity puts us in relation to the objective (something which is sorely lacking in poetry today).
Consider, for a moment, how the opposite is true. Consider how easily we perceive incompleteness, as in music when the rhythm of a chord progression fails to ‘complete’ itself. The ending of Dexter Gordon’s “Second Balcony Jump” is an example of a famous musical rhythm failing to conclude itself.
The call-and-response of the phrase is intentionally broken at the end, and the effect is comically frustrating.
Just as we perceive incompleteness, so too do we have a sense for unity and harmony. We feel when a musical cadence has resolved itself, just as we feel, when reading verse, a sense of rhythmic progression and resolution inherent in the lines. Meter, through its underlying uniformity, effects this sense in us.5
It is, at the very least, an agreement between the writer and the reader, that the poem be taken up in this way. Such an agreement, to something outside oneself, is a gesture toward that objective sense. It’s a welcome reprieve from so much of poetry today that seems, in many ways, unmoored by a radical subjectivity, which insists, almost pathologically, on the primacy of individual expression above all else. A contemporary poetry that figures language, not to elucidate and imagine for others, but to create, as it were, a private gallery in an attic. A poetry that wants us to peruse, in the halls of its museum, fragments of thoughts like shards of pottery, and idioms of unknown and questionable origin. That hangs in gilded frames and places on pedestals the superficial and sloganistic as if they were supreme achievements.
Meter, on the other hand, gives shape and form to thought, gives it music which is the hallmark of deep thought.6 It demonstrates an attention to craft and knowledge of a discipline. It evokes a tradition inherited from poets universally going back to the first bards and scopes and troubadours. It is neither anachronistic nor limiting, but only awaits, like a priceless picture in a yard sale, its renewal in a new vernacular.
We abandoned it, and perceive it now to be, for the most part, anachronistic and regressive. It’s not that people aren’t still writing metered poetry, but the general public sees it as something of a relic, and the poets who don’t practice it find it constraining and limiting to self-expression.
Omond goes so far as to say that the variation is “only successful when it brings into relief, not obscures, our perception of underlying uniformity.”
Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings, which included Tolkien and Lewis and Barfield, called this conditioning of the reader the “ostentation” of verse. He said it was what made verse different than prose.
Prose, being irregular, while it certainly has other ways to lend an experience of time, cannot do so in the same way that verse can.
Rhyme also accomplishes this. As does the cadence of speech, and pitch, what Robert Frost called “the sound of sense.” But that’s for another post.
Thomas Carlyle’s assertion, according to Robert Frost, that if “you think deep enough you think musically.”
I certainly agree with you. Now, I do not counter you at all, however, what you are talking about in poetry is something which very few people can do even if they tried. Most people do not have the intelligence, the creativity or the awareness to even attempt what you are talking about, and so they stay in prose-poetry because it is easier--anyone can write prose. The anti-form people come up with all kinds of excuses why any sort of form inhibits expression, when the truth is they simply can't write poetry of any worth, only plain prose. Form in poetry is using many more tools and effects which are limited in prose--and that presents a big hurdle to most writers. Poetry can exist without given forms, rhyme, meter, and still be poetry, but most writers can't even write an expressive original line of any sort.
I am no purist or professional when it comes to poetry, but I have plenty of experience with performing and listening to music. I've only been writing poetry for about five years. I feel most comfortable when I write a rhyme with a definite rhythm, one that could be sung with a tune if I wanted to, or one that already has a tune in mind. That's just the way I think. I know that's considered out of style, but that's my style. Can I write a poem without rhyme or rhythm? Sure. But it's less comfortable and it may not sound like "me." I guess it depends whether you are writing to please others or yourself. I'd settle for what pleases me. If someone else likes it, all the better. Most people don't understand poetry at all and think it's beyond their understanding or just plain useless. Some people really like rhymes, even if they're old fashioned. It's all good.