from Poetic Form: An Introduction
When I was a boy, my mother bounced me on her knee and chanted:
Trot, trot to Boston,
Trot, trot to Lynn,
Watch out little David,
Or else you'll fall in!
For a grand finish she shouted, "Weeee!" and dangled me from her lap.
My mother did not randomly bounce me. She bounced me four times on the odd lines and three on the even ones. She kept to the pattern of the song, which I will reproduce by capitalizing the syllables where I received a bounce and the language a little emphasis:
TROT, TROT, to BOS-TON,
TROT, TROT to LYNN,
Watch OUT LITTle DA-VID,
Or ELSE you'll FALL IN!
We know a lot more about poetic form than we think we do.We experience it before we can speak; we hear it on commercials, on the playground, and at sporting events. When a crowd chants, they do so in form. In college the basketball player Marcus Camby outplayed his rival Tim Duncan. At every road game that followed, the opposing crowd mocked Duncan with the singsong taunt, "MARcus CAMby!" When New Yorkers turn against a coach, they make their opinion known by chanting words fit into the same pattern: "FIre CHAney!" (and Donald Chaney, the coach in question, was soon unemployed).
Formal elements distinguish poetry from prose. Poetry foregrounds these structures to a greater degree than prose, making form expressive, whether of an emotion, a tone, or an attitude. Form, though, does not exist simply to support an extractable meaning. To see how, read the following poem, a deer song of the Yacqui Indians, silently to yourself:
First you just look,
later you will find, find.
First you just look,
later you will find, find.
First you just look,
later you will find, find.
First you just look,
later you will find, find.
Over there, I, in an opening
in the flower-covered grove,
I went out,
then you will find, find.
First you just look,
later you will find, find.
Now read the poem again, this time aloud.
Like most poems, the deer song demands to be heard so its patterns can be felt, not merely noted. As prose, the poem's circularity might seem maddening. When the poem is read aloud or performed, the form extends an invitation. It asks the reader to enter the poem's rhythms, to delight in the arrangement of language into a pattern. The repetitions gain intensity and interest; the poem's incremental development foregrounds the process of looking, not the thing found. If I were to ask a hunter for advice, I would seek practical information; namely, the most effective way to track and shoot prey. Poetry works differently. Verse form directs the reader's attention to the verbal articulation, not the expressed idea. Demanding a certain mindfulness, it dramatizes the intensity of looking.
Poetic form structures language into a reproducible pattern. A reproducible pattern means that someone else can duplicate it. The resulting poem may strike readers as more or less successful than the original that inspired it; regardless, the two examples share the same form. When the poet Seamus Heaney was a boy in Ireland, he and his classmates "used to fling at one another" a "scurrilous and sectarian" rhyme:
Up the long ladder and down the short rope
To hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope.
To which [Heaney adds] the answer was:
Up with King William and down with the Pope.
As these relatively simple examples suggest, poetic form possesses a remarkable flexibility. The same form can express contradictory emotions and attitudes. One rhyme blesses the Pope and calls for King's death; the response borrows the same form to express the opposite values. It is a mistake, then, to assume that all poems in one form are alike. Instead, they might differ more than they correspond. Almost all parodies, for instance, share the form with the poem they satirize.
This is not to say that any one poetic form can do everything. A group chant would struggle to express a quiet intimacy, just as a limerick would hardly convey most kinds of sincere admiration. Classical rhetoricians linked form to genre, arguing that certain kinds of literature required certain meters. Aristotle asserted that "nature itself," not literary convention, governed the formal choices that poets made. "No one has ever composed a poem on a great scale in any other than heroic verse," he observed. "Nature itself... teaches the choice of the proper measure." Poets, though, continually find new uses for forms, adapting them to suit their purposes. History has proven Aristotle wrong: poems on a great scale have employed a number of meters other than heroic. Poets change the forms they discover, especially when claimed from different cultures, languages, and historical periods.
The chapters that follow discuss the language's main forms and their uses. They provide clear, evocative examples to illustrate complex effects. To understand poetic form, we must understand poetic forms: the history and features that distinguish a sestina from a ballad, a sonnet from an epigram. This idea organizes this book. Accordingly, the chapters represent how specific forms work.
Virtually all of our language's forms originated outside English. As a form moves from one language to another, it inevitably changes, drawing from new linguistic resources and changed cultural contexts. This extreme example illustrates a general truth. Forms are always in a state of flux, drawing from what has been previously done in the form and adjusting it to a different set of circumstances. A poem presents a snapshot, an image of what the form seems capable of to a certain person living in a particular time and place. Each chapter begins with a poem that raises important issues about the form under discussion. Often I sketch the circumstances surrounding the composition in order to suggest the pressures that inspired the choices the poet made.
As the chapters will suggest, each form offers a shifting range of possibility, not a fixed agenda. Just because the poets have used a form in a particular way, it does not follow that future generations will continue similarly. In fact the opposite is more likely: forms find new inflections and purposes or they retain only an historical appeal.
Form is worth considering from at least two points of view: the author's and the reader's. "[I]f technique is of no interest to the writer," Marianne Moore observed, "I doubt that the writer is an artist." Poets care about technique because it allows them to transform an impulse into a work of art. Yet form does not help poets only to write what they want. It allows them to express ideas and emotions that they could not otherwise imagine. Form, H. L. Hix observes, "enables the poet to defy her own limitations of intelligence, knowledge, and point of view and thus to discover and reveal what she did not already know." A "silly" person (as Auden called Yeats) can write a wise poem because it expresses more than he or she intends. Form can impede the author's usual associations and suggest other options that he or she might pursue. It inspires what Hix calls "alchemy"; it helps the author to create knowledge instead of repeating what he or she "already know[s]."
This process occurs during the innumerable calculations that an author must make. A poet drafts a pleasant but unexceptional start to a rhyming couplet, "License my roving hands, and let them go." The rhyme "go" presents a host of possible pairs, "woe," "show," "although," "foe," and so on. Each suggests certain syntactical, rhetorical, and thematic possibilities. A conjunction such as "although" would raise some kind of qualification. (When "although" appears midway in a sentence, we know that what follows will contradict the sentence's opening.) "Woe" might introduce an unattractively self-pitying tone. "Foe" would repeat an epithet used a few lines before. The poet tries a few more rhymes. It would be easy to start the next line with "below," "License my roving hands, and let them go / Below your shoulders..." but the form requires that the rhyme appear at the line's end. This difficulty suggests an opportunity: to get to the rhyme "below," the line may linger a bit. It could trace and retrace the route the speaker's hands would take across his beloved's body. Addressing a technical challenge, the author discovers an unusual grammatical construction – a string of five prepositions – with an arrestingly sexy rhythm and movement, "License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below."
In addition to inspiring individual lines, form helps poets to revise their drafts. Faced with a promising but unsatisfactory start, an author may recast it into a different form. If the draft has nine syllables per line, the revision might have seven. The need to remove two syllables from each line requires numerous alterations to the poem's syntax, imagery, and rhetoric. If successful, this technique might introduce an economy that the earlier version lacks, clarifying the draft's most interesting suggestions. Recognizing that a change in form can inspire a new style, many poets dissatisfied with their careers try different forms, exploring the new opportunities and obstacles they offer. "The only way you can follow a poet's evolution," Joseph Brodsky asserted in a characteristic overstatement, "is by his prosody, his meters."
Because poets choose the forms they use, a poet's choice of form can define his or her enterprise. Invoking the form's masters, a new poem might challenge its predecessors or pay them homage. Or it might do both:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
In chapter four I will discuss sonnets at greater length. For now it is important to note that Keats rather self-consciously shares the form with Shakespeare, a poet whose work he greatly admired. In one of his most celebrated sonnets, Shakespeare declares, "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." Keats does not prophesize his poetry's immortality. He expresses a fear that he may write little of lasting value. The borrowed form mitigates this despair, invoking Shakespeare's authority as well as his intimidating example. The form places Keats in the company of those authors whose ranks he yearns to join, suggesting that the young poet has started to achieve his ambition.
As Keats's invocation of Shakespeare suggests, poetic forms carry affinities and expectations. "By the act of writing in verse," William Wordsworth maintained, "an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain habits of associations." According to Wordsworth, a form makes a "promise" that it will fulfill the expectations it raises. Reading a sequence of four-line stanzas, readers assume that the next stanza will repeat this pattern. If it doesn't, they will wonder why. If the elegy rhymes its first and fourth lines and its second and third, the form introduces Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as a point of comparison and departure. The study of poetic form makes readers more alert to the expectations that a poem raises; it clarifies the process by which a poem fulfills or frustrates the desires it arouses.
Only dull poetry, though, precisely meets its readers' expectations. Just as groundbreaking poems create new associations, forms fall in and out of fashion as taste changes. All poems are written in some form. The form may be hard to classify because we lack a good critical terminology or because its elements are difficult to identify. Just as poets who claim to be "for form" generally mean that they favor certain forms and dislike others, poets who stand "against form" typically reject currently fashionable kinds of form. A writer who hates sonnets, for instance, may live in a sonnet-crazy era. One option would be to invent new forms or to import them from other arts, discourses, and cultures. Poets have composed poems in the form of the menus or based on musical progressions, computer programs, and mathematical formulae. Such forms structure language into reproducible patterns; such forms are poetic when used in poems.
Form might be thought of as the poem's architecture, presenting the most visible structures of support. By necessity the same kind of building inspires a host of architectural styles. A house designed by Frank Gehry hardly looks like Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water. Similarly, the same form invites different poetic styles. Hardy and Milton shared certain meters, but few readers would confuse their poems. Hardy modeled his style after the gothic churches he loved, full of pleasant irregularities, while Milton's verse shares affinities with the Italian baroque. When the two poets employed the same form, the shared structures clarify their differences. In this way, form's impersonal demands can reveal a writer's personality. The apparently humble effort to find an interesting rhyme or a graceful end to a stanza has inspired singular works. America's most arrestingly odd poet, Emily Dickinson, wrote in hymn meters, a form that encouraged her idiosyncrasy, her profound weirdness.
The more familiar a form's conventions grow, the more they can be played with, frustrated and varied for expressive effect. In the mid-eighteenth century an anonymous poet published an untitled poem:
Dear Phoebus, hear my only vow;
If e'er you loved me, hear me now.
That charming youth—but idle fame
Is ever so inclined to blame—
These men will turn it into a jest;
I'll tell the rhymes and drop the rest:
_______ _______ _______ desire,
_______ _______ _______ fire,
_______ _______ _______ lie,
_______ _______ _______ thigh,
_______ _______ _______ wide,
_______ _______ _______ ride,
_______ _______ _______ night,
_______ _______ _______ delight.
"I'll tell the rhymes and drop the rest," the poem mischievously declares. As it slyly implies, these rhymes "tell" nearly the whole story; not only the depicted affair but also the kind of poet who would use such trite language to describe it. The anonymous poet uses these stupid rhymes smartly, quoting rather than singing the clichés (unlike certain postmillennial pop stars who unblushingly rhyme "fire" with "desire"). Just as the poem can play with these bad rhymes because they are so familiar, it departs from the opening lines' form, substituting typographical lines for words, because the reader knows the conventions they replace.
This technique establishes a visual pattern. Existing on the page, it needs to be seen. The rhyme my mother sang to me needed to be heard and felt. The bounces she gave me marked the form. As with many childhood encounters of poetry, the rhyme presented a physical, bodily pleasure. Form need not emphasize either the visual or the auditory; instead it might explore the interplay between them:
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so very soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd another noon.
Stay, stay, until the hasting day
Has run but to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will happily go with you along.
This is dull verse, plodding and not very inventive. The poem I have weakened, Robert Herrick's "To Daffodils," is much more interesting, though I have made only a few small revisions:
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attained his noon.
Stay, stay
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.
Rearranged into a simpler form, the words lose intensity and interest. The familiar argument remains largely the same, but the poem's limber, agile lines grow sluggish. Herrick's poem offers a very different experience. Regarding it on the page, we see a striking pattern of shorter and longer lines. Reading it aloud, we encounter a voice as it moves through these elaborate stanzas. Rhymes fall in consecutive lines and in nearly the greatest distance that the stanza allows, the opening and the penultimate lines. The first kind of rhyme, a couplet, is easily heard; a rhyme that takes nine lines to repeat must be seen on the page. Consisting of one sentence, the first stanza is especially acrobatic, pausing at the end of some lines and racing through others.
"Art to disguise art" is not Herrick's motto. A show off, he introduces conspicuous difficulties so he might overcome them. Elaborate restrictions inspire skillful displays; the freedom needs restraint. Describing playground basketball, the novelist John Edgar Wideman calls it "an imaginary labyrinth testing how ingeniously, elegantly players can actually work their way out." The poem's movements evoke the bodily pleasure of graceful movement, of a diver spinning in the air three times before tucking into the water or a schoolyard player smoothly whipping a pass around her back.
Whether Herrick's poem delights or annoys you might suggest your assumptions about form. Those who view it as a game generally favor elaborate forms whose elaborate restrictions inspire virtuoso flourishes. No one wants to watch a game of tic-tac-toe, no matter how talented the players; chess aficionados travel continents to watch grand masters compete. Other theories argue that form arises from a compulsion to arrange disparate experience into a shapely pattern, "a rage for blessed order" (in Wallace Stevens's phrase). This approach often emphasizes the psychological effects that an impersonal form achieves; it "gives," I. A. Richards writes, "both poet and reader a firm support, a fixed point of orientation in the indefinitely vast world of possible rhythms; it has... [the] virtues of a psychological order." If form provides "a fixed point of orientation," a clearly defined kind might seem appealing.
A poem's form, though, need not stay constant. It might expand or contract, shifting from line to line or stanza to stanza. Some poems suggest clear connections between their arguments and forms, while others use form to exert a counter force to the argument, a point of tension.
Writing around 400 A.D., St. Augustine asserted a classically stern conception of form. "The very art by which I composed poems," he maintained, "did not have different laws in different places but was always the same." From its start poetry in English has lacked this certainty; it generated a host of theories and forms. (One of the language's very first treatises on form opens with the observation, "Quot homines, tot Sententiae," meaning, "There are as many opinions as people.") To understand our subject, form in English, we must remain open to its many arts. To speak of "laws" or "rules" implies that form has regulations that cannot be broken except under threat of penalty. Poems in English have strategies, tactics that they employ and, in some happy cases, invent.
About the Author
David Caplan is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Pearson Longman
Copyright © by Pearson Education, Inc.
Reprinted by Poetry Daily with permission
