by James Longenbach

from The Art of the Poetic Line

Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great prose writers in the English language.

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.

This is King Lear's madness speaking. While the syntax holds steady in the second sentence ("there's . . . there's"), the diction leaps from elaborate Latinate words (sulphurous, consumption) to the most basic AngloSaxon words (pit, stench). A list gives way to repeated exclamation, pure sound: pah, pah. Then the disparities in diction take control of the logic: civet, apothecary, sweeten, imagination. The roaring prophet who begins this speech is in no time superseded by a courtier in search of a fine perfume.

Shakespeare's sentences have many of the qualities we associate with the texture of great poetry (patterned syntax, varied diction, metaphorical implication, disjunctive movement), but they are not set in lines—at least they are not set in lines in one of the two earliest printings of King Lear. In the other printing, however, these sentences are set in lines. A few of the words are different, but the basic shape of the sentences remains the same.

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,
There's the sulphury pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consummation. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,
To sweeten my imagination.

We don't know what Shakespeare intended. One compositor set this passage as prose, the other set it as poetry; they may have been working from different manuscripts, neither of which was necessarily Shakespeare's own. How does the division of these four sentences into four and a half lines change our apprehension of them? What procedure determines the length of the line? Does that procedure introduce arbitrary line endings, or are the line endings functional in their own right?

In this chapter I will discuss metrical lines (which follow a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables), syllabic lines (which adhere to a fixed number of syllables, whether stressed or unstressed), and free-verse lines (in which the relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables is consistently various). In every case, however the line is shaped, what will matter is not the line as such but the relationship of the line to the poem's syntax—to the unfolding structure of the poem's sentences. That relationship is endlessly various. Short lines or long lines don't inevitably function in any particular way. A rhyming line doesn't necessarily function differently from a free-verse line. In the end, line doesn't exist as a principle in itself. Line has a meaningful identity only when we begin to hear its relationship to other elements in the poem.

Shakespeare's lines are organized metrically. While his plays often contain passages of prose, the language of his plays is most often cast in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. That is, unrhymed lines in which there are usually five pairs of syllables: the second syllable of each pair gets more stress than the first syllable.

BeNEATH is ALL the FIEND'S. There's HELL, there's DARKness

None of the lines in the passage I've quoted from King Lear is a perfect pentameter: although it contains five stressed syllables, this line has an extra unstressed syllable hanging on to its end. The second line is missing an unstressed syllable at its beginning. And the third line scans programmatically only if we stress the syllables in an unnatural way.

Stench, CONsumMAtion, FIE, fie, FIE; pah, PAH!

No actor would say the line this way, if only because he would not give all the stressed syllables an equal amount of stress. As in all accomplished poetry, there is a tension here between pattern and variation. If we've heard a lot of iambic pentameter lines before encountering these ones, we will feel this tension as pleasure.

Counting the stresses helps us to recognize a principle that divides Shakespeare's prose sentences into lines, but merely counting the stresses won't let us understand the function of line. That's because I've so far described the line only as an arbitrary unit: something that might contain a certain pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Now we need to listen to the way in which this unit, this way of organizing the syllables, plays against the syntax of the sentences. Listen to the whole of King Lear's speech, paying attention to the varied length of the sentences in relationship to the relatively consistent length of the lines.

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!
I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!
No, the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell,
For I lack soldiers. Behold yon simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist
They're centaurs, though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit;
Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,
There's the sulphury pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consummation. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,
To sweeten my imagination.

This speech is made of twenty-one lines, most of which are pentameters. The speech is also made of fifteen sentences. What is the relationship between these sentences and these lines? How does that relationship help to make us hear the unfolding of the speech in one way rather than another?

First, we may notice that the sentence and the line are not the same thing: sometimes a single sentence may take up a single line, but often the sentence is either shorter than the line or longer than the line. Second, we may notice that even though sentence and line are not the same thing, there is no regular relationship between the sentences and the lines; the sentences do not exceed or fall short of the line in any predictable way. Third, we notice that the lines end differently. Some lines end with a full stop—a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point. Others end with a comma, a semicolon, or a colon that joins together two clauses or phrases within a sentence. And others end with no punctuation at all: the syntax continues in the next line. We might be tempted to say that the line "breaks" at such a moment, but the line merely ends—it doesn't break. Rather than thinking about what often gets called "line breaks," it's more helpful to think about "line endings": the syntax may or may not break at the point where the line ends.

The opening line of the passage is made of one complete syntactical unit: the syntax does not break. The homeless, bedraggled Lear is clinging pathetically to his lost power, and the opening line feels like a declaration.

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!

The second line is also syntactically complete, but it is made of two sentences, a statement and a question.

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?

Then the third line, also syntactically complete, is made of three units: a question, a statement, and an exclamation.

Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!

Though we move from one to two to three syntactical units within these lines, all three lines are end-stopped: syntax ends where the line ends. What is the effect of three such lines in a row?

King Lear is blinded by madness here. He imagines that his friend Gloucester is merely an adulterer who has come before him for mercy, when in fact Gloucester has literally been blinded by the husband of one of Lear's daughters. The relationship of the lines to the syntax does not make Lear sound mad, however: the lines organize the syntax in a way that feels balanced and coherent. Any actor reciting this passage would be led by the relationship of the syntax and the lines to read this passage with a strong sense of reasonableness: the opening declaration (in which syntax equals line) is superseded by lines that are divided logically into two and then three syntactical units. The sound of logical thought is not inappropriate here, for there is a strange logic to what Lear says. Gloucester is indeed an adulterer, and he has been unable to distinguish his loyal legitimate son from his disloyal bastard son.

What happens to the relationship of line to syntax as the speech progresses?

No, the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.

Here we have two sentences, the first of which takes up two lines, the second of which takes up two and a half lines. For the first time in the passage, syntax has exceeded the end of the line, spilling into the following line. We say that such lines are "enjambed," the word "enjambment" referring generally to lines that end while the syntax keeps going. What is the effect of these kinds of lines, following on the three end-stopped lines preceding them?

First, the mere fact that these sentences are longer than the ones preceding them makes us feel that Lear's mind is in motion, launched from the runway of the three end-stopped lines. Second, the fact that both these sentences are enjambed or broken across the line introduces a formal tension to the sentences, one that is completely lacking in the first three end-stopped lines. Consider the effect of the first longer sentence if it were written this way.

No, the wren goes to't. And the small gilded fly.
They lecher in my sight.

Had Shakespeare broken up the sentence, he would have continued with the sonic decorum established by the three opening lines of the speech, in which sentences are short and always end where the line ends: the sound of coherence would prevail. Instead, we move in these lines to a new sound—the excitement of syntax overriding the line to which it had previously been subservient. It's important to recognize that no particular kind of line has any inevitable relationship to sound or sense; that is, an enjambment does not necessarily speed up the line or contribute to a sense of frantic movement in thought. But in this speech, we feel Lear's rabid enthusiasm for his own thought increasing as the speech unfolds, moving from one kind of relationship between syntax and line to another relationship. This progression is appropriate, since the impression of logic is disintegrating as Lear speaks: we know, though Lear does not, that Gloucester's bastard son was not kind to his father.

The disintegration continues as Lear begins to rail at what seems to him the essentially lascivious nature of female sexuality.

                     Behold yon simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite.

Even if we don't follow Lear's sense here, we hear the rising passion of his voice because of the increasing tension between syntax and line within the longer sentences. Again, the lines offer implicit instructions to the actor: having begun by reinforcing the impression of reasonableness, the speech should devolve into an increasingly questionable passion. Blaming women will get Lear nowhere.

How, then, do the final lines of this speech, the lines with which I began, sound after we've listened to this movement from an initial trio of end-stopped lines to a group of mostly enjambed lines?

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,
There's the sulphury pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consummation. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,
To sweeten my imagination.

Here, at the end of the speech, we return to endstopped lines. Unlike the trio of opening lines, these lines don't all end with a full stop, but the lines are not enjambed: some definitive turn of syntax takes place at the moment when the line ends. The result is that we feel we have returned to a sonic decorum similar to the one with which we began. The speech begins firmly, determinedly; then it grows into an enthusiasm fueled by Lear's madness; finally it calms down again.

The opening and concluding lines have a different effect, however, for while the concluding lines may sound like a return to sanity, they are in fact the most wildly associative lines in the speech: Lear is still talking about the female body when he says "beneath is all the fiend's." Formally, the speech moves from the initial order of syntax matching line through the excitement of syntax exceeding line, ultimately returning to the initial terms of order. But thematically, the speech moves inexorably toward increasingly disordered thought. The fluctuating tension between syntax and line is itself in tension with the thematic content of the speech, and there is no predictable relationship between the form and the content. In other words, the passage does not simply describe a movement of thought; it embodies and complicates that movement through the relationship of syntax and line. This is what great poems do.

The lines I've examined so far are of course taken from a play written in verse, not from a poem as such: I've begun my discussion with dramatic poetry so that I might speak freely of the passage as something we hear. It's a commonplace to talk about the speaker of any poem, but the notion of a speaker may or may not be useful; a poem might feel more like a concatenation of various linguistic strands than like the utterance of a single person. In any case, however, the sonic properties of the poem's language are always crucial. When a poet creates a relationship between the syntax and the lines of her poems, she is trying to organize the language on the page so that it corresponds to what she hears in her head. The poet may speak the lines out loud while composing the poem, but she generally does this to test what is on the page against what she hears—much as a composer turns to the piano not to discover the melody but to confirm it. Then, once the poem is finished, its sounds are re-created in the mind of the reader, and the relationship between line and syntax is one of the primary means through which this sonic information is transmitted. Reading a poem out loud helps us to hear that relationship, but poetry does not literally need to be spoken in order to exist primarily as a sonic work of art....

About the Author
James Longenbach is the author of three poetry collections, including Draft of a Letter, and five works of criticism, including The Resistance to Poetry, as well as numerous essays and reviews. He is Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

The Art of the Poetic Line
Graywolf Press