[Maryann Corbett]

I'm trying something new for me: couplets that are rhymed but not metered. My model for this exercise is an A.E. Stallings poem, "Written on the eve of my 20th high school reunion, which I was not able to attend. I remember another such piece by Jehanne Dubrow, in Subtropics I think, but I haven't hunted it up this morning.

I'm finding that the exercise raises all sorts of questions. The first is, Can we do this sort of thing and get a serious result, or does the echo of Ogden Nash doom the poem to lightweightness? Or will feminine rhymes be the death of its seriousness?

Another question is how one ensures that the unmatched couplets don't merely look like failed meter. I think I know the answer to this one: the elements of the pairs have to be very different in length.

It looks as though the looseness of the structure makes it possible for the poem to tolerate more prosey language than other poems might take. Do you agree?

What other examples of rhymed but unmetered work have you found and enjoyed?

[Gregory Dowling]

Interesting topic. Don Paterson has some poems in couplets without discernible metrical patterns and very loose off-rhymes or para-rhymes. Here's a link to a poem entitled "11:00: Baldovan". As you can see the couplets are of varying length but the lines within the individual couplets tend to be of similar length. The effect is very different from Ogden Nash, if only because the rhymes are so faint, and because he doesn't play with the comic alternation of long and short lines within the couplet. However, one has the sense of a ghost of formal control over the material, which is quite effective. It certainly allows for a natural colloquiality, which is appropriate to the poem, as we are supposed to hear a small boy talking.

[Susan McLean]

Obviously, Plath's "Daddy" has rhyme without meter, but she does it unpredictably, not in couplets. I love that effect when it is well done, and when I started writing poetry again, I wrote a number of poems that used it. But I quickly realized that it is an effect that tends to be scorned by both camps, the formalist and the free verse. So I stopped using it. Part of the problem, I think, is that beginning writers are often attracted to it and handle it very poorly, which gives it a bad name.

Susan

[W.F. Lantry]

Maryann,

I wonder if the solution to the problem Susan raises isn't a kind of variable foot? Two poems have been exampled, Daddy and Alicia's. But at first glance, neither one is truly unmetered. Instead, the meter is varied, using a kind of loose accentuals. Take this:

But they pulled / me out / of the sack,
And they stuck/ me together / with glue.
And then / I knew / what to do.
I made / a model / of you,

or this:

Just when / I understood / I was / no longer / among
Those ephemeral / immortals, / the gauche / and pitiable / young,

I'm not sure either one qualifies as vers libre at all. The meter may be irregular and extremely variable, but it still helps move the poem forward.

Just a thought...

Thanks,

Bill

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, everyone. Will it seem churlish of me to say that your examples help me see what I'm not after? Ack. It will, but let me try to explain.

The veiled and buried rhymes in the Paterson don't stand up and yell RHYME! the way the full rhymes in the Stallings poem do. The combination of full rhymes with their organization into very clear couplets brings the rhyme absolutely to the fore. That foregrounding of rhyme--at least for me--calls my attention forcefully to the absence of a clear metrical pattern. That's not to say, Bill, that I can't hear feet and a motivating rhythm in the lines. But there isn't a repeated number of feet, or number of beats per line, from couplet to couplet, so I would call this rhythmical rather than metrical. By contrast, the Dubrow poem I had in mind keeps much more clearly to trimeter and pentameter throughout and seems to me fully metrical.

(Full disclosure: I'm resisting really getting into the question of what is and isn't a metrical poem because it's been a vexed question in the history of the board, given the long-standing decision to bifurcate met and non so absolutely.)

Might we classify this as a "ghost of meter" poem, in the way Annie Finch uses the term to talk about the Modernists? There's a great deal of rhyme and meter, for example, in Prufrock.

The relaxedness and the loosening of metrical control go along with a relaxed and colloquial diction that shifts very gradually to a more elevated one. For example, "Just what I needed" is a very plain-spoken opener, but "the high hubris of our hair" is something other.

Let me try phrasing the question this way: What does full rhyme do to the reader's expectation of meter?

[Petra Norr]

Stallings' poem - I love it. But I loathe the sound of it. To me it's a very good example of how tricky it is to use rhyme without meter. It sounds ridiculous. No?

[Maryann Corbett]

Petra, you ask "No?" and I answer, "Maybe."

I suspect some of us, and I'm certainly one, have our brains preset concerning the effect of uneven rhymed couplets by exposure to Ogden Nash, who did things like this in such poems as "Very Like a Whale." He rhymed his couplets outrageously (interpolate them/purple ate them; proof/woof woof woof) and over multiple syllables, which ups the ante of ridiculousness hugely. And his lines are uneven in the extreme, don't seem to contain even the ghost of meter, and are utterly prosey, even lecture-like.

But Stallings doesn't do those things.

I'll write more after I've checked the quiche that I think is burning downstairs.

Back now, after eating the quiche. Stallings doesn't do those things to the degree that Nash does. Her feminine rhymes are limited to two syllables (needed/receded), and her rhyme words don't seem to be chosen for obvious clash and oddity the way his are. And as Bill says, there's flow to the lines, and that's absent from the Nash poem.

But there's something like the ghost of humor there. The subject contributes to that--those dreams of showing up undressed to an exam, those descriptions right out of one's horribly dated high school yearbook. If the metrical strain makes us giggle a little, in most places that's suitable for the content. Yet the poem is finely balanced between the humorous and the sad, and I'm interested in that balance.

[Gregory Dowling]

That's a very acute analysis of the effect of Alicia's couplets, Maryann, and I agree fully. The "ghost of humour" is a nice way of putting it; maybe one could even go as far as call it "the ghost of Nash".

But rhyme without strict meter need not necessarily be overshadowed by Nash's achievements. Another major example of a long poem that adopts rhyme and highly variable lines would be Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal. I suspect that MacNeice, writing this poem in England in autumn 1938, did not know Nash's poetry at all. Here's the opening section:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
xxxEbbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals
xxxAnd the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew
And August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiums
xxxAnd the sunflowers’ Salvation Army blare of brass
And the spinster sitting in a deck-chair picking up stitches
xxxNot raising her eyes to the noise of the ‘planes that pass
Northward from Lee-on-Solent.

There's a very good essay by Kate Evans-Bush on the poem which you can find here. In it she quotes from MacNeice's own remarks on the poem:

Autumn Journal:

A long poem from 2,000 to 3,000 lines written from August to December 1938. Not strictly a journal but giving the tenor of my emotional experiences during that period.

It is about everything which from first-hand experience I consider important.

It is written in sections averaging about 80 lines in length. This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself (e.g. the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be good citizen) can be given their say in turn.

It contains rapportage [sic], metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography, nightmare.

balanced by pictures.

Places presented include Hampshire, Spain, Birmingham, Ireland, &—especially—London.

It is written throughout in an elastic kind of quatrain. This form (a) gives the whole poem a formal unity but (b) saves it from monotony by allowing it a great range of appropriate variations.

The writing is direct; anyone could understand it.

I think this is my best work to date; it is both a panorama and a confession of faith.”

The idea of elasticity is what is important here, I think. It's a form that is clearly appropriate to a certain kind of colloquial, meditative poetry, which is definitely reflecting on the here and now, and, as MacNeice says, contains a great range of feelings and experiences. Though there are touches of humour (see the "tin trumpets of nasturtiums"), it is far from prevailingly comic in its overall effect.

This doesn't answer your last question, Maryann, of course. I would say that in this case, at least, one reads the long lines with few expectations of strict meter, but a sense of the overall rhythm of the thing. The rhymes prevent the risk of mere sprawl, is as far as I would go.

[Jerome Betts]

Maryann, I've not come across 'Very like A Whale' before and don't know if it is one of his later pieces, but it seems to me rather tired or flat Nash, which may account for your 'utterly prosey, even lecture-like' comment. In many of his early pieces in the same vein I sense, if not 'the ghost of meter' at least a good deal of carefully-crafted rythm, with long lines building to climaxes only to be undercut by wry short ones. Hard to imitate succesfully. I think of these as his 'monlogues of humorous expostulation', perhaps with hints from Gilbert and some of Hood's long line pieces like 'The Lost Boy', though, I think,ON's twist was the varying line lengths.

[Janice D. Soderling]

The brilliant, inestimable Stevie Smith is very good at this.

The Jungle Husband

Dearest Evelyn, I often think of you
Out with the guns in the jungle stew
Yesterday I hittapotamus
I put the measurements down for you but they got lost in the fuss
It’s not a good thing to drink out here
You know, I’ve practically given it up dear.
Tomorrow I am going alone a long way
Into the jungle. It is all grey
But green on top
Only sometimes when a tree has fallen
The sun comes down plop, it is quite appalling.
You never want to go in a jungle pool
In the hot sun, it would be the act of a fool
Because it’s always full of anacondas, Evelyn, not looking ill-fed
I’ll say. So no more now, from your loving husband Wilfred.