[Perry Miller]

I'm a very literal-minded person, and this is an example of where I find myself getting caught up when trying to appreciate a poem:

I know you dying and I know you alive
Captivated by a pair of hands
The harp glistens down its waterfall
And choirs rise above a distant dune

The first line is great, in my opinion. But what does a pair of hands have to do with a heart? What does a harp have to do with a heart? Or a waterfall? Or choirs? Or dunes? Do you see what I am getting at?

In my own poetry I don't rhyme a lot, and my meter is sometimes shaky, but I am a formalist in the sense that I write clearly. I never throw a series of images at my readers that are not closely connected to what I've written on the lines above.

Perhaps the connection between the heart and the images that follow is the word "captivated", since we all think of the heart as something that can be captivated. Even so, the connection to all of those images is a weak one for me.

[Siham Karami]

Perry, certainly I can see where you’re coming from. These are certainly leaps, and in fact I had originally written the “harp” line followed by the distant dune, then the “hands” which captivated the harp and the choirs. But I felt that the hands preceded the harp with its sound I envisioned as a glistening waterfall and the sound of choirs in the distance. All these elements are metaphors for what happens to the heart. The pair of hands are what the person does with their heart’s energy, creating this music by listening to the heart’s rhythm. Some poetry, for me, can’t be explicit. At some point having to explain everything pedantically exhausts me and leaves me sad, so I actually write this in a very specific meter, but the images either come across or don’t. There are many poets on the sphere whose work you’ll enjoy and find pleasing. And I do write poetry where everything is pretty clear. Here I was trying to do something else. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Siham

[Mary Meriam]

Hi Siham, I thought for a long time about L1, and finally came up with this:

I know you dying and I know you living

but you know how strict I am about meter. I think your rev. 3 L1 is fine. It's a beautiful poem.

[Deborah J. Shore]

Hi, Siham,

I have not read most of the preceding comments. Mine is in response to revision #3.

There is some really lovely lyricism here.

I hardly see any irregularity in the meter. Apart from the first line, I just see some headless lines. If this is irregular meter, just wait until you see how much irregularity I sometimes use, lol.

That said, although I can speculate that the first line is meant to mimic a brush with literal or figurative death as a heartbeat fades and comes back, I am tripping some on it.

To my ear (and I'm probably going to step on the toes of strong opinions about how meter in English works), the first line probably receives its most expressive delivery scanned thusly:
U= unstressed
/=stressed
)=unstressed epic caesura close

U/ U/) UU// U/

I know that some disbelieve in the pyrrhic, and some disbelieve in spondees. But here it not only sounds like a pyrrhic to me but like such a strongly-weak pyrrhic beside such a strong spondee that the beats are wholly promoted to the spondee. To my ear this beat promotion does not happen with all pyrrhics followed by spondees but does happen in some cases. So I hear the beats on:
know dy know you live

But it could also be scanned another way(s) that I'll get to in a moment.

My main issue is that it is already hard to hear these metrical possibilities, and this is made harder by the lack of punctuation within the line. I think it needs guiding punctuation (or some other alternative) for one metrical solution or another in order to work. It doesn't matter if that punctuation proves to be grammatically redundant. The ear needs guidance here. Unfortunately, this would change how the poem as a whole is written since it lacks punctuation.

I know you dying. And I know you alive.
--could help with my prior scansion
Another read that alters my proposed scansion could be:
I know you dying--and--I know you alive

If you are opposed to punctuation in this poem, maybe scattering the first line on the page with line breaks and indentations would be the solution??

I know you dying
..........................and I know you alive

I am not someone who believes in the necessity of giving the reader a metrically pure first line to set the stage. I think mixing things up in the first line can be a particularly powerful way to open sometimes. But in this case, I think the reader needs guidance so that it feels expressive rather than like a clank.

Just my 2c!
Deborah