[Mary Meriam]

Thanks, Rick. I don't use epigraphs much, but I do like this one.

I'm so glad to be back at the Sphere, Julie, thank you and Carl too, for the correction. I had a feeling I wasn't doing it quite right. I saw the rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG but didn't pursue what those caps meant. Pushkin-ish maybe?

Thank you so much, John!!!

[Rick Mullin]

It's a Pushnik.

[Mark McDonnell]

Mary,

I can't give anything particularly "Deep" other than to say the line "I move these words to reproduce support / that’s gone" has enough heartbreaking depth for a dozen poems.

Edit: I'd hoped nobody else had mentioned that line but I see Cally got there first. Darn it.

[Deborah J. Shore]

I remember John's post that inspired this poem, having tried to defend the monotheistic God there. You took a worthy excerpt, one that I'd found moving as well!

I've pondered comments on a variety of lines and then walked them back. If it is at all helpful, I do read the first line as hexameter, but I assume that the long, barely stressed "esses es" is supposed to stand out as metrically mimicking the action of the goddesses escaping, perhaps with snakelike sibilance.

Much has already been said. I would add that I find that the slight pause we must make to best deliver the trochee of "No gods knock on" is a lovely feature in how it matches meaning. It also easily sets apart "No gods" as if that phrase is itself an appellation--or maybe that is the Torah-lover in me reminded of the "no gods" phrasing in the prophets and psalms.

"I move these words to reproduce support
that’s gone," possibly feels a little awkward or like filler to me. But that's not a firm conviction.

Good to read you,
Deborah

[Mary Meriam]

Of course, it's a Pushnik, that's what I meant, of course. I was mad at myself at first for not doing the Pushkin correctly, but then I realized I wouldn't have wanted to write this sonnet with feminine rhymes. I have read The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, and perhaps subconsciously, I directed myself away from the exact form.

Thanks, Rick and Mark.

Thanks Deborah, for pointing out L1's hex, which I'd missed in my original writing/revision rush. I first had "The gods broke free from corpses in the field" —but I didn't like all the f's. Now I've revised it again to:
"Goddesses clear from corpses in the field".

"No gods knock on" — is iambic for me, with no trochees. But I believe trochees are rare in IP. There's always one word that gets ever-so-slightly more stress.*

I'm happy to meet a Torah-lover! Thanks for that.

EDIT: * I was thinking about spondees - sheesh. I believe spondees are practically nonexistent in any metrical poem. Trochees aren't all that rare in IP - sheesh!

[Deborah J. Shore]

Originally Posted by Mary Meriam;499617

"No gods knock on" — is iambic for me, with no trochees. But I believe trochees are rare in IP. There's always one word that gets ever-so-slightly more stress.*

EDIT: * I was thinking about spondees - sheesh. I believe [I

spondees[/i] are practically nonexistent in any metrical poem. Trochees aren't all that rare in IP - sheesh!

You had me slack-jawed for a moment! Thanks for editing

So interesting that you hear that line as iambic though! That might be one of the big differences between persons who’ve always read and written a lot of formal poetry and persons like me who’ve been hanging out in free verse. I don’t readily reverse what I would think the natural stresses are, especially if I don’t see a dramatic reason to, whereas it seems to be a default perhaps among formalists to read iambically until strongly otherwise prompted.

[Carl Copeland]

Goddesses clear from corpses in the field,

Mary, did I get this right to begin with? The goddesses were inside the deer, right? The new first line gets me thinking about clearing corpses off the field. That’s not what it says, but it’s what I keep trying to make out of the words. At a minimum, change “from” to “of,” but I’d prefer something like “fled/left their corpses on the field.”

Originally Posted by Mary Meriam

"No gods knock on" — is iambic for me, with no trochees.

Originally Posted by Deborah J. Shore

So interesting that you hear that line as iambic though! … I don’t readily reverse what I would think the natural stresses are, especially if I don’t see a dramatic reason to, whereas it seems to be a default perhaps among formalists to read iambically until strongly otherwise prompted.

The iambic momentum carried me over those two feet just as Deborah suggests, but I think most here—reading naturally and letting the meter weave in and out of consciousness as it will—will get a spondee (or iamb) and a trochee—perfectly respectable substitutions. I was always told to read poetry that way, but have never been able to break the chanting habit.

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks Deborah and Carl. I suppose everyone finds their own way in meter. Here's my take on it. Meter isn't natural, it's mechanical, like a clock. A poem can scan in perfect meter, but be read, naturally, as if it isn't metrical. A great example of this is Shakespeare's Sonnet 12, "When I do count the clock that tells the time." I think it's almost impossible to read that line in any other way but IP. It also scans as perfect IP. Although the rest of the poem isn't as metrically clock-like, the other 13 lines still scan as IP. It wouldn't be read in a clock-like manner, as you can hear when David Tennant recites Sonnet 12 on YouTube. However, scanning the sonnet isn't reciting the sonnet. Scanning is mechanical. Reciting the sonnet is performance. In other (and more) words, scansion isn't done by putting stress marks on "big" or "important" words. Many times, a stress will fall on "in" or "a" or "the" and it makes no difference to the excellence of the poem. Every word in a poem is important. The meter is below the surface, like a heartbeat, giving the poem life, making it breathe, lending its magic to the sense, but not the sense itself. Meter can also be more pronounced or more subtle, as you can hear in the difference between L1 in "When I do count the clock that tells the time" and the rest of the lines.

[Roger Slater]

Mary, your take is pretty much indisputable. Another way of saying it (yours was great) is this, from Richard Wilbur:

A metrical form—the pentameter, for instance—is an underlying paradigm or model which we never hear, though a line like Tennyson’s “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” may come near conforming to that silent model. What one does in writing a metrical poem is to outrage the paradigm, to counterpoint the unheard model with the rhythms of emotion or description or dramatic speech. The result is that those rhythms, underlined by variance from the tidy norm, are heightened, strong, and definite in a way that the rhythms of prose or free verse can never be. Enjambment—the spilling-over of one line into the next—is also an expressive violation of the norm, because the tidy pentameter norm wants us to pause at the end of every five-foot measure; when we don’t, when we brush aside that pause and plunge into the next line, we do it in support of the poem’s meaning, emphasizing perhaps some impetuous emotion or some sustained and headlong action. If one were describing in verse a 90-yard broken-field run for a touchdown, a good bit of enjambment would be called for.

The entire essay is here.

[Carl Copeland]

Ok, I’m going to dispute Mary’s indisputable take! If scansion is simply a matter of determining the base meter and leaving the rest to performance, it would mean that “barren” in L5 of Sonnet 12 is a metrical iamb, but a good performer will read it as a trochee. Metrical analysis would have nothing to say about the dramatic spondee “Time’s scythe”—just another iamb. And I could no longer use scansion to figure out why something sounds metrically dodgy: IP is IP, and if anything is off, I must be performing it badly. (In the case of Shakespeare, that would surely be the case!) Metrical analysis must and does, at least to some extent, take into account the counterpoint that Wilbur mentions. Otherwise, it’s a crude instrument indeed.