14
I’VE JUST HAD A SHARP FLARE of an emergency, but I think it’s now under control. What happened was I remembered that I should put my passport in my briefcase so I wouldn’t forget it when I went to the airport to go to Switzerland.
And then suddenly I wondered: Is my passport possibly out of date? I thought, no, it can’t possibly have expired. I looked in my top drawer among the socks and the under-pants and my fragile folded birth certificate, and there it was. I flipped it open with my paperback-holding fingers and looked inside and there was my more-than-ten-years-younger face, and yes: it was expired. My flight is on Monday night, and this was Thursday.
I called the federal government of the United States, and a nice woman who worked there made an appointment for me in Boston on Monday morning at nine-thirty.
YOU SEE, this is what I’m up against. This little book here. Published by Farrar, Straus, which publishes Elizabeth Bishop. It’s James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry. Very nice indeed. In it he says some true and interesting things and some false things.
We can’t blame him for saying the false things, because he’s saying what everybody has always said from the abysm of time. First he says that iambic pentameter is preeminent in English poetry. No it is not. No it is not. Iambic pentameter is an import that Geoffrey Chaucer brought in from French verse, and it was unstable from the very beginning because French is a different stress universe than Middle English and it naturally falls into triplets and not doublets. No, the march, the work song, the love lyric, the ballad, the sea chantey, the nursery rhyme, the limerick—those are the preeminent forms, and all those have four beats to them. “Away, haul away, boys, haul away together, / Away, haul away boys, haul away O.” Fenton’s own best poems use four-beat lines.
And then Fenton says that iambic pentameter is, quote, “a line of five feet, each of which is a ti-tum. As opposed to a tum-ti.”
And that’s what they all say. Fenton doesn’t know what he knows. He’s written beautiful iambic pentameter lines. His ear knows that there’s more to it than that. And he is just one of an endless line of people who say that an iambic pentameter line is made up of five feet, or five beats. And it isn’t. An iambic pentameter line is made up of six feet. Or rather five feet and one empty shoe—i.e., a rest. Unless the line is forcibly enjambed and then, to my ear, it sounds bad. Keats, bless his self-taught genius soul, came up with some scary enjambments. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains,” next line, “My sense.”
BUT LET’S GET the Sharpie out. And let’s take a look at a real iambic pentameter line. Two of them, in fact, from Dryden. I’m going to write them out for you. This is the couplet that I copied out in my notebook, as I think I mentioned. It’s called a heroic couplet—and Dryden was the one who really made it work in English. He forced its preeminence. He used it to write what he called “heroic plays,” and he used it to translate Virgil’s Aeneid, which is about the heroic deeds of gods and men. And after him came Pope and everyone else. The couplet goes like this. I’ll sing it.
Now, the way we’re taught to talk about these two lines is to say that they are in iambic pentameter. There are two parts to this. First, “iambic.” And second, “pentameter.”
“Iambic” is a Greek word that in English just means an upbeat. The iambic conductor puffs out his man chest, lifts his batoned hand up, and everybody sees the eighth note hovering there before the bar line on their music stands, and the string tremolo builds, and the mallets of the tympani blur, and the chord swells, and crests, and gets foamy at the ridge, and then the baton comes down and a big green glittering word-wave crashes down on the downbeat. Ya-ploosh. Ka-posh. “All human things.” That’s the iamb. It’s a kind of sneeze. Iambs can begin four-beat lines or so-called pentameter lines, which are really six-beat lines. “Oh who can from this dungeon raise.” “A soul enslaved so many ways.” “And what is Art whereto we press.” “The world is too much with us.” “I met a man who wasn’t there.” Let’s see, what are some more? “The wed ding guest, he beat his breast.” “My lit tle horse must think it queer.” Dang, I keep wanting to use shorter lines as my examples. Which is my point.
But let’s see, let’s see. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.” Prufrock. Iambic pentameter. “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Keats, iambic pentameter. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yeats, iambic pentameter. “And slender hairs cast shadows, though but small.” Dyer. “If you can keep your head when all about you.” Kipling. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Elizabeth Bishop. “They flee from me who sometime did me seek.” Et cetera, et cetera. “Et cetera” is an iambic rhythm, if you pronounce it the way the French do. And iambs are extremely common. The first syllable is an upbeat to the line, and the rhythm is a game of tennis—it’s that basic duple rhythm, badoom, badoom, badoom.
Now one problem with “iamb” as a name for this clearly audible upbeat phenomenon is that the word “iamb” isn’t iambic, it’s trochaic. A trochee is a flipped iamb. It’s like a staple-crunch: crunk-unk. “Iamb” is trochaic. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard? And we’ve tolerated and taught this impossible Greek terminology for centuries. If iamb were pronounced “I am!”—as a counterfactual—it would itself be iambic. “I am interested in what you’re saying!” “I am going to take out the garbage!” “I think therefore I am!” You hear that? Then “iamb” would be a decent name for what’s going on. Not a great name, but a decent name. But no, it isn’t pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. And yet this is what we’ve got to work with. “Iambic” is the name for this sort of upbeat when it’s found in a duple rhythm. Not in a triple rhythm. In a triple rhythm, there’s another Greek word you can use, if you’re inclined: “anapest.” But in a double rhythm, a line that begins with an upbeat is iambic. If you follow me. Just saying all this creates a fog of brain damage.
But so much for the first part of the phrase, “iambic.” Just set it and forget it. Don’t worry about it. You can change an initial trochee to an iamb by adding an “And” or an “O.” And you can flip around an iamb so that the line begins with a little triplet, or an eighth note and a sixteenth note, which happens a lot—as in “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Or “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet.” So the whole notion is fluid, and we don’t need to dwell on it any longer. Some lines begin with an upbeat and some don’t—that’s all you need to know about the iamb.
BUT NOW FOR THE REAL THORNINESS: PENTAMETER. “All human things are subject to decay.” That’s the line. Then: “And when fate summons monarchs must obey.” And you think, Okay, good, I see five stresses there, like five blackbirds on a power line.
Five little blackbirds. Ah, but there’s a raven of a rest there at the end that you’re not counting, my friend. If you say the two lines together, you’ll hear the black raven. Listen for him:
If you leave out those raven squawks—those rests—and you only count the blackbirds on the line, you are not going to be able to say this couplet the way Mr. Dryden meant it to be said. Try it as a run-on. “All-human-things-are-subject-to-decay-and-when-fate-summons—” What? Who? Where am I? You see? It’s just not right that way. You cannot have five stresses in a line and then jog straight on to the next line. If you do that, it sounds out of whack. It sounds horrible. It sounds like—enjambment.
Let’s take another example of a heroic couplet. This one is from Samuel Johnson. He wrote it for his impoverished drunken friend Oliver Goldsmith.
You’ve got to have the rests! There’s no question about it. If you don’t have the rests, you don’t have a proper couplet. These are six-beat lines. So-called iambic pentameter is in its deepest essence a six-beat line.
Actually no, I take that back. It’s not. In its very deepest, darkest essence it’s a three-beat line. Here’s where we get to the nub of it. Because people really only hear threes and fours, not sixes. Let’s take a look at how this works. And t
o do it, we’re going to up the pace a little bit. We’re going to say some of these lines flowingly and fast, listening for the way they truly fall. And as we do, we’re going to tap our feet in rhythm. Let’s try it. Get your foot tapping with me, in a nice slow walking pace.
With me now: One——two——three. One——two——three. “How small of all that human hearts endure (rest), the part which wars or kings can cause or cure (rest), all human things are subject to decay (rest), and when fate summons monarchs must obey (rest), that time of year thou mayst in me behold (rest), When yellow leaves or none or few do hang (rest), When I have fears that I may cease to be (rest), before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain (rest).” Are you with me? I feel like I’m making an exercise video.
What’s happening is that if you tap your foot only to the big beats, you end up with a line of inner quadruplets chugging away in sync with three large stresses. You can chart it like this:
Looks like an air-balloon festival, does it not? But I hope it shows that what we call iambic pentameter is really, if you count the rest the way you must count it, a kind of slow waltz rhythm. You can leap around the room reciting so-called iambic pentameter to yourself and your leaps will fall in threes. You cannot make your leaps fall into fives. You need to add the rest. I’m telling you that this is true. No amount of reading and underlining any textbook about meter and seeing them go on and on about five beats is going to make that necessary sixth rest beat go away. It’s there, and it’s been there for centuries. And when poets forget that it’s there, it hurts their poems.
15
MISTY AGAIN TODAY. A freakish mist lies over the land. My clothes are out on the clothesline, and they have been there for two days and they’ve started to get that wet-too-long smell.
Now, if I were a nineteenth-century poet, I would say that the freakish mist lay “o’er” the land. And that’s one of those words, “o’er,” that makes a modern reader feel ill. So what I do, to make the old poems feel true again—the good old poems—is very simple. This is another little tip for you, so get ready. I just pronounce “o’er” as “over,” but I do it very fast, so you’re gliding o’er the V, not really adding another syllable. Because that’s really what it was, I think: it was a crude, printed representation of a subtle spoken elision that might well have had some of the vocal ghost of the V left in it.
There are rare times when it’s absolutely necessary to say “o’er” without any V—as when, say, Macaulay rhymes it with “yore.” But a lot of the time you can fudge it.
This trick will also work for “’tis” and “ne’er”—the other painful bits of poetic diction. When I’m reading a poem to myself, I just mentally change all the instances of “’tis” to “it’s.” And I give “ne’er” the “o’er” treatment—I just barely graze my teeth with my lower lip, while thinking V. It’s like waving the vermouth bottle over the glass of gin. Try it, it may work for you.
After all, we don’t want some mere convention of spelling to block our connection with the oldies. We want to hear them now as if they’re being said now. And that tailcoated diction can really get in the way. It’s bad. Not to mention the exclamation points everywhere. Lo! Great God! Just ignore them. If you say the poem aloud, they disappear.
The mouse climbed up the curtain again, and this time I got him to drop into the plastic pitcher. I took him out to the lilac bush and let him go in the mist.
I CALLED UP ROZ to ask her if there was anything she wanted from Switzerland. She told me she had the flu and wasn’t thinking straight because she had a fever. I asked her if I could bring over some chicken soup and crackers and ginger ale, because I knew that’s what she’d want. And she said, “That would be nice. Also some chewable Motrin, the junior kind, and a trashy magazine.” So I went over to her apartment, which she’d painted five careful colors—and I helped her sit up. She really had been quite sick, very feverish, hot, confused. “I’m here to take care of you,” I said, and I gave her the chewable Motrin and a spoonful of soup, and she ate a corner of a cracker.
“Let me think of cold things to cool you down,” I said. “Do you remember how you used to make that marvelously cold potato salad and we’d have it outside on the metal table?”
She nodded. “On cool tin plates,” she said. “That was fun.” Then she said she was going to sleep, and she thanked me for coming by.
IMOWED more of the lawn. But first I cut away the thorny brambles so that they wouldn’t attack me as I mowed near them. What I found was that grapevines were kinking their spirals around the long, reaching, hooky bramble suckers. The two plants had a little gentlemen’s agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard. I pulled some of their tanglement out of an old, beleaguered lilac bush, and I got pricked a lot but I felt I’d accomplished something. Then I mowed for an hour and chanted a stanza of Kipling as I mowed, from his poem about the undersea cables.
The wrecks dissolve about us; (rest)
Their rust drops down from afar— (rest)
Down to the dark, to the utter dark,
Where the blind white sea-snakes are. (rest)
When I was done mowing I drank a glass of iced coffee with some baking soda mixed into it to soften the burn. And I went up to my now half-empty bookcases in the hall and found Theodore Roethke’s prose collection, On the Poet and His Craft. It’s a small white book. On the cover is a picture of Roethke looking sad, as he always looked, sitting against a wall with a mysterious white graffiti hand-painted on it. The dustjacket is very soft on the top and the bottom edges because it has slid out of place and crunched into things. Holding this book always affects me strangely. It was put together by one of Roethke’s colleagues, and it came out only a year or two after Roethke died. It’s like standing in some little cemetery somewhere, staring at a small white gravestone in the grass.
In it was Roethke’s review of his old flame, Louise Bogan. He adopts a formal tone—he keeps calling her Miss Bogan. And he quotes nice things from her poems—for instance he quotes “Roman Fountain.” And he says, rightly, that the first stanza is good and the rest he doesn’t care for as much. Bogan herself thought that. She said the poem was minor except for the first stanza. He includes some criticisms to show that he’s a dispassionate reader and that he’s not going to let their long-ago lost weekend influence what he says.
And then he says the Big Thing. He says that Louise Bogan’s poetry will last “as long as the language survives.” There it is. This was in one of the last reviews he wrote. It was what he hoped would be true of his own poetry.
Her poems will last as long as the language—ah, yes. That used to be, in the nineteenth century, a much-employed piece of literary praise. Macaulay used it several times. He said, for example, that Byron’s poetry “can only perish with the English language.” Mark Twain said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would “live as long as the English tongue shall live.” Many lesser nineteenth-century reviewers used it. And it’s a fearful phrase—it’s an Ozymandian phrase. Because you have to ask: How long, in fact, will the English language last? Not that long maybe. Another three hundred years?
One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly— maybe—and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now: Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the “hair bump” episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: Surprisingly little can be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the grea
tness of Larry Sanders.
And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won’t perish.
I SAT IN THE DRIVEWAY and read my old poems for about an hour in the morning. As I read them I had some driveway sand between my toes, and I felt the faceted grains rolling. And I had a combinatorial feeling. I was embarrassed but also impressed. I’d written a lot of poems, frankly. When you turn the page there is another poem. And there’s another. And another. And they keep going. Somehow I have accumulated a whole bunch of poems. Each one had its itinerary—each had gone to a particular editor and gotten published somewhere, except for some that I kept back that I didn’t want any editor to have, and some that no editor wanted, and then I’d collected them in a book.
I put the book down on the metal table, and I went inside and I tried to write about how a tablecloth catches the ottoman of the air as it settles down on a metal table. And now I’m back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bite me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They’re just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.
MY ANTHOLOGY has to have the right thickness. I do know that. It has to have that I’m-not-really-a-textbook textbook-ishness. It has to have a lot of love poems in it because in the end love poems are the best kind of poems. If it had a whole lot of love poems and was the right thickness, it might be adopted in college classes. September comes, and sleepy undergraduates all over the country are walking their diagonal paths to writing classes with Only Rhyme zipped away in their backpacks. I would have power and influence—maybe even a trickle of money. That’s a motivator. Power and influence, baby. And maybe some of the poems I chose would make people happy. That would be my contribution. I want to include a Charles Causley poem, and a Wendy Cope poem, and a James Fenton poem. I haven’t heard back from Fenton’s publisher yet so I don’t know if I’ll get permission. I hope so.