their content,
coast blissfully along like cool jazz: you can practically see Milt Jackson’s hammers bouncing on the silver leaves of the vibraphone. In Australia, Gwen Harwood (whom I didn’t find out
about until later) shared Plath’s gift for placing a phrase on the music like Blossom Dearie singing in a cocktail bar. Hardly anybody can do it. When you think of the few poets who can, and
of how what a jazz musician would call their ‘feel’ unites them, surely you are getting close to another kind of building block that is set apart from the semantic even if never getting
beyond it – the building block constituted by the propulsion of a line.
There is an elementary way of propelling a line of iambic pentameter which almost anyone can do. (How would we know, without further evidence, that ‘Nothing is so beautiful as
Spring’ even with the novelty of its truncated first foot, hadn’t been written by Mrs Hemans, as famous in her day as Sylvia Plath, but no more dangerously exciting than a pile of clean
napkins?) Kitchen criticism tells us that non-elementary ways, or variations, were being looked for well before Shakespeare was born. Throughout the history of English poetry, the tightly packed
line that tells
you
it is tightly packed has been a way of sharpening up the basic pentameter. It is even there in Chaucer, and by the time of Shakespeare’s sonnets it is already
getting near the limit. The penultimate line of our already adduced Sonnet 129 is a supreme example: ‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well’. Reversing the two words
‘well knows’ so as to wind the spring at the end of the line gives a reserve of energy to launch the last line like a crossbow bolt: ‘To shun the heaven that leads men to this
hell.’ But even standing on its own, the penultimate line is arresting for its effect of being packed with energy.
Part of that effect comes from the way the iambs are morphed into spondees as the conversational accents are played off against the meter. In everyday speech, the word ‘well’ would
get at least as much emphasis as ‘knows’. In the meter, the stress gives it less. The combination gives both words equal weight. The same thing happens at the end of the line, so that
the three words ‘none knows well’ seem to be stressed equally, in a monotone on a falling cadence. Put it all together and the effect is far from being tum-ti-tum. (The iambic
pentameter is always being called tum-ti-tum by people who couldn’t write even the tum-ti-tum version if their lives depended on it.) The effect of the packed line is to reinforce expectation
by defeating it. The elaboration on the underlying structure spells out the structure: spells it out by outplaying it.
All depends, however, on the reader’s knowing what to expect. George Herbert, in his showpiece poem ‘Providence’, could depend on his readers being able to place the
conversational phrasing of ‘want of heed’ against the strict iambic meter when he asked ‘Should creatures want, for want of heed, their due?’ Shelley could depend on the
reader’s awareness that he was playing passion against law when he wrote ‘Stay yet awhile! Speak to me once again.’ The expectation is still there underneath. Far into the
twentieth century, poets in English could still depend on the reader’s knowing that there was a simple rhythm under the complex one and that the simple was what made the complex possible.
Empson’s poems almost entirely depended on the reader’s knowing that. (‘Stars how much further from me fill my night.’) Empson further stoked the packed line, to such a
pressure that an effect which had begun before Shakespeare came to be called Empsonian. In Geoffrey Hill’s sonnet ‘The Eve of St Mark’ there is a line which I am sure deliberately
echoes Empson (‘Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill’), and which I suspect is trying to hitch a ride on the Empsonian wagon that
coast blissfully along like cool jazz: you can practically see Milt Jackson’s hammers bouncing on the silver leaves of the vibraphone. In Australia, Gwen Harwood (whom I didn’t find out
about until later) shared Plath’s gift for placing a phrase on the music like Blossom Dearie singing in a cocktail bar. Hardly anybody can do it. When you think of the few poets who can, and
of how what a jazz musician would call their ‘feel’ unites them, surely you are getting close to another kind of building block that is set apart from the semantic even if never getting
beyond it – the building block constituted by the propulsion of a line.
There is an elementary way of propelling a line of iambic pentameter which almost anyone can do. (How would we know, without further evidence, that ‘Nothing is so beautiful as
Spring’ even with the novelty of its truncated first foot, hadn’t been written by Mrs Hemans, as famous in her day as Sylvia Plath, but no more dangerously exciting than a pile of clean
napkins?) Kitchen criticism tells us that non-elementary ways, or variations, were being looked for well before Shakespeare was born. Throughout the history of English poetry, the tightly packed
line that tells
you
it is tightly packed has been a way of sharpening up the basic pentameter. It is even there in Chaucer, and by the time of Shakespeare’s sonnets it is already
getting near the limit. The penultimate line of our already adduced Sonnet 129 is a supreme example: ‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well’. Reversing the two words
‘well knows’ so as to wind the spring at the end of the line gives a reserve of energy to launch the last line like a crossbow bolt: ‘To shun the heaven that leads men to this
hell.’ But even standing on its own, the penultimate line is arresting for its effect of being packed with energy.
Part of that effect comes from the way the iambs are morphed into spondees as the conversational accents are played off against the meter. In everyday speech, the word ‘well’ would
get at least as much emphasis as ‘knows’. In the meter, the stress gives it less. The combination gives both words equal weight. The same thing happens at the end of the line, so that
the three words ‘none knows well’ seem to be stressed equally, in a monotone on a falling cadence. Put it all together and the effect is far from being tum-ti-tum. (The iambic
pentameter is always being called tum-ti-tum by people who couldn’t write even the tum-ti-tum version if their lives depended on it.) The effect of the packed line is to reinforce expectation
by defeating it. The elaboration on the underlying structure spells out the structure: spells it out by outplaying it.
All depends, however, on the reader’s knowing what to expect. George Herbert, in his showpiece poem ‘Providence’, could depend on his readers being able to place the
conversational phrasing of ‘want of heed’ against the strict iambic meter when he asked ‘Should creatures want, for want of heed, their due?’ Shelley could depend on the
reader’s awareness that he was playing passion against law when he wrote ‘Stay yet awhile! Speak to me once again.’ The expectation is still there underneath. Far into the
twentieth century, poets in English could still depend on the reader’s knowing that there was a simple rhythm under the complex one and that the simple was what made the complex possible.
Empson’s poems almost entirely depended on the reader’s knowing that. (‘Stars how much further from me fill my night.’) Empson further stoked the packed line, to such a
pressure that an effect which had begun before Shakespeare came to be called Empsonian. In Geoffrey Hill’s sonnet ‘The Eve of St Mark’ there is a line which I am sure deliberately
echoes Empson (‘Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill’), and which I suspect is trying to hitch a ride on the Empsonian wagon that
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