You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [11]
You may also notice that these lines, with the exception of the third, are written in a strict meter (a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; more on meter in chapter six). The meter of "my father moved through dooms of love" is iambic tetrameter (eight syllables of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables). Here is the meter of the first line (the capital letters indicate the stressed syllables):
my FATH- / er MOVED / through DOOMS / of LOVE
The second and fourth lines have exactly the same pattern of meter:
through SAMES / of AM / through HAVES / of GIVE,
• • •
my FATH- / er MOVED / through DEPTHS / of HEIGHT
Despite its strange syntax, this is a formal poem, written in the long tradition of formal verse. Its strength, however, is in the music it makes, all those words put oddly together to make beautiful sounds.
When you become accustomed to the oddness of cummings's poems, you find that they do make sense, just not in an everyday fashion. He didn't want his poems to make sense in an everyday fashion; he wanted them to make sense in an innovative fashion. Cummings's poems are unconventional because he wanted the reader to experience the world in a new way, to see it with new eyes and hear it with new ears. He wanted to surprise and delight the reader. If you like e.e. cummings's poems, go back and read Emily Dickinson's poems and go on to read John Berryman's poems. If you like John Berryman's poems, read John Ashbery's poems. One poet leads you to another, and to another.
If you don't like a particular poet's work, that's OK. There's a degree of taste involved in reading poems. Some poems won't appeal to you. Set those poems aside and pick up others. Literary magazines are the best places to find a variety of poems. You may pick up an issue of The River King Poetry Supplement, a magazine published in Freeburg, Illinois, and in it find poems like this one by Katherine Riegel:
WHEN
in the morning a bird
rushes my window
it leaves a curious white swirl
on the glass, an outline
of its body, as though in the fright
and almost-death of the moment
part of its essence oozed out
never to be recovered.
I think of the killdeer that fakes an injury
calling loudly and limping
to lead the watcher away from its nest,
into the tall pussywillows with their feathery ears.
My lover and I call the plant "lamb's ear"
"Alex ear," because our dog's ears are that soft,
and softer. In the evening she turns
and lies down with an old man's groan, and if you get
too near her hips
she growls a warning:
I love you, but they hurt
more in the evening.
Some day they will hurt too much,
o my lovely.
If the soul
is a bird
tell it about glass,
that boundary
that looks imaginary.
The simple title "When" has an air of mystery: when what? The title invites you into the poem to discover the answers. It also serves, essentially, as the first word of the poem, so it begins When in the morning a bird. . .. The poem is written in free-verse form (see chapter eight for more on form) and divided into four stanzas. Each of the stanzas focuses on a single subject: the first with a bird almost flying into a window, the second with another bird (or is it the same bird?) and its ruse to protect its nest, the third with the speaker's aged dog, and the fourth with the proposition that the soul is like a bird. Each of the stanzas addresses a different subject and is a complete thought, but the last stanza, in its references to "a bird" and "glass" (the window), also harkens back to the first. In a sense, the poem makes a circle. It goes from bird to killdeer to dog to soul and back to bird.
While each stanza addresses a different subject, each addresses its subject in a similar context. What the stanzas have in common, despite their different subjects, are concerns with danger, death, life and protection. The bird doesn't hit the window. The killdeer saves its young. Alex, the old dog, "growls a warning" not to cause it pain. And