You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [38]
THE WAKING
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Roethke weaves the repetition in gracefully and repeats lines that are strong and moving. (Notice that he indulges in slight variations in two of the repeated lines, the ninth and the fifteenth.) The villanelle is a difficult form. It takes expertise to master, but that's the challenge and reward of writing in poetic forms.
Writing in form hones your skills. You must meet the requirements of the form, which means you write and revise until the poem seems it can only be a ballad, or sonnet, or villanelle. The lines must flow in their meter. The rhymes must surprise and yet be perfectly apt. Form is an artifice in which you try to craft a poem that seems completely natural. Try your hand at all of these forms. Expect to be challenged. Expect to be frustrated, and to be elated when a poem masters the form.
Blank Verse
You may also write poems that use formal elements—meter, rhyme schemes and stanza forms—but not a poetic form, per se. Instead, the poet writes in quatrains rhymed abab cdcd and so on. Or in iambic tetrameter. Or in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse isn't a form, but is a style of formal poetry. Here are the opening lines of William Wordsworth's The Prelude, written in blank verse:
O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that, while he fans my cheek,
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er his mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long have pined
A discontented Sojourner—Now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
Blank verse was the favored poetic line of the theater during the English Renaissance. Shakespeare used blank verse extensively in his plays and in his long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse. Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning and others wrote in blank verse. Its presence is so strong in the tradition of poetry that it's still widely employed by contemporary poets.
I write in blank verse because I like its formal nature, and the iambic pentameter line provides structure. It makes me pay close attention to the words I use and how I use them, their syntax. Because blank verse provides a strong rhythm, I must decide where to let the rhythm flow and where to vary it. I find myself sounding out words to hear the rhythm, as in these lines that begin a poem of mine called "The Idea of Order":
BeCAUSE / the WOODS / ROSE THICK / and LUSH / in SUM- / mer,
TransFORM- / ing E- / ven SUN- / light to / a DARK
DRIFTing / GREEN, a / PRESence / an AIR- / y BOD- / y,
BeCAUSE / the FIELDS / ALL LAY / unCUL- / tiVAT- / ed,
Littered / with KNIFE- / EDGED GRASS- / es, BROK- / en STONES,
BeCAUSE / ALL a- / BOUT us / the LAND / GREW WILD . . .
Of the thirty feet in these six lines, only nineteen are iambs, a high degree