Vers Libre

skip this one if you don't want a long ramble about prose, free verse, and my own poetry

I’ve been reading Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Art of Writing, for both my writing and my teaching. In one of his lectures, he gives this image:

“I am journeying, say, in the west of England. I cross a bridge over a stream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty; yet nothing happened as I stepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of no change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and I shall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. but at what turn of the road this will happen, just how long the small multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into conviction—that nobody can tell. So it is with prose and poetry. They are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a De Quincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt.”

Different realms, joined by a debatable land. Take Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Visited, September 1814”:

“A blue sky bends o'er Yarrow vale,
Save where that pearly whiteness
Is round the rising sun diffused,
A tender hazy brightness;
Mild dawn of promise! that excludes
All profitless dejection;
Though not unwilling here to admit
A pensive recollection.”

Or Matthew Arnold’s “The Future”:

“This tract which the river of Time
Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border'd by cities and hoarse
With a thousand cries is its stream.
And we on its breast, our minds
Are confused as the cries which we hear,
Changing and shot as the sights which we see.”

Or Siegfried Sassoon’s “To His Dead Body”:

“When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried,
Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died,
Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fare,
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way
Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,
Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind—
Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.”

Or Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude”:

“O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being?”

Compare any of those with this sonnet from John Donne:

“What if this present were the world's last night?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether His countenance can thee affright.
Tears in His eyes quench the amazing light;
Blood fills his frowns, which from His pierced head fell;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray'd forgiveness for His foes' fierce spite?
No, no; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour; so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd;
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.”

The earlier poems lie much closer to that debatable land, while Donne’s sonnet is rooted deep in the country of verse. The difference is not merely one of meter or of rhyme scheme, for all of the first poems scan; some rhyme; some even do so strictly. But even with a stricter meter or rhyme, the whole set borrows from the syntax of prose, while Donne’s sonnet employs the inversion¹ and elision² that marks his poetry, as well as Shakespeare’s, Phillip Sidney’s, and other Elizabethan masters of the sonnet.

Take these two lines: “Beauty of pity, foulness only is / A sign of rigour.” Rendered as prose, that would read: “Beauty is a sign of pity, but foulness is only a sign of rigour.” But through several devices—zeugma³ and ellipsis⁴, to name two—he has transformed the line of thought into something more musical and strange.

In contrast, although a good prose writer would omit such strict internal rhyme⁵, we can more easily reimagine Sassoon’s poem as prose: “Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair can bring me no report of how you fare, safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day.” The key difference between his poem and Donne’s is not rhyme and un-rhyme, but on the one hand, something that reads more like the typical patterns of our speech, and on the other, language that distills its sense in fewer, keener words.

Poetry, Quiller-Couch argues, develops out of music; it aims to evoke emotion through the patterns of sound. Prose, on the other hand, seeks to capture the movement of thought through the structures of syntax, which has become an instrument of sight. Quiller-Couch then takes the division farther. Poetry, he says, expresses the extraordinary; prose, the ordinary, and both genres struggle to capture the other’s substance without borrowing their form. Prose that reaches a pitch of emotional intensity borrows from poetry; poetry that seeks to sound conversational borrows from prose.

In my own writing, when I want to make a point, I often reach for consonance or anaphora, or cast key lines in iambic pentameter. (As in last week’s essay, where the closing clause reads “but such a love is lightness, granting wings”, which is, properly, a poetic line.) Whether Quiller-Couch approves of such heavy borrowing between his two countries, I’m not sure. But many memorable lines of prose often scan like poetry, and Quiller-Couch himself says that it is Edmund Burke’s ear for Shakespeare that made his political writing so powerful.

If such is the borderline between prose and poetry, then free verse is the form that stands with its feet on both sides of the line, borrowing both the syntax of prose and the musicality of verse. Free verse is—at best—not an absence of meter, but a give-and-take, meter and rhyme reigned in, then let slack as a poem progresses. As T.S. Eliot, that master of free verse, said: “[The] ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse.” Or, on rhyme: “When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent.”

Taking one of my own poems (because I can speak to the intent behind it, not because it is the best example):

“I bet you thought that this would be a sonnet.
If we’re honest, they are my usual haunt, 
while for you, a monologue’s the thing:
tragedy, mock epics, too many soliloquies,
apostrophes,
for the small and humble 
form I make my home.
This is not a sonnet.”

My worst habit as a writer is the old trick of Roman rhetors: telling a reader something by claiming not to mention it. This is a monologue of sorts, verse in character, inspired in part by Robert Browning’s poetry, which is almost all character speeches in verse. It is also, although not a sonnet, an extended play on Sonnets from the Portuguese, especially Sonnet 44 (“Here’s ivy!—take them, as I used to do / Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine”), Sonnet 8 (“What can I give thee back, O liberal/ And princely giver, who hast brought the gold…”), Sonnet 12 (“Thy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak, /And placed it by thee on a golden throne…”), Sonnet 4 (“canst thou think and bear /To let thy music drop here unaware/ In folds of golden fulness at my door? …Hush, call no echo up in further proof /Of desolation!”), Sonnet 5 (“those laurels on thine head, / O my Belovëd…), and Sonnet 9 (“We are not peers/ So to be lovers; and I own, and grieve, /That givers of such gifts as mine are, must /Be counted with the ungenerous”).

So, after a stanza which I borrowed almost entirely from the Brownings’ letters, the poem continues:
“I confess I am surprised. I had not
thought my words had power
quite like this. 
Your poems, yes, 
which work out wonders
on an unassuming page,
as a thousand unthought
threads enwreath your brow
like golden 
laurel leaves.

But mine? Simple, timid
poesies composed on 
nymphs and trees, bedridden
by my homebound intellect.
“There she goes again, writing
about ivy and Echo and pretending
that she knows the Greek.”
My soul is too wracked 
by anxieties, cast
in too much shadow
to deliver brightness
that delights.”

Looking at the meter of the next stanza:

“And yet 
delight you do,
intrusive (almost) in your
eagerness to throw open
the shutters of my heart and cast
your sight like sunlight on the empty room.
Now that your searching eye has 
by its glittering rays illuminated
the interior to my sight…”

Reimagined without the heavy enjambment:

And yet delight you do,
Intrusive, almost in your eagerness,
To throw open the shutters of my heart
And cast your sight like sunlight on the empty room
Now that your searching eye has by its glittering rays
Illuminated the interior to my sight…

That’s iambic (if you read “glittering” with elision— “glitt’ring” —and aside from the interruption of the trochee “open”) and although the lines vary from trimeter to hexameter, they hover around the longer line, hinting at pentameter, which is, of course, the basic meter of the sonnet.

In the next stanza, however, the meter dissolves (though it starts to slacken in “illuminated the interior to my sight”):

I can see that you forgot your coat.
It hangs, folded, on a chair
And perhaps I will return it…

I could have written a sonnet; I could have written a letter in the character of Elizabeth Barret Browning, but in free verse, I’m able to move between a chattier tone and the crests of a high style, which suits the homage to Elizabeth and Robert, as well as Elizabeth’s own modesty about her art. It also imitates something of the character of romance, which often casts itself in old and elevated words, even as it laughs at the quirks of the beloved.

This is not to say that I’ve done what I wanted. My writing mentor has a saying: in writing, you can do something badly for the right reasons, you can do something well for the wrong reasons, and you can do something well for the right reasons. Only the third is masterful. But crossing borders can be an act of irreverence or one of exploration; any act of play requires both rules and levity in how we handle them. Free verse, at its best, is free because its poet knows his cosmography so well that he is, in Dante’s language, “crowned and mitered lord of himself”, which is to say, of his craft, his creativity, and its employ. Or, to borrow from Eliot again: “We conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”

1. Ie, not following typical English word order. We would say “horrid shapes are assigned to wicked spirits”, not “To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned.”

2. Condensing syllables or sounds to fit the meter, as with “assign’d” or “pray’d”.

3. Two words joined by one modifying or governing word, rather than repeating it.

4. Omission of words

5. Rhyme in the middle and end of a poetic line, or here, a clause