There are a bewildering number of guides to reading and writing poetry.Footnote ¹ Nor is this a new situation. In ‘The Preface’ to the folio manuscript of her works, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, wrote:

In their different ways, contemporary guides ‘putt into familiar language’ an account of poetry’s forms and patterns and possibilities, past and present. Usually offered at a helpful level of generalisation with straightforward examples to illustrate the structures and the points being made about them, they tend to promote a craft-directed, formalist conception of the poetic art – identifying the individual performance with the type of poem it exemplifies. The impulse to write poetry and the desire to become better informed about it are treated in reverse order, learning the forms and expectations of verse being taken as a step in trying to write some, when the impulse to write has likely preceded such knowledge. As Samuel Johnson put it: ‘whatever ridicule may be incurred by a solemn deliberation upon accents and pauses, it is certain that without this petty knowledge no man can be a poet; and that from the proper disposition of single sounds results that harmony that adds force to reason, and gives grace to sublimity; that shackles attention, and governs passion’.Footnote ³ The ‘petty knowledge’ acquired can also be advantageous to a reader’s beneficially enabling experiences of what I have called poetry’s sound sense. Robert Frost observed in the remarks quoted in Chapter 1 that ‘if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’.Footnote ⁴ To be a reader of poetry is to perform, embody, hear and understand expressively meaningful sound sense, for this must be perceptually realised. If not perceivable then it isn’t there, and those arguments suggesting that poetry can act subliminally because parts of its actions, the supposedly non-content-bearing parts, can be overlooked or ignored even as they work, may prove, as I suggest in Chapter 5, a disabling of intelligence.

Frost has it that we hear the interplay of irregular accent and regular beat, either when composing or reading a poem. Yet, whether this is perceived because heard, or conceptually realised from the hints of what is perceived, needs clarification: because, as already noted, when listening to a poem all that is heard is a single stream of phonemes. The ‘irregularity of accent across the regularity of beat’ may not, strictly speaking, be heard in ‘And I have promises to keep’.Footnote ⁵ The word ‘promises’, for instance, has three syllables. This line follows ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep’, which reinforces the alternating weaker and stronger stresses of an iambic tetrameter line. But ‘promises’ does not rise in its third syllable to the same strength as its first.

What is performed and heard is a lesser stress after the even weaker middle one: there is no full iambic beat to hear in the line’s third foot. The contrast between the iambic expectation and the sound of the word ‘promises’ is not heard in performing the poem, but rather conceptually constructed from the tacit contrast that comes from projecting forward an expectation from previous auditory experience. This conceptual contrast contributes to the experience of the poem, but it is not simultaneously heard and is not like counterpoint in music. Essential to the realisation of sound sense attunement in composing and reading is to hear the degrees of stress and their significance in the actual rhythmic contours of words such as ‘promises’, without which the conceptualisation of the line as a sound-sense complex of heard and unheard elements will not be realised.

Poets in English produce sound sense by hearing and articulating sequences of variously attuned, stress-pitched and timed phrasings. Further, hearing and responding to their rhythms, we do not simultaneously hear their meters as distinct (which may be why the two terms, meter and rhythm, tend so frequently to be confused, or confusingly substituted for each other, in writings on prosody). Rather we remember regularities and irregularities from previous instances in the poem being read, or in other poems already known. Meter in poetry is not, as it were, a bass line existing under the treble of the speaking voice. To illustrate the meter of a poem, if there is one, it will be necessary to exaggerate the stressed syllables, giving them a prominence equally different from the similarly weakened syllables. Doing this, the line’s sound sense is thoroughly denatured to make a point.

There is usually, as I say, when reading a poem, only one instrument producing a single stream of naturally sounded human phonemes. This is why poems in regular or regularly varying meters often place guide versions of the metrical scheme in lines that come next to expressively discrepant variations on it. But the regular pattern is not heard simultaneously behind an irregular variation; rather, tension is produced by comparing and contrasting in memory temporally distinct verbal experiences of theme and variation. To hear and experience the rhythm you have to read the poem out loud (or attentively listen to it being read), monitoring while you do what you are hearing and feeling in body-and-mind. Rhythm is experienced as muscular, aural and conceptual.Footnote ⁶

The rhythm of a poem is an experience of the patterned sound it makes when read aloud; any identifiable pattern, regularised in hinted at binary alternations of stress, is its meter.Footnote ⁷ As already noted, the meter is an abstract template that can, with varying degrees of plausibility, depending on the complexity of the cases, be identified by analyzing a poem’s lines and phrases. In all but the simplest of jingles, the meter and rhythm, template and performance, are by no means the same. This is because there are more than two levels of stress in naturally pronounced English. Even in jingles the distinct characters of the individual syllables will give variety to the simplification of such sounds into the abstractly alternating ‘ti tum’ of, in this instance, iambic metrical feet. These feet are similarly abstract interpretations attributed to formed phrasings. Intuiting a meter may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient to hearing the poem. Many poems are written in exactly the same meter or meters, so while their sound sense depends on what the meter contributes to the full and singular orchestration of its sonic experience, the meter cannot – strictly speaking – be what is heard.

Meters are, as noted, generic while rhythms are specific, and because the meter in individual cases is conceivable from the experience of the rhythm, it can be analysed as distinct from the rhythm but not so heard in performance. William Blake’s ‘The Clod & the Pebble’, from The Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) not only exemplifies such reflections, but brings some of its own to bear too:

Not only does Blake’s poem contain the word ‘feet’, preparing the only rhyme in the ABCB second stanza (the first and third rhyme ABAB), but it also rhymes thematically on the punning phrase ‘metres meet’. Yet, the meet-ness of its meters are challenged by the fact that the meter of the first quoted song, the clod’s in stanza one, is sung to the same meter as the pebble’s. The metrical form of this poem then as good as asserts that there is as much meet-ness in what the clod sings as in what the pebble does, and this is inescapably part of what Blake’s poem can teach. Yet, while all three verses might be described, generically, as octosyllabic iambic tetrameters (for this is the most common structure, appearing as the opening line to each verse), both of the variant burdens in lines 4 and 12 are nine syllables, with the variation produced by ‘Heaven’s’ extra syllable appearing at different points in the line in each case. So too lines 2–4 of the second verse are all seven-syllables with a trochaic fall produced by beginning on a stress.

The fact that the metrical shapes of stanzas 1 and 3 are so nearly homologous incidentally underlines how meters are generic templates, but also draws attention to how they are experienced as specific combinations of sound sense, with distinct rhythmical contours produced by their word choices whose meanings cannot be fully accessed without hearing their exact intonation implications. Blake’s poem invites its readers to experience the difference between sounding the ‘not Itself’ of stanza one and ‘only Self’ of stanza three in lines where the other words are exactly the same. The latter ‘Joys in another’s loss of ease’ that bit more promptly, because ‘only self’ has a weaker middle syllable that allows for an easier flow from the one in ‘only’ to the one of ‘self’, while the separately stressed word ‘not’ and the greater emphasis needed then to initiate the word ‘Itself’ produces a slight midline caesura, a caesura expressive of all that may be involved in putting yourself second to another’s pleasure.

The entire poem is also a commentary on the construction of Pandemonium in Hell at the end of Paradise Lost Book I, a commentary interpreting the purpose of that episode by bringing it back home into individual love lives, illustrating both Blake’s observation that Milton ‘was a true Poet and of the devil’s party’, and his proverb that ‘without Contraries is no progression’.Footnote ⁹ Taking place in time, the poem allows the clod to get its idea in first, but then, suggesting the clod’s innocence and the fragility of its goodness, it lets the pebble appear to correct it from experience. Meter and rhythm conceptualised together, however, underline the equal relevance of both versions of the verse and minutely criticise the pebble’s song in the light of what has come before. The poem creates thus a dynamically contrary relationship between the two ideas of love that readers can work with, enabling both, and reflecting on their necessary interplay in the processes of amorous attachment.Footnote ¹⁰

Reading a poem out loud in a natural and plausible way, then, will mean not dividing the syllables into two types of beat, for linguists have identified at least four levels of stress, and there are innumerable degrees of contextually relative, locally contrastive emphasis. The voice also rises and falls with the pitch contour of the phrase. There are minute and longer pauses, elisions of syllables and elongations of vowels. There are tiny increases and decreases of volume and speed. All of these happening together and being shaped – though not exclusively – by the words in the lines of the poem, constitute its rhythm. Therefore, the rhythm of a poem is not distinguishable from its meaning, its sound from its sense. The latter is manifested in and by the former; but, equally, the former could not be realised without the shaping purpose of the latter.

In describing the close of ‘To His Coy Mistress’, one of Andrew Marvell’s editors writes that ‘The force of the speaker’s claim for the instant consummation of his desire is enforced through a flattening of rhythm in the poem’s last line: the six final syllables are all stressed’.Footnote ¹¹ Here a common critical attraction to power shows in ‘force’ and ‘enforced’. Yet this editor is commenting on a syntax that begins with an offer to resolve the pair’s differences in collaborative action:

In Marvell’s famous close the desire is not ‘enforced’ because that first-person plural proposes collaborative activity, implying that the speaker would convince his mistress, who may agree to collaborate, rather than raping her. Nor are the final six syllables ‘all stressed’, for, to begin with, the penultimate ‘him’ takes less stress than the surrounding verbs ‘make’ and ‘run’. There is, though, a complex ruffling of expectation in this last line, for while ‘will’ would usually take less stress than ‘make’, and can be heard to step back and foreground the verb for which it is an auxiliary, here it internally rhymes with the stressed ‘still’ two syllables before. Nevertheless, this ‘will’ is in the line’s fifth position, and thus would be expected to be weaker in an iambic line before a stressed monosyllabic verb.

Marvell has moved the pronoun ‘we’ from the third position in the penultimate line to the fourth in the final one. Moving predictive stress onto the pronoun in this fashion invites and expects the realising of emphasis against expectation, further underlining the idea that the pair may now work together to give the sun a run for its money. The editor notes that something unusual is happening with the syllables in this last line, but it is not that they are all stressed (or not all stressed equally), and the line is by no means ‘flattened’. That word might be more apt, though not fully accurate, to Tennyson’s depressively clustered ‘On the bald street breaks the blank day’ (also an octosyllabic tetrameter) in the last line of the seventh section to In Memoriam.Footnote ¹³

For Marvell’s winning close, a quite different effect is occasioned. The word ‘flattened’ is rarely likely to be a fair description for memorably inventive lines of poetry because to stress a syllable is not usually done by coming down heavily and flattening it, but by lengthening and raising it in pitch. Notice, then, how ‘yet we’ contrasts the short pronunciation of the first vowel with an unusually stressed, lengthened and raised pronunciation of the first-person plural pronoun. Contrasting with the shorter ‘we’ in the previous line, and collaborating with the open ‘a’ in ‘make’, the line performs its claim to have pleasurable time go on longer and be more valued, even though we can’t prevent it from going. The line retains the oscillating sense of an iambic forward movement (after the dead stop of the comma’d-off spondee ‘stand still’), but then gives some added prominence to the odd-numbered syllables ‘yet’ and ‘will’. The ‘him’ is given little stress; and, further, by keeping it weaker Marvell underlines their claimed relative triumph over the sun as agent of ‘time’s winged chariot’. It’s not a flattened, insistent, forced effect, but a rising and collaborative one – and one in which readers (like the pair in the poem) will join to enable its work.

In Poetry: The Basics, Jeffrey Wainwright spends time on the first line in Wordsworth’s poem now called ‘Daffodils’: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. He draws upon the useful detail that the poet’s wife, Mary Hutchinson, once mis-transcribed the line as ‘I wandered like a lonely cloud’, then noticed her mistake and crossed it out. Wainwright comments:

Wainwright’s pointing, in this sensitive a sound-sense analysis, to the centrality of the first syllable in ‘lonely’ is surely right. He also notes that the number of syllables in each version of the line is the same, while the placing of the beats (though this may be a misleading way to put it) is approximately the same. The opening line of the poem, which we know is economical with the truth of the occasioning situation, serves to sketch in the poet’s device of being surprised when encountering joy-giving or reflection-causing flora. He’s ‘lonely as a cloud’ (not the most desolating kind of loneliness then) when ‘all at once’ he catches sight of ‘a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils’.Footnote ¹⁵ The preference for solitude is underlined in that explanatory adjustment – for the word ‘crowd’ will prompt the thought of people. When he first saw the daffodils, he wasn’t wandering on his own, but walking home from Eusemere to Grasmere with his sister, as Dorothy recounts in her journal for 15 April 1802.Footnote ¹⁶ Wordsworth’s deletion of the purposeful walking and the company in his encounter with the flowers stages the contrast. If the poet weren’t ‘lonely’ it wouldn’t occasion the benefits of, and reflections on, that host of daffodils. Yet, if he were missing people, daffodils mightn’t be enough. The nuanced and poised nature of his being not only ‘lonely’ but also relevantly so is crucially sounded in the poem.

Wainwright is acutely perceptive when he explains that the word ‘lonely’ has to be associated with the ‘I’. This further underlines why sentiment and image are distinguishable. It’s rather different to be ‘lonely as a cloud’ than to be ‘like a lonely cloud’. As pathetic fallacies go, the second is decidedly more pathetic because clouds can be ‘alone’ but are (as far as I know) never, strictly speaking, ‘lonely’. Wordsworth could thus foreground his ‘as’, relatively stressing the syllable; even though, lacking the consonantal frame of ‘like’, it might be weaker than the other word used to access a simile. Thus, one way to redefine the relationship and difference between meter and rhythm is that to identify conceptually the meter you have to make a plausible, but arbitrarily over-emphatic, distinction between the individual syllables in a line, dividing sheep from goats, as it were, the stressed from the unstressed, while to hear its rhythm you have to appreciate the relative and relational differences of emphasis between one syllable and the next.

Perhaps the mistakenly transcribed line doesn’t so much sag as divide sharply into two parts at the over-emphatic hinge word ‘like’. When Wainwright states that the correct line can ‘gather its meaning’, he’s evocatively suggestive as regards how sound sense is collaboratively achieved. The sounds and the meanings of the correct line and its mistakenly transcribed version are different, which is why their sentiments are different, and, since in the correct version the cloud is not directly described as being ‘lonely’, so is the image. It’s unlikely too that the ‘sentiment’ in a line of poetry precedes the words with which it is said to be expressed, as Wainwright’s conventional word ‘convey’ implies. The sentiment (a feeling with an attitude) is realised and understood – by the composing and rereading poet too – from the trial words composed. The feeling in a poem is not prior to it and conveyed by its words; it is created by words and rhythm, in the achievement of sound sense.

Yet, this is not how Wordsworth in his prime understood the action of meter. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he proposes that

Wordsworth argues that the metrical structure of poetry introduces a mitigating feeling to regulate the passions that its narrated matter excites, and he assumes that the poet both stirs up the reality of painful experience and then makes it more bearable with the formal structure, going on to contrast ‘the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe’ with ‘Shakespeare’s writings, in which the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure’.Footnote ¹⁸ Wordsworth’s project in his Preface, of justifying the use of a language which was assumed to be inappropriate to metrical composition, is obliging him to conceive of language and form as distinct entities, a separation of poetic components that then allows him to propose this idea of the poet’s care for the reader’s pleasure even when challenging it with painful realities – as if it were easier to bear Lavinia’s raped and mutilated condition evoked by Marcus in Titus Andronicus than Clarissa’s in her post-defilement letters. Given his observation regarding the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear (an act ‘too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition’),Footnote ¹⁹ Johnson is unlikely to have believed this view of poetry’s super-adding of pleasure, though his use of the word ‘endured’ may indicate an influence on Wordsworth’s formulation. Yet, whether the rhythmical easing works as proposed depends upon a reader or listener not making the distinction Wordsworth uses to press his point, for that would be to separate out the painful description and its pleasurable form, where the effect Wordsworth argues for is a single, complexly mitigated experience.

Nietzsche expressed a very similar, but differently nuanced idea about what the meter of poetry ‘adds’ to its words:

This observation compounds his equivocal skepticism about poetic form in The Gay Science, asserting the unjustified and unjustifiable, but still entrancing, sonic amorality of poetic form: ‘even the wisest among us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm – if only insofar as we feel a thought to be truer if simply because it has a metrical form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip, and jump’.Footnote ²¹ Thus, according to Nietzsche, not only does the form of poetry veil reality, but it will tempt us to think this distorted vagueness truer than it actually is. Here might be two related reasons for believing that poetry cannot have the truth-content that, among others, J. H. Prynne and Simon Jarvis has passionately and intricately argued for it.

Yet, the disjunctive structure of Nietzsche’s idea determines what it can allow itself to say. The ‘reality’ in the quotation from Human, All Too Human turns out to be language-use outside of poetic art, speech without the ‘artificiality’ of metrical form. This presupposes a true or real prose statement of what a poem might have said, but couldn’t, existing behind the veil of its distorted version in the metrical composition. The competition between these supposed different kinds of language-use is reconfigured as a contest between reality and illusion, where art’s success is simultaneously its defeat, or vice versa. But if the speech of poetry is, by means of its techniques, able to invite exact attunements of sound sense in a reading ear, then these complexly differentiated relations of meter and rhythm in poetry are also contributing to its truth-content access.

To offer a further example, consider how Emily Dickinson shapes reflections on feeling and order beyond suffering:

The close of this poem imagines what it might feel like to be rescued from such a freezing end after you’ve lost consciousness, but before death has you. It is entirely taken up with thought about form and feeling in poetry, as its first line, which may be characterised as an eleven-syllable iambic pentameter with a dactyl for its first foot, implies. If it is concerned with the reduction of people to automata after great pain when ‘The Feet, mechanical, go round’, it enters such a state in the disposition of its metrical feet, repeatedly underlined, so as to be audible, by its emphatic and disjunctive use of commas and dashes.

Yet, it doesn’t merely succumb to a deadened formality, for the poem’s final line, also a pentameter, offers a vividly rhythmical resistance to the formal expectation that Dickinson has reminded readers of in the previous line. Where ‘As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -’ is regularly iambic with a comma-marked caesura dividing it after the second main stress and the fifth syllable, ‘First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -’ shapes strong stresses on the first four syllables (the first ‘then’ much less weak than the second syllable of ‘Stupor’, falling into regularity in the second hemistich ‘then the letting go -’. Vitality in this poem is figured as a resistance to the mechanical, the routine, and calls upon reserves of energy in ways from which there is always the danger of relapse. The metrical and formal intelligence here is not separate from its conceptualisations of experience, rather it gives access to them. Its reality is not veiled by the meter, but measured in its revelation.

Sound sense is also inherent in what Charles Tomlinson called ‘the chances of rhyme’.Footnote ²³ The sounds of particular words and their capacities to rhyme, or not, with other words are contingencies that have developed with the communally purposeful evolution of a natural language. It is a curious fact about the development of this hybrid pidgin, English, that, borrowing words from a variety of distinct language groups, ones in which the concepts don’t necessarily rhyme, it has created a number of highly charged rhyming contraries: ‘night’ and ‘light’, ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’, and ‘breath’ and ‘death’. Here the temptation might again be to say that such rhymed opposites drive a wedge between sound and sense, but such a notion is dependent upon an assumption of simple mimesis between a sound and a meaning; rather, the auditory affinity between the consonantally differentiated words bespeaks the conceptual interdependence of the terms. It is as if they had been created by the poet in all our ancestors – so much so as to render them, for poets, both problematic and inescapable. Similarly, folk music and popular song have so exploited the loftier rhymes on the word ‘love’ that poets have been driven to inventiveness, for, as Wittgenstein notes, it is an accident that in German ‘Rast’ rhymes with ‘Hast’, but it is a lucky one, and you can discover it – as Goethe did when composing his motto: ‘Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast’.Footnote ²⁴

In ‘A Fit of Rime against Rime’, Ben Jonson’s classicizing leads him to prefer how

The titular equivocation in the poem’s strategy, the action of its sound sense, allows Jonson to illustrate the infection and deploy his own illness as its cure. He may be

Yet, he is also deploying the ways that ‘falling’ calls back to ‘calling’ as a shape for his verse, and further using its sound as his sense, while the six-line patterning of the poem (rhymed AABCCB) means that what falls ‘To the ground’ in his tumbling mimetic line three is picked up in the answering second half of the form:

The poet ambivalently rails against, and effectively deploys, the constrictions of rhyme. Simultaneously, he is also complaining about – and benefiting from – the limited rhyming possibilities in English. The relative poverty of rhyme words and near absence of homophonic inflections has contributed to English rhymes being sound-sense pairings, for in this language the similarity in difference of rhyme is heard on monosyllables or stem syllables, not remnant inflections, and the sound of a rhyme is inextricable from its sense. This is what produces a superficial contrariness in those rhymes such as ‘breath’ and ‘death’ with which I began. In Jonson’s lines ‘-fect’ and ‘-tect’, ‘call-’ and ‘fall-’, then ‘lett-’ and ‘fett-’ are the parts of the words that produce the rhyme. Obliged to rhyme on stem sense too, poets may find it near useless that ‘womb’ rhymes with ‘tomb’, because the in-my-beginning-is-my-end idea is too plainly invited by the rhyme itself. Similarly, while a poet today might have great difficulty with the rhyme of ‘love’ and ‘dove’, because again the romantic picture of the nestling birds has been worked to a nullity, the rhyme automatically triggering the familiar idea, so the less promisingly conceptualised rhyme of ‘love’ and ‘of’ might stimulate a poet’s art.

In Jonson’s ‘A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme’, the poet customises his art’s technique, associating it with ‘fetters’ (thanks to the opportune rhyme on literary ‘letters’), working with and against those thematic senses in the course of his poem. Such sounds as senses can evoke no end of allegiance and affiliation, producing heated debates, blows and ripostes, between poets and their critics on what a particular technique entails and whether it should or shouldn’t be used – something G. H. Lichtenberg’s observation notes by taking part in it when asserting that ‘To most of the opponents of rhyme there no doubt applies what Dryden said of Milton: they possess no talent for rhyme’.Footnote ²⁶ Marvell’s encomium, ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’, reiterates the equivocating strategy of Jonson’s ‘A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme’ in its closing couplets:

Marvell is obliged, he admits, to ‘commend’ Milton because appearing compelled to rhyme with ‘offend’. His final couplet simultaneously argues for unrhymed blank verse as the more sublime, while claiming its own ‘needs’ for the sense pointing of a rhymed form – affirmatively revaluing the technique even in light of its having been denigrated with analogies from a horse’s bells and fashion accessories. Milton had associated rhyme with bondage, tyranny and custom in his note on ‘The Verse’ of Paradise Lost, and, as a result, had his style attributed with republican and regicidal tendencies, something that couldn’t be said, by the by, of Jonson’s poem rhyming against rhyme. The sound sense equivocation in Marvell’s poem commending Milton’s epic enables it to support his friend’s values while allowing for a plurality of styles – and politics.

But how far away may a rhyme word be before a reader can no longer catch its echo? This will vary from person to person, culture to culture, and between those who have trained themselves to be sensitive to such effects, and those who haven’t. The long ‘Prologue’ to Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (1953) proves a test case for such limits. All the lines rhyme, the first with the last, the second with the penultimate, and so on to a couplet at the centre of the poem. When, in reading beyond that central couplet, do you stop hearing that Thomas’s poem rhymes?Footnote ²⁸ Denise Riley has observed of her rhymed poem ‘“Affections of the Ear”’, which is written in lines of some 21 syllables:

Having been told this by the poet, when you then go back to her poem you can see the rhymes and sound them, but they still don’t appear to integrate into a sound sense amalgam, the poet having created an experimental structure in which the rhyme is both present and at least partially disabled. This continues even when she starts to comment on the constraints she has put herself under as symptomatic exemplification:

Riley is acute about line-length and audibility, as can be sensed when we suddenly encounter that extra internal rhyme, at a pentameter-like tenth syllable, invoking the Sugarplum Fairy in the Nutcracker ballet. In the space that they articulate for this meta-poetic commentary and the bravura effort inaudibly to end-rhyme throughout, her lines articulate a paradoxical case, not unlike Jonson’s, for and against the fetters of rhyme.

The verbs adopted in the last line quoted above are perhaps, though, overstated to make a case because to ‘parrot’ is to reiterate without reflection (and reflecting Riley is manifestly doing), while at that late twentieth-century stage in the history of poetry no one was forcing her to form ideas by humdrum rhymes.Footnote ³¹ Her widely influential point is that we don’t speak language so much as language speaks its created beings: ‘I am made to parrot others’ words’. Although if she is so made, I can’t help thinking, then the others were too, so, strictly speaking, they wouldn’t be able to own or seem to originate words either. The dialectics of freedom and constraint encountered here in the chances of rhyme are returned to in relation to lyric subjectivity and agency in Chapter 6.

To conclude with a metered poem that highlights its thematically significant sound sense composites, I turn to one of Rudyard Kipling’s, which no less self-consciously than Riley deploys a complex of delayed rhymes and highly flexible metrical shapes rhythmically to qualify the elapsing of time. In his essay on Kipling as poet, T. S. Eliot was unapologetic about the looseness of his terminology regarding ‘poetry’ and ‘verse’:

Eliot’s purpose is to claim that ‘in speaking of Kipling we are entitled to say “great verse”’, while admitting that were he to construct a category of writers who had written similarly he would be ‘dealing with matters as imprecise as the shape and size of a cloud or the beginning and end of a wave’. Among the poems Eliot selected for A Choice of Kipling’s Verse at least one fails to fit the offered definition of great verse, not because it is bad, but because it is manifestly and unqualifiedly poetry. Yet, it is an instance of particular interest because the poet has consciously deployed varieties of metrical feet in the composition of his lines, varieties that he is expecting readers to hear quite clearly as a thematic contribution to the sound sense of his poem.Footnote ³³

‘The Way through the Woods’ first appeared in ‘Marklake Witches’ from Rewards and Fairies (1910). Its interwoven rhythms, rhymes and metrics are strongly intimated:

For the first seven lines, aside from the regularly spaced internal rhymes, there appears to be practically no end-rhyme. If we overlook the rime-riche ‘wood’ rhyming with ‘wood’, and the ‘ago’ and ‘know’ at lines two and four, there is none. The internal rhymes at lines three and then again at seven do have the reassuring insistence that recalls the verse writing of Kipling’s more familiar kind. The second end-rhyme appears at line eight when ‘anemones’ meets ‘trees’, and then the stanza rhymes twice more on the same sound: ‘sees’ at line nine and ‘ease’ at eleven. But by now, a first-time reader’s sense of the verse has been transformed, for ‘broods’ at line ten has picked up the two ‘woods’ from lines one and five, as well as preparing for the closing rhyme again on ‘woods’ at line twelve. If we allow that the internal rhymes at lines three and seven stand in for end-rhymes, then the entire stanza is rhymed, but, again, the sense that it is so rhymed only dawns over the stretch of the twelve lines. This complex rhyming pattern is repeated in the second verse, though the two stanzas are not of the same length – the second having thirteen lines, made by echoing with a variant the twenty-fourth line.Footnote ³⁵

The poem is written in variations of trimeters and tetrameters, the latter being the lines with the internal rhyme. However, the syllabic count and metrical feet for the trimeter lines turns out to be expressively varied. ‘They shut the road through the woods’ is made of two iambic feet followed by one anapaest, while ‘Seventy years ago’ could be scanned as a trochaic foot, followed by two iambs. This is followed by the first of the tetrameters: ‘Weather and rain have undone it again’ – a trochee and an iamb followed by two anapaests. Glancing forward to the other tetrameters, readers can hear Kipling’s skill in varying lines that appear from the internal rhyming to be firmly four square. Not quite so, especially in the first verse, for ‘It is underneath the coppice and heath’ give us an anapaest, followed by two iambs, and then a second anapaest. ‘When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools’ has the matching pairs of an anapaest followed by an iamb, or, since both halves contain a hyphenated compound, it might be more plausible to say an anapaest followed by a spondee. The final tetrameter then closely echoes the third with ‘You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet’, a doubling of anapaests and iambs.

Kipling’s choice of ‘beat’ and ‘feet’ for the internal rhyme of his final tetrameter invites the thought that an ability to hear the metrical units he deploys and to catch rhymes is central to the thematic sense of ‘The Way through the Woods’. Why does he decide on seventy years for the time that has elapsed since the road was shut? Three score and ten is the traditional lifespan, and this means that hardly anyone alive can remember there being a road through the woods. Yet the rhyming and metrical ensemble of the poem asserts that, listening carefully, you can hear the sound of this distant, lost past:

Following the internally rhyming tetrameter, there are three anapaests (‘And the swish of a skirt in the dew’), then, reversing the rhythmical shape, a pair of dactyls with a final stressed syllable (‘Steadily cantering through’), or a dactyl, a trochee, and an iamb.Footnote ³⁶ Then there’s a line of iambs: ‘The misty solitudes’, then one of two iambs and an anapaest, culminating, or almost, in a three-syllable stress cluster (‘old lost road’) around the poem’s topic (‘The old lost road through the woods’), an iamb, a spondee, and an anapaest. Kipling distinguishes the sound of the ‘skirt’ (anapaests) from the sound of a cantering horse (dactyls), and these from the background sound of the woods (iambs). If readers can listen as closely as to hear these different patterns of sound, then we are not as bereft of the past as might have been thought. That Kipling is concerned with himself, his readers, and contemporaries is let slip by the use of ‘as though’ in ‘As though they perfectly knew / The old lost road through the woods’ – since, if what we hear are the people who used to use the road (or their ghosts), then it isn’t for them ‘as though’ at all. They do know the road. Yet, for us, it is ‘as though’ for we enable the intuition, one underlined with his final, contrast-asserting line: ‘But there is no road through the woods’.

In the course of his Kipling essay, Eliot attempts a discrimination between his subject and another writer devoted to the English countryside:

These wartime remarks, dated 26 September 1941, involve a broadly generalising critical intelligence that was only truly valuable in so far as a similarly informed reader could engage with it. Eliot had a cultural-religious aversion to Hardy (see, for example, the poor treatment he receives in After Strange Gods)Footnote ³⁸ and the contrast made here convinces less than he would like – as if Hardy never composed self-aware fables, or wrote of the contemporary world as he found it, or had no sense of what needed preserving, or had little political or historical imagination in, say, The Dynasts. ‘The Way through the Woods’ compares appropriately with ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in the latter’s evocation of nature as discontinued poetic inspiration with its ‘strings of broken lyres’ and its technical siding with the thrush’s note in the renewed rhythmic and syntactical flexibility of stanzas three and four.Footnote ³⁹ Both poems locate the explicit speaking subject in Hardy’s poem (‘I leant’) and the implicit one in Kipling’s (‘You will hear’) as detached from the scenes which each views with a sense of loss, while each addresses and compensates for this identified loss by deploying poetic rhythms against social changes they describe or imply have befallen.

Not that Eliot doesn’t have a point to make once he’s done his bit of dividing and ruling: ‘The second peculiarity of Kipling’s Sussex stories I have already touched upon, the fact that he brings to his work the freshness of a mind and a sensibility developed and matured in a quite different environment: he is discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Both Hardy’s poem and Kipling’s, in their different ways, are about ‘discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance’, not only that of the threatened English countryside, but of the threatened sound senses of poetry, felt to be under sentence of death from changes to the rhythms of life – for instance, the mechanisation of transport and farming. Meter, rhythm and rhyme in poems can have truth-content because they can evoke by a species of quotation or allusion cultural memories and previously established meanings. Yet the ways in which ideas of memory’s uses can be composed are as various as the poems in which they occur. In ‘The Way through the Woods’ and ‘The Darkling Thrush’, Kipling and Hardy, writing within a decade around the turn of the twentieth century, show sensitivity to ways the sound sense of poetry can be deployed to counterpoise the experience of historical change and intuited crisis.