Response to comments on Rhyme and Rhythm

This is a response to Max Babi's several poems about rhythm in response to Geetanjali's original post.

In particular, Myfanwy is spectacularly rhythmic. Thanks Max, for dredging it out of your heap. . .

I am no expert, and this is a more modern rhyme, abcb - sort of like a heroic quatrain, abab, (also called the Elegiac Stanza) but here only the even lines are rhyming.

One can do technical stuff, all very boring and vague - something like this:

Trace|me|yo_ur|wheel|-tracks,|you|for|tu|nate|bi|cy_cle,
Out|of|the|shop|ping|and|in|to|the|dark,
Back|do_wn|the|ave|nue|back|to|the|pot|ting|shed,
Back|to|the|house|on|the|fringe|of|the|park.

So that's 11-10-11-10 syllables. (Note that "|" here is syllable boundary, not meter boundary.) Now here I am really venturing into deep uncharted waters, but presuming that the powers-that-be agree that more or less that there are four short-long sequences (iambs) and a 2 or 3-syllable meter at the end, then this could be classified as an iambic pentameter.

But all this helps you pass exams, and actually tells you next to nothing. Poets break rules all the time, most celebratedly in Eliot, e.g.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

which is 7/10 syllables. On the other hand, who can deny the rhythm in:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

I have always felt that the best understanding of rhythm lies not in poetry, but in song. The taala cycle ensures that at the critical points in the song, you
come back to the som. In between you may have been gallivanting everywhere, playing 11 3/4 beats in a teentaal piece, but in the end, at that precise moment, you magically return to som, eliciting an "aaah" of relief in the listerner. . .

In poetry as well, in the end, the rhyme when it comes, must also hit the som. . .
But the most important reason why Myfanwy works is not because it has a fine rhythm or a fine rhyme, but the harmony between its internal cadence and its thought. The rhythm is (somehow) in harmony with the thought, the girl childs growing up, coming home, and the father's love has something heroic about it perhaps, even in its mundane-ness. I must admit though that I was looking for some tragedy towards the end as I was reading it. . .

e.e. cummings poem is deliberately disrespectful - and evokes it with a broken up rhythm.

You feel the relevance of this harmony most poignantly when translating, e.g. if you read a dark-stormcloud-rains poem in tagore's original, there will often be a heavy sound, with a heavy meter. In translation, it is impossible to do justice to that meter, and when you read otherwise fine translations you realize that what is lost is this harmony of cadence and thought. You see this also in languages one does not know, as in translations of
Pablo Neruda's , say:

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos".

translated as:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, `The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

Somehow the english version, though it is the best instance I know, fails to carry the tragedy of the Spanish sound, esp for the second stanza.

What makes a rhythm harmonious with a thought? Here one reaches a domain of magic and mystery, one where you once again encounter the magic of song...

Like Coetzee says in Disgrace: "The origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. (p.3-4)"

So Geetanjali, you see, I am completely on the side of rhythm. Without rhythm, how can poetry live up to its arrogance of ending its line anywhere and everywhere, with not a hoot of thought for the right margin? How can it dance and sing and shout - "Look at me!" How can it turn up its nose at penny-pinching squished-up miserly prose, crawling around filling up space with its verbiage? Vers libre or rhyme, it is rhythm, rhythm, cadence, rhythm, all the way.