The poet these days can’t win.
Either free verse is the rule—and the poet wonders, “wait, so what is poetry?” —or those who like metrical verse make it so complicated, the poet is confused going in that direction, too.
It is bad enough good poetry is really hard to write, but the “wisdom” out there says:
1) poetry must be “difficult.” The end of difficulty is difficulty. A cheery thought.
2) the free verse you write “may not be poetry” and
3) formal poetry has too many impossible, contradictory rules.
Annie Finch, who has written an entire book to explain poetic form, informs us a simple line of trochaic rhythm is actually iambic rhythm—the very opposite of trochaic.
How is this possible?
Trochaic is DAA da and Iambic is da DAA.
The line is Robert Hayden’s and it scans very simply:
SUN-days, TOO, my FATH-er GOT up EAR-ly.
Trochaic.
Ms. Finch decides to call “SUN” a “headless iamb.”
In the expert’s imagination, an invisible syllable hovers in front of this trochaic line, changing the whole sequence to the iambic rhythm.
[hey!] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/ ly.
Welcome to verse pedagogy! Learning about the iamb (the most common foot in English poetry) is not enough. The “headless iamb” (an iamb which is not an iamb) must be in the mix, too, for no apparent reason —just to be more “difficult” perhaps. “Difficult” is the great mantra of modern poetry.
And then Ms. Finch tells us with a straight face that:
“the line from Hayden is not only headless, it also has an extra syllable at the end.”
“It also has an extra syllable at the end.”
Well what do you know? It does!
Mr. Hayden, the poet, has counted wrong.
Hayden’s line has an “extra” syllable—because Ms. Finch, who has spent a lifetime studying and celebrating verse (and witchery) declares his perfectly trochaic line is actually an iambic line—with an unaccounted-for syllable at the end waving in the wind.
Annie Finch cannot be wrong. It would embarrass one who has given a lifetime to verse.
Annie Finch is correct to say that a trochee can sometimes stand-in for an iamb. This is common and has nothing to do with her mystical reading of Hayden’s poem. Well, it does, to a degree. A poet establishes an iambic rhythm—da DAA—and for variation’s sake, throws in a trochee—DAA da. But there’s never any confusion between da DAA and DAA da, unless the reader over-thinks the whole matter.
This is what Annie does when she takes a trochaic line in Hayden’s poem—in which she believes an iambic meter is established—and finds a need to declare the trochaic is really iambic.
Poets substitute freely. They don’t need pedants making all sorts of excuses for their substitutions.
If you substitute too much, the established rhythm changes—but this happens when it happens; to impose a reading of an established rhythm is to let ‘what ought to be’ crush ‘what is.’
The line in question, from Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” is the poem’s first line. The poem as a whole is trochaic, with substitutions. There is no need to make the line iambic. There is no need to interfere with Hayden’s intent. This is obvious, because if we use the “extra” syllable at the end of line one to push an iambic rhythm onto line two, we get this atrocity:
[uhh] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/
ly AND/ put HIS/ clothes ON/ in THE/ blue BLACK/ cold.
Line two, in which the extra syllable in line one (created by Annie Finch!) forces its iambic rhythm on line two, demands the reader place emphasis on trivial words: “and,” “on,” and “the” while creating another hanging syllable at the end of the line: “cold.”
Our ears tell us this is completely nuts.
A more subtle error is made by Annie Finch when she turns to Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and her expertise says it is iambic where it is not, simply because the poem’s established rhythm (in this case, unlike Hayden’s poem) is iambic.
The versifying skill of the poet Wordsworth uses the anapest—da da DAA—as a pleasant variation within the general iambic rhythm in his famous “daffodils” poem.
The line:
Flutt’ring and dancing in the breeze.
freaks out the pedant as they notice “flutt’ring” is DAA da (trochaic) and not da DAA (iambic). No one would say Flutt’-RING. Not even a pedant. Something must be done, then, to re-establish the iambic rhythm as quickly as possible, or the pedant will have a heart attack. So we get this piece of doggerel:
FLUTT ‘ring/ and DANC/ ing IN/ the BREEZE.
“Dancing IN the breeze” is clunky because there is a natural anapest right here:
in the BREEZE.
Wordsworth varies from the iambic this way: FLUTT’R ing/ (trochee) and DANC/ (iamb) ing in the BREEZE. (anapest)
The anapest, “ing in the BREEZE” is what Poe calls a “quick” anapest in his article, “Rational of Verse.”
da-da-da DAA. (You can see the relationship to the iamb.)
In the Wordsworth poem are several good examples of this. The “ing in the” part is pronounced with slightly more speed.
The poem is mostly tetrameter (4 beat) but Wordsworth varies it with trimeter (3 beat) lines:
“I WAND/-ered LONE/ ly as a CLOUD.”
“a-LONG/ the MARG/ -in of a BAY.”
These are free-breathing trimeter lines, just as
“FLUTT-‘ring/ and DANC/ -ing in the BREEZE.”
These variations, with their quick anapests, help to give the poem its famous sprightly character. Those fixated on conventional iambic readings will miss this. If you listen to the poem read aloud, you will notice the tendency is not to say “DANC-ing IN the BREEZE.” But the more lightsome and appropriate “DANC-ing in the BREEZE.
In poetry, the ears are wiser than the eyes.