New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Again, Alan Stephens, as quoted by Louis Simpson (in Three on the Tower), said that though there was “no definite and recurrent combination of stressed and unstressed syllables” and therefore no possibility of that “measurement” Williams desired and claimed, yet his line “is a line because, relative to its neighboring lines, it contains that which makes it in its own right a unit of the attention,” and because it “has a norm against which it almost constantly varies … the formal architecture of the sentence.” Simpson comments, “He [Alan Stephens] goes on to say that this principle also underlies verse in meter; ‘audible rhythm’ is not the ‘supreme fact’ of the line of verse, and so ‘Dr. Williams will have been working in the tradition all along.’ … Dr. Williams would not have been happy to hear it,” says Simpson, “for he insisted on the variable foot’s being a measurement in time … a unit of rhythm, not a form of sentence structure.” But Simpson does not commit himself further; instead he questions, at this point, whether or not there is indeed an “American measure.”

  Williams himself tended to cloud the understanding of his prosodic ideas by linking them too closely to his emphasis on notating American, not English, speech patterns; but the variable foot itself is a principle equally applicable to other idioms, not only to American speech. Simpson, however, a page or so earlier, had reiterated some of Williams’ own clearer definitions of the measured line he was after—“auditory measure” and the assertion that “the passage of time (not stress) is the proper … key to the foot. …” In the face of such evidence it is particularly distressing to read that so astute a critic as Hugh Kenner (whose close reading of “Young Sycamore Tree” and the little poem about the cat stepping over the jam-pot are models of what such analyses can be—and rarely are) could write to Mike Weaver (as quoted in Three on the Tower) that Williams’ use of the triadic line was merely a visual aid to reading aloud after strokes had affected his visual coordination. Perhaps Kenner was merely trying to account for why the variable feet were arranged in three’s rather than four’s, let’s say. I would find no argument with that attempt: it’s a good question; but Kenner’s remarks can be read as a relegation of what was a deliberate auditory notation to the level of merely visual typographical convenience; and in The Pound Era he does say the term “variable foot” suggests “a rubber inch.”

  As for Marjorie Perloff, she claims that Williams scored his lines for the eye, not the ear (in “To Give a Design”: Williams & the Visualization cf Poetry from William Carlos Williams: Man & Poet)—something I know, from my own conversations with him and his approval of my way of reading his own work back to him (at his request), was not the case. Unfortunately, Flossie Williams was the only witness to those occasions, so you have only my word for it. Among the writers on Williams whose expositions of the variable foot I’ve read, only James Breslin approaches clarity and understanding, for he does write (in William Carlos Williams: An American Artist) of “uniform intervals of lapsed time,” with variable syllable count and “pauses used to fill out the intervals in the shorter lines.” But even this does not seem to adequately acknowledge the variations in speed which I hear in these units, nor, to my mind, are pauses merely fillers: they are not resorted to, as it were, but have expressive functions to fulfill—waiting, pondering, or hesitating.

  What then is my own sense of how to read the variable feet in their (usually) triadic line-clusters? It is so simple, if I am right, that one wonders at all the confusion and mystification. Each segment of a triadic duster is a foot, and each has the same duration. Thus a foot (or segment) with few syllables, if it is to occupy the same amount of time as one with many, must by the reader be accorded, in the enunciation of those syllables, a slowness (or marked “quantity”). If that would in any particular instance distort the words or impart a weird mouthing effect, then the reader must give full value to the spaces between the words—especially in a foot with syntax and expression (punctuated or not) calling for some degree of pause in any case. Conversely, a foot (or line-segment) if many syllables must be uttered with whatever rapidity will give it equal duration with a few-syllabled line. What sets the norm? Just as the tempo at which a piece of music will be played is established in the first bar (so that if, in practicing the piano, one starts very fast, one will be obliged to play the designedly quickest passages all the faster) so, in reading aloud a poem of Williams’ written in this relative mode, the opening segment (many or few syllabled) is the determinant. As one moves through a poem, the consistency of duration in time, though not absolute, can be felt, registered, experienced—not in a blatant or obtrusive way, but in much the same way that the consistency of traditional metric patterns is felt: as a cohesive factor. In The Pound Era Kenner records a conversation with William Carlos Williams in 1957. Kenner asks (conversant though he was with Pound’s definition of rhythm as “a form cut in TIME”), “Did he mean … each line to take up the same time?” Williams, he recounts, “at once said "Yes;" then he said, "More or less.”

  That “Yes” is dear and unequivocal; nor does the added “more or less” take it back, but simply qualifies it in the same degree that any traditional prosodist would note that an absolutely unvarying rhythm, with no inverted feet, no departures of any kind from a rigid norm, is deadly dull and inexpressive: some “give,” some “more-or-less-ness” is required.

  If duration in time, not number of syllables nor of stresses (or accents), is the simple, open secret of the variable foot, what determines which words go into which foot? Why are some words—being few or of few syllables, or even monosyllables—stretched, or their surrounding silences given more than average importance, so that they may, taken together, form a foot as long as another which contains a larger number of polysyllabic words uttered with rippling rapidity? Why should not some of the latter have gone into the preceding few-syllabled segment? The answer is no different from that with which the same question would (by my lights) be met had it been asked concerning any modem poem written in non-traditional forms: the ultimate determinant of what goes into a line is the totality of the demands of expressiveness, comprising intellectually comprehensible syntax, sensuous and expressive musicality (including variation of pace), and above all the emotional charge—delicate or forceful—of content. Each of these interpenetrates the others. The more fully wrought the poem, the less discrete each of its strands.

  This assertion leads me to consider in what way the poems written before the triadic line became Williams’ prevailing mode differ from the latter in rhythmic organization. If duration in time was not, in these, the cohesive structural factor, what was? One finds in them that “pulse ”—a rhythm experienced underneath all else, yet rarely “heard,” just like our heartbeats—which is essential to any good poem (and which distinguishes non-traditional, non-re-useable forms from mere formless free verse, though the latter term is widely employed to allude to poems which deserve a better definition). And it is my conviction that the source of this pulse, this subliminally registered ground-bass, this verbal analogue for such unifying elements in visual art as an unobtrusively recurring hue or a subtly echoing series of diagonals, is a dominant (not a relentless) number of strong stresses per line, often with an alternation—usually irregular in frequency of occurrence—of another number of strong stresses. So that (rather than the steady march of two strong stresses in each line that Winters, juggling natural enunciation a bit to demonstrate his point, claimed for “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”) we get in one poem, if we count strong stresses only, a definite dominance of three, let’s say, with a goodly number of twos and a sprinkling of ones or fours or even more disparate numbers per line; or in another poem, fives may dominate, with threes a strong second and here and there the odd six or four; and so forth. The shorter the poem the less variation, otherwise a sense of dominant stress will have no chance to accrue. And in a longer poem the balance may shift, gradually, to a different figure.

  This unifying pattern of stresses is written by
ear and out of the feeling-tone of the content, not by conscious scansion; but the vigilance of ear and sensitivity are as “crafty” as in the work of syllable-counting or the maintenance of traditional meters. In the case of Williams, his aural alertness was towards the speech around him, but this focus of his attention as listener and as maker was held in tension with a peculiarly distinctive high rhetoric very different from common speech. I think this tension contributes greatly to the abiding interest of his diction, rhythms and syntax, which are both more intense and more lofty than so much contemporary work supposedly influenced by him but which is flat and flabby, devoid of that aristocratic and eccentric inner voice Williams engages in counterpoint with the notation of external voices. His typical use, within a generally demotic phraseology—which is unobtrusive as diction even when its images startle—of such turns as “save only” (“lifeless/save only in/beauty, the kernel / of all seeking” … ), “by what” (“passionately biased / by what errors of conviction”), “were it not” (“Were it not for the March within me, … I could not endure”), contribute, along with other syntactic idiosyncrasies, to this important stylistic tension.

  An example—not outstanding but representative—can be found in “Approach to a City” (Collected Poems, Volume II, 1939-1962). The poem begins with the vernacular “Getting through with* the world”; moves through four stanzas of images, simple in diction but giving, in their precision, the “shock of recognition.” Then, in the last stanza, though without recourse to a recherché vocabulary, the whole poem lifts, culminating in the language of the inner voice:

  I never tire of these sights

  but refresh myself there

  always for there is small holiness

  to be found in braver things*

  To demonstrate the kinds of stress-dominance I’ve spoken about I’ve chosen a poem which does not clearly manifest this peculiar counterpoint of diction since it is an intimate conversation between Williams and his ancient mother—two very articulate people.

  The Horse Show

  4 Cónstantly néar you, I néver in my entíre

  5 síxty-four yeárs knéw you so wéll as yésterday

  4 or hálf so wéll. We tálked. You were néver

  3 so lúcid, so disengáged from all éxigencies

  4 of pláce and tíme. We tálked of oursélves,

  4 intimately, a thíng never heárd of betweén us.

  5 How lóng have we wáited? álmost a húndred yéars.

  3 You saíd, Unléss there is some spérk, some

  4 spirit we keép within oursélves, life, a

  4 contínuing lífe’s impóssible—and it is áll

  4 we háve. There is no other life, ónly the óne.

  4 The wórld of the spírits that cómes áfterward

  5 is the sáme as our ówn, just like yóu sitting

  4 thére they come and tálk to me, júst the sáme.

  4 They come to bóther us. Whý? I sáid. I dón’t

  4 knów. Perhaps to find out whát we are dóing.

  3 Jeálous, do you think? I dón’t know. I

  4 dón’t know whý they should wánt to come báck.

  2 I was réading about some mén who had been

  3 búried under a moúntain, I sáid to her, and

  4 óne of them came baćk after twó mónths,

  3 dígging himself oút. It was in Swítzerland,

  3 you remémber? Of course I remémber. The

  4 villagers thought it was a ghóst coming dówn

  2 to complaín. They were frightened. They

  3 dó come, she said, what you cáll

  3 my “visions.” I tálk to them just as I

  4 am tálking to yóu. I sée them plainly.

  4 Óh if I could ónly reád! you don’t knów

  3 what adjústments I have máde. All

  4 I can dó is to trý to live óver agaín

  3 what I knéw when your bróther and yóu

  4 were children—but I cán’t acute always succéed.

  2 Téll me about the hórse show. I have

  3 been wáiting all wéek to héar about it.

  4 Móther dárling, I wasn’t áble to get awáy.

  4 Óh that’s too bád. It was júst a shów;

  4 they máke the hórses wálk up and dówn

  3 to júdge them by their fórm. Oh is thát

  3 all? I thóught it was something élse. Óh

  4 they júmp and run tóo. I wish you had been

  4 thére, I was só interested to heár about it.

  Here I find 4 to be the dominant number of strong stresses per line: 23 out of 42 lines; 3 is the secondary dominance, with 13 lines, and there are 3 each of 5 and 2.

  Read the poem aloud without any thought of traditional prosodic feet or of counted syllables, but paying minute attention to what is being said and in what mood, in this poignant dialogue; I hope the logic of my scansion will then be apparent.

  It may be helpful, in studying the rhythms of this or other poems, to mark off with a musical “phrasing mark” those cadences which override syntactic units, especially those which “swallow” some words, giving them minimal emphasis. (Such cadences, in common speech as well as poetry, run counter to syntactic logic, or coincide with it only incidentally.) Here for instance are a few examples of this method:

  (Note that the speech cadence break in the penultimate example cuts right through the word “remember,” in the same way that a line-break occasionally divides a word in modern poems.) A principle that emerges from this phrase-marking seems to be that the end of the cadence unit occurs just before one of the strong stresses and just after a “swallowed,” minimally stressed syllable—in other words, when that particular combination (of the extremes of unstressed and strong-stressed) appears. Not all strong stresses follow notably unstressed syllables.

  Unless the poem is given physical embodiment—voiced reading—it is not possible to fully evaluate, to weight and measure, the components of its sonic character. This does not imply that silent reading (if “sounded out” in the mind) should be abandoned as inferior; but its limitations (and virtues) need to be more clearly recognized by most readers. Both silent and voiced reading are needed for the fullest experience of a poem.

  How do Williams’ pre-triadic line poems differ from the triadic ones? An effect of the triadic line seems to me to be a certain stateliness of pace, even though individual line-segments may move swiftly. Thus they seem particularly appropriate to his late years, expressing formally a hard-earned wisdom. But wherein lies the principal difference between the two kinds of Williams poem when we consider them with a view to better comprehension of his prosodic theories? Clearly the cadences I have pointed out partake of the character of what he later named the variable foot. However, rather than the organizing principle being parity of duration as in the triadic lines, the earlier poems depend upon the less conscious phenomenon of focal stresses around which the syllables cluster in variable (or as Winters called them, unlimited) numbers. But this does not imply that the “pulse” provided by focal strong stresses is absent from the triadic, duration-organized structures. Williams did not abandon it, but absorbed it into the triadic mode. An examination of that process is not within the scope of this essay. My hope for the preceding pages is simply to clarify a subject which has been considered more difficult than it is or else contemptuously dismissed as illusory. Williams did know what he was doing, and it worked.

  * * *

  * Williams never bad been a counter of syllables and a pattern of stresses is not the same as syllables anyway!

  * (My italics)

  Williams and the Duende

  (1972)

  THOUGH IN WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS there is what I have thought of sometimes as a Franciscan sense of wonder that illumines what is accounted ordinary—

  I never tire of the mystery

  of these streets: the three baskets

  of dried fruit in the high

  bar-room window, the
gulls wheeling

  above the factory, the dirty

  snow—the humility of the snow that

  silvers everything and is

  trampled and lined with use.

  (Approach to a City)