Scott's meter is pretty ragged in this poem. Keeping the first couplet as a model, I would have written,
"O tell me, thou bonny bird, when shall I marry?" — "When six brawny gentlemen, kirkward thee carry." "And who makes the bridal bed, birdie say truly?" — "The grey-headed sacristan, tending graves duly." "The glow-worm thy gravestone light; by night so shady, The owl from the steeple sing, 'Welcome, proud lady.' "
@Thinkerbell I think the ragged meter adds to the poem's tension. It's kind of a grim topic, where she's asking these innocent questions and basically being told that she will die.
I found the ragged meter distracting; I think Scott was just being lazy. Poe did a far better job in "The Raven," for example, as did Goethe in "Erlkoenig."
And Shelley's "Ozymandias," though treating a somewhat less somber theme, keeps almost perfect iambic pentameter throughout. (And Shelley is said to have composed that sonnet in under half an hour. Wow, just wow.)
@Thinkerbell Shelley was definitely talented, but since reading Galway Kinnell's poem about him, I think of him differently.
When I was twenty the one true free spirit I had heard of was Shelley, Shelley who wrote tracts advocating atheism, free love, the emancipation of women, and the abolition of wealth and class, a lively version of Plato’s Symposium, lyrics on the bliss and brevity of romantic love, and complex poems on love’s difficulties, Shelley who, I learned later—perhaps almost too late—remarried Harriet, then pregnant with their second child, and a few months later ran off with Mary, already pregnant with their first, bringing along Mary’s stepsister Claire, who very likely also became his lover,
and in this malaise à trois, which Shelley said would be a “paradise of exiles,” they made their life, along with the spectres of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine, and of Mary’s half-sister Fanny, who, fixated on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits of adored but neglected children conceived almost incidentally in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley and sent out to foster parents, Mary’s Clara, dead at one, her Willmouse, dead at three, Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” but then left behind, dead at one and a half, and Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron, whom Byron packed off to the convent at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—
and in those days, before I knew any of this, I thought I followed Shelley, who thought he was following radiant desire.
Yeah, Shelley's personal life was nothing to write home about.
As for Kinnell's poem, like much of what passes for poetry nowadays, it is mostly prose — chopped up into lines of varying length, and with barely any interesting imagery.
@Thinkerbell It's not his best work. The Book of Nightmares on the other hand meets the definition of heightened language even if it doesn't have rhyme or meter. If rhyme and meter alone define poetry, then Ogden Nash is up there with Shakespeare.
I have glimpsed by corpse-light, in the opened cadaver of hen, the mass of tiny, unborn eggs, each getting tinier and yellower as it reaches back toward the icy pulp of what is, I have felt the zero freeze itself around the finger dipped slowly in.
That is an interesting image because you can feel it even if you've never done this.
Eh... with just the revision of a couple of small words, this 'poem' might as well have been prose.
I have glimpsed by corpse-light, in the opened cadaver of a hen, the mass of tiny, unborn eggs, each getting tinier and yellower as it reaches back toward the icy pulp of what is, as I felt the zero freeze itself around the finger dipped slowly in.
On the other hand, something that was written as prose (it's the last sentence in a science fiction novel, A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn) can easily be made into a poem of the Kinnellian sort. In fact, Pangborn's prose has a lot more rhythm than Kinnell's poetry.
Never, beautiful earth, never even at the height of human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains, the meadows, the continuing rivers, and the incorruptible promise of returning spring.
BTW, I never said rhyme and meter were necessary (let alone sufficient) requirements for a poem. Content, imagery and well-turned phrasing (of which Shakespeare was an absolute master; e.g., "And be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense...") are also important. And by most definitions of poetry, there should be at least SOME rhythm, regular or not.
