Clive James‘ essay “An Almost Perfect Break-up Poem” in Poetry last year sent me looking for more work by Stephen Edgar. James himself hosts the most accessible selection here (links to the poem appear in the list on the right under Edgar’s name), and I managed to order Other Summers directly from the Australian publisher, Black Pepper (they really ought to charge postage), but I didn’t sit down to read the book until this past weekend.

It’s damned good, and I intend to right an actual review this coming weekend, but today I just want to point out his use of regularly varying line-lengths in rhymed, metrical poetry. I’ve seen such verse called “heterometrical,” or “het-met,” for short, but Lew Turco don’t like that, not one bit, so I won’t use the terms. Not today, anyway.

A fairly simple example is the stanza Edgar uses in “Transit of Venus,” from the sequence “Consume My Heart Away.” Here are verses 6 and 7 (of 11):

I puzzle on and marvel at
The manner of her magic that
    Does me this kindness:
To take my sight, yet leave me free
In my mind’s dazzled eye to see,
    Despite my blindness,

Each moment, episode and scene
Transacted intimately between
    Such disparate actors,
And try to pick and tease apart
Infections of the human heart,
    The fatal factors.

Yes, that is one long, grammatically correct sentence. Yes, the dimeter lines but not the tetrameter couplet rhymes are here and throughout the poem feminine rhyme. Yes, that is a fairly simple example. Here’s a more ambitious stanza — the first of six from “History of the House,” the first poem of the same sequence:

Switch off the radio.
Enough of ghosts, of those who lived before
Where you live now, whose steps your steps retrace
Along the corridor,
Whose bedroom has your bed
In it, whose sleeping bodies you replace
When youre asleep, or do not sleep, instead.
Don’t tell me now, now I don’t want to know.

Only the C rhyme is repeated in lines of the same length — A, B, and D all appear once in a pentameter line and once in a trimeter line, and the scheme is a kind of woven envelope rhyme. Echoing both structural elements of the stanza, here are the first and last lines of the final stanza:

This is enough to know:
…
I have to live. Switch off the radio.

Remember A. E. Stallings’ “Presto Manifesto!”?

Rhyme can also free a poem from fixed line length. A rhyme lets us hear the end of the line, so lines may be of any metrical length, or even syllabic, and still be heard.

Edgar really shows how that works.