In Defence of Verse

Why medieval bards had it right

What poetry looks like now

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When I first heard about “metre” in high school English class, I didn’t have much use for it. As far as I could tell, metre was something utilized by fusty poets of old, for no reason in particular, it seemed, aside from yellowed notions like convention and authority and the apparent inborn drive of past generations to be boring and abstruse.

And if you open Instagram and look at the most popular poetry accounts today, you’ll see a generation of writers and readers who for the most part can do without traditional metrical forms. Nary a regular line in sight, the overwhelming majority of poetry shared online these days is in what’s called “free verse.” That is, it tends to contain some roving elements of structure, some awareness of rhythm and stress, but for the most part, it’s verse-free. It doesn’t have any consistent, repeating syllabic or stress patterns. Very rarely does end-rhyme make an appearance. You could say it’s poetry gone feral. 

And that’s really quite appropriate to our moment, isn’t it? It’s been important for our disentanglement from centralized notions of order and conformity in the past century to go off-piste with our writing. When the overdog tells us to write in straight lines only, it’s contingent on us underdogs to champion the raggedy ones. It’s clear we need the intuitive wildness of Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese as much as we once needed the predictable regularity of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But if we come to abandon the enchantments of metred verse entirely, I think something essential will be lost to us.

As much as we are in a deeply technological time, just the same, many past technologies are no longer with us. As a medievalist, I’ve marvelled for years about the fact that scientists still can’t determine exactly how the super-thin vellum pages of tens of thousands of medieval pocket Latin bibles were made, because at some point the last person who cared and knew how to do that particular process of manuscript-making passed away. Though I don’t think metre will go the way of vellum anytime soon, there is something to be said for regaining a deeper appreciation of the beauty of this particular linguistic tool, by remembering something its origins and context.

If you’re someone who appreciates poetry but who finds the words “iambic tetrametre” alienating, I get it. But lend me your ear for a few more moments, and I hope I can give you a small dose of fresh excitement about that older sort of poetry to take along with you.

What verse is for

In contrast to my first encounters with metre as a teenager, these days the idea of scansion makes my eyes shine and my blood pump. It makes me want to gather in caves like the kids in Dead Poets Society, sucking the marrow out of life. It makes me want to chant and stomp and sweat and spend long moonlit, wine-soaked hours memorizing lines. (It’s true!)

So what has changed?

Well, now I know what verse is for. 

And what it’s for is not for proving the authority of dead poets. What it’s for, I would argue, is relation with the living world. What it’s for is community.

Allow me to explain. 

Without metre, a poem or song is, at best, a meandering river, a waterfall, a dazzling complexity of sounds. At its worst it’s a shapeless mass. A puddle of feelings. A sentence with its back broken, hashtagged #poem. If you discard the conventional structure typifying the artistic form, you get an original and often expressive item. But it’s an item unto itself. It’s difficult for anyone else to actively participate in it, to memorize it, or to reproduce it. 

And to a large part, reproducibility was a primary poetic feature before the advent of publishing had us imagining verse as written marks on a silent page, the exclusive purview of published (usually educated/European/male) writers. Before poetry retired to the page, it was daily heard around the hearth fire, along the trail, and more often than not, on the lips of a singer. 

Though you wouldn’t know it from popular culture and modern education, before the invention of the printing press, regular patterns of sound and stress, rhythm and rhyme were actually what made verse accessible to the average “unlettered” person. For the millennia that humankind has been making utterances, poetry has overwhelmingly belonged to, and been produced by an oral, not a written tradition. That is because it springs from the natural rhythms of daily life — from body, language and breath.

Metrical forms are worthy of our appreciation not just because they are old, but because they belong to, and they help to create, embodied community across time. They carry in their airy skeletons the logic of collaboration. Someone writes a song. They pass it on to another person. That person remembers it differently. Or they improve upon it. And the collaboration goes on, generation by generation, the living co-authoring with the dead.

Because the canvas of traditional poetry is held in the collective, in oral tradition, even though it’s extremely evanescent in some ways, it is not so vulnerable to the obscurity that can spell the death of the average piece of art. Nothing means anything without its system of relations, after all. It’s why we go mad in solitary confinement. Its why trees grow best in the company of the forest. Context is everything. And enmeshment is a strength. Enmeshment is the only source of earthly strength, maybe.

Just like the biblical loaves and fishes story, or the stone soup folk tale, when it comes to cultural riches, what we share grows. For example, say, one of these days an undiscovered free verse poem by the late Mary Oliver surfaced, but the last line had been smudged from the page, nobody would be authorized to replace it. The poem would remain a fragment because its maker, the sole source of its meaning, is absent. By contrast, if a ballad singer forgets a verse of the traditional song Willie o’ Winsbury in the moment of performance, she can substitute one from the Outlandish Knight, perhaps. Or she can invent a new one, since the metre and culture of the ballad form is already running in her veins and across her tongue, like the steady beating of a heart or drum. 

Metre is not only the structure at the core of the poem, it’s also the matter you can use to make a new one. Just as if the wall of a timber frame building was damaged by water or by earthquake, it could be replaced with more wattle and daub. If a clay pot was smashed, another potter could take the wheel and begin again, guided by the rhythm of the tool at hand.

Poetic metre is the bone containing Thoreau’s “marrow of life.” It’s the circling, weaving, repeating steps in the dance that mirror the circling of the sun. Words on a page may excite the mind, but metre is for, and from, the body. And the body is of the Earth. This is why I believe that becoming more intimate with this traditional knowledge form can be instrumental in our reweaving of nourishing connection with our living world.

The deeper rhyme

We are a culture that has forgotten how to deeply rhyme. We don’t remember the meaning of moving in tandem on a deeper, more structural level with our planet and fellow beings, the value of listening for repetition, the tender joy of apprenticeship to life. We are hell-bent on originality, and it’s costing us our belonging to the world.

And like the glorious, repeating seasons, like the sun and the moon sailing our spherical sky, the old sort of metre happens in cycles. We are used to seeing poetry as lines on a page, little tracks marching along, but I expect anyone who has recited an epic poem (they’re out there) would resonate with the observation that traditional metre is a circular thing. It comes back around to the same shapes and sounds, rhyming with itself and its invisible collaborators, again and again. And the circle is the very shape of life.

Our ancestors who carried the muscle-memory of poetic metre entrained the sacred history of our kind in their bodies. Because it confers the ability to memorize incredibly long texts of oral tradition, I would say metre is one of the primary keys to myth itself. And myth is a source-book for relationality between us human beings and the radiant others we encounter here on Earth. Of course, not all myth or sacred knowledge takes the form of verse. But just because we can do without something beautiful and useful doesn’t mean we should.

Those who know how to rhyme, how to sing and speak in verse, preserve one the firmest and most reverent containers for sacred human knowledge. And if you have ever got an earworm stuck in your head, or found yourself all-but unconsciously memorizing songs from the radio, then that capacity is alive in you, too. I entreat you to hold it in as much reverence as its vast and radiant history commands.

Then again, if you don’t have time or maybe the confidence to chant in caves right now, or to pick up that leather-bound copy of Tennyson from the library and read it aloud to your friend or lover, it’s okay. It really is. The rhythm goes on beating inside you, in your own heart’s drumming. And the glorious wreathing dance of life all around will arrive every morning to invite you and your heart to rhyme with it, whenever you’re ready to take up the invitation.

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On August 1st, for just 24 hours (12 - 12 Pacific time) I’ll be offering all of my recorded workshops and courses at 30% off.

You can browse them ahead of time right here, if you like!

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