Structure In Poetry

Structure in Poetry

A lecture by Jonathan

 

A Framework: Four Temperaments — 0:00:09

Today’s topic is structure in poetry, approached broadly. A useful starting point is an essay by Gregory Orr called “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” Orr opens with a quote from 1 Corinthians—”Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit”—and proposes that there are four distinct temperaments every poet draws on, in different proportions. A poet is born with one dominant temperament and grows by developing the others. The greatest poem fuses all four.

 

The four temperaments: story (dramatic unity, beginning, middle, and end, conflict, resolution); structure (the satisfaction of measurable patterns—sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, metrical lines, rhymed couplets, and repeated stanza patterns); music (rhythm and sound, including syntax, the syllabic qualities of English that determine pitch, duration, stress, and the full range of sound effects); and imagination (the flow of image to image or thought to thought, moving as a stream of association, either concretely through images or abstractly through ideas).

 

Orr pairs them: story and structure are intensive—they limit, contain, correspond to our desire for the rule of law. Music and imagination are extensive—they push outward, correspond to our longing for liberty, the unconditional and limitless. For a poem to have stability and dynamic tension, it must fuse a limiting impulse with one that resists limitation.

 

For the purposes of this lecture, the definition of structure is broader than Orr’s. When Orr says structure, he means fixed forms. Here, structure refers to all four of his categories, since each one has its own kind of structure: narrative structure, formal structure, musical structure, and the structure of thought—how image flows into image, idea into idea. The goal is to look at poems through all four of these lenses at once.

 

A side note worth pausing on: Orr’s claim that music in poetry is irrational—that it works directly on the emotions regardless of the content of language. The better word might be extra-rational: the sounds of language convey ideas outside the logic of the words, and those ideas can reinforce or work against what the words purportedly say. How the sound of what you’re writing operates is as important a question as what you’re saying.

Frost’s (accidental) argument for free verse — 0:05:47

Robert Frost wrote that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. He meant it as a jab—he was a committed formalist. But he inadvertently makes the argument for free verse’s difficulty: playing without a net is hard. You have to invent the rules as you go, convince your reader to go along with your rules, and do this every time. Free verse still has structure; it just has to find its own underpinning logic each time, without the pre-made scaffolding of fixed forms.

 

Orr makes a related point with Dylan Thomas. Thomas was primarily interested in music—his instinct was for sound, not constraint. But “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” the villanelle, is arguably his best poem. The villanelle locks him into a structure, and the tension between the wild music and the rigid form is what makes it work. Haiku operates similarly: an extremely tight structure that is almost entirely image-driven.

 

Fixed Forms — 0:12:23

Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 — 0:12:47

That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

 

The speaker, probably in late middle age, addresses a lover who is aware of his aging. The argument: you love despite knowing you’ll lose what you love—and knowing it makes the love stronger.

 

On the formal level: strict iambic pentameter (that TIME of YEAR thou MAYST in ME be HOLD) with a fixed rhyme scheme. These constraints shape every word choice. On the narrative level: the story is simple, but it moves. On the musical level: the rhyme scheme gives it a driving, almost performative quality—one participant noted it felt like words chosen for the stage.

 

What’s particularly interesting is the imagination at work. Yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang—you can see the speaker’s mind moving in real time: “Yellow leaves. No, I’m older than that. No leaves. Too old. A few leaves. Yes.” The poem isn’t presenting a finished argument; it’s presenting an argument being made. You watch the wheels turn.

 

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang—choirs here doesn’t mean people singing but the place in a church where the choir sings. So: empty choir stalls where birds should be but aren’t. A very dense and layered image.

 

The third quatrain’s fire image is striking: a fire lies on the ashes of its own youth, and the accumulating ash chokes it out—consumed by the remnants of its own fuel. Then the final couplet, dictated by the sonnet’s form, where the argument lands. The form requires the turn to happen at line thirteen, and it does.

Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina” — 0:20:29

A sestina is defined by six end-words that rotate in a fixed swirling pattern through six six-line stanzas, followed by a final three-line stanza (the envoy) that uses all six words, two per line. No fixed meter is required—just the word rotation. Bishop’s end-words are: house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears.

 

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the little marble stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears.

 

And so on through six stanzas, until the envoy:

 

“Time to plant tears,” says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove, and the child draws another inscrutable house.

 

On the formal level: the rotating end-words create a kind of musical structure—the same sounds returning in a shifting pattern, a slow spiral. On the narrative level: there’s implied grief here that’s never named. The grandmother is laughing to hide her tears; the child is somewhat aware of the adult world of sadness without fully understanding it, which gets translated into what she draws. The person with buttons like tears is inscrutable in the same way the implied narrative is inscrutable.

 

The imagination builds as the poem goes. It starts straightforwardly—house, grandmother, stove—and then the kettle starts singing; the kettle has small hard tears; the almanac becomes birdlike and hovers above the child; the stove begins speaking; the almanac speaks. Everything is becoming slightly animated and alive, revving up as it goes. The word inscrutable in the final line earns its weight: the child has experienced something and translated it into art, but you can’t quite map the translation. The feeling comes through even though the cause never surfaces.

 

The risk with sestinas is that staying fixated on making the end-words work causes the rest of the line to go flat musically. It’s easy to spend all your energy on the constraint and let the interior of the poem suffer. Bishop doesn’t do this; but one participant noted that sestinas can feel less musical than other forms for exactly that reason.

Jim Harrison, “Drinking Song” (ghazal) — 0:29:22

A ghazal is typically written in couplets, each self-contained—no enjambment across stanzas. Each couplet must end with the same phrase, and the word immediately before that phrase must rhyme with the equivalent word in every other couplet. (There are additional traditional conventions about signing off with a pseudonym, among other things.) Harrison’s poem uses the ghazal loosely, keeping only the refrain and jettisoning most of the traditional rules. The repeated phrase: fish and drink.

 

I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization, I want to walk around in the woods, fish, and drink. I’m going to be a child about it, and I can’t help it. I was born this way, and it makes me very happy to fish and drink. I left when it was still dark and walked on the path to the river, the Yellow Dog, where I spent the day fishing and drinking. After she left me, I quit my job and wept for a year, and all my poems were born dead. I decided I would only fish and drink. Water will never leave earth, and whiskey is good for the brain. What else am I supposed to do in these last days but fish and drink? In the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my chest, clouds above. She was in New York forever, and I fishing and drinking.

 

The poem’s success depends on a tone that’s genuinely hard to pull off: sincere and comically self-pitying at the same time. It would be easy to tip toward maudlin or jokey; it walks the line. The structure suits the speaker perfectly—someone self-mythologizing (“I want to die in the saddle”) who immediately undercuts himself (“I’m going to be a child about it, and I can’t help it”). There’s the implied audience, someone who’s going to say he’s being childish, and his preemptive defense.

 

The narrative structure is simple—she left; now I just want to fish and drink—but it unfolds in a way you can trace: bravado, self-justification, context, backstory, more self-justification, absence. The structure is looser than a ghazal strictly requires, and that looseness is part of the point. The form is a container with a lot of room in it.

 

The poem doesn’t have much musicality, and that’s intentional. It’s more driven by story and structure than by sound. A participant noted it’s funny that he calls it a “drinking song” when it’s not particularly song-like, which is a fair observation—and also kind of the joke.

 

Musically Driven Poems — 0:36:22

Hailey Leithauser, “O” and “Mockingbird” — 0:36:57

Two poems from Leithauser—one formally structured, one free verse, both extremely driven by sound.

 

“O” is in strict quatrains with only two end-rhymes, the O sound and the night sound, repeated throughout:

 

“O,” she says, because she loves to say O. O to this cloud break that ravels the night. O to this moon, its mouthful of sorrow. O shallow grass and the nettle burr’s bite.

 

And so on through O to heart’s flare, its wobbly satellite; O step after step in stumbling tempo; O owl and oak, O rout of black bat flight; O moaned in attic and Esperanto; O covetous tongue, O fat fandango; O gnat tango in the hot ochred light; O wind-word leaves in subtle inferno; O flexing of sea; O stars bolted tight; O ludicrous swoon, O blind hindsight; O torching of bridges and blood boiled white; O sparrow and arrow and hell below; O, she says, because she loves to say O.

 

One participant noted that wherever the rhyme requires an O sound at the end, she doesn’t just end on it—she puts the O sound inside the line as well: moon, mouthful of sorrow; stumbling tempo. The letter is doing double duty throughout.

 

“Mockingbird” does something similar in free verse:

 

No other song or swoop, part quiver, part swivel and plash. With tour de force stray the course note liquefactions, its new body air and aria hangs in, enthralls, trills, loops, soars, startles, out-warbles, out-bronzes more juicily, lifts up the dawn. Outlaws from sackcloth, the cool sloth of bedsheets, from pillows and silks and blue quilted feminine bolsters, fusses of coverlets, nips as the switch of a juvenile willow, fuzz of a nettle, to window and window and window and ever toward egress, to flurry, pollen and petal shed, to wet street and wet pavement, all sentiment intemperate, all sentience ephemeral.

 

The formal structure is gone, but the sonic density is the same—one sound linking to another, pulling the poem forward. The connections are auditory more than logical. This kind of poem has a kinship with Hopkins; it’s musically beautiful and also something of a tongue twister.

 

Narratively Driven Poems — 0:43:06

Two poems by the same poet that use different structures to tell stories in different ways—both by Dean Young.

 

“Jet” is free verse in loosely flowing paragraphs:

 

Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth, and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish, and old space suits with skeletons inside.

 

The poem starts with a bunch of guys drinking beer on a back porch, and through free associative logic—cans fall like booster rockets, rockets lead to astronauts, astronauts lead to space, space leads to Earth seen as a planet, Earth as a planet leads to the bright unbroken place we came from and can’t return to—it ends somewhere enormous:

 

We were amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.

 

The imagination is the engine here. The associative leaps from image to image are the organizing principle, not narrative or form. The poem seems to stumble into its ending rather than drive toward it—but of course it’s carefully made.

 

“Coming and Going” is structured in couplets, and the form shapes the telling differently:

 

My marriage ended in an airport long ago. I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car, walking through the underground garage. Jets were roaring overhead, and if I had been wise, I would have looked up at those heavy-bellied cylinders and seen the wheelchairs and the frightened dogs inside, the kidneys bedded in dry ice and styrofoam containers. I would have known that in synagogues and churches all over town, couples were gathering like flocks of geese getting ready to take off, while here, the jets were putting down their gear, getting ready for the jolt, the giant tires shrieking and scraping off two long streaks of rubber molecules that might have been my wife and I screaming in our fear. It is a matter of amusement to me now, me staggering around that underground garage, trying to remember the color of my vehicle, unable to recall that I had come by cab. Eventually gathering myself and going back inside, quite matter of fact, to get the luggage I would be carrying for the rest of my life.

 

The couplets parse the story into chunks: here’s where I was; more detail on where I was; what I should have known; what I would have understood; the absurdity of looking for a car I hadn’t driven; and then the final blow, the luggage. The structure builds toward a punchline—I came by cab—that then instantly becomes something else.

 

One participant observed that the couplets don’t necessarily unite the same thought; the thoughts move from one into another across the breaks, the way thoughts move. But by putting lines in couplets, you join them, and that joining creates meaning. The couplets are like rooms—the Italian stanza means “room”—and asking what belongs in the same room together is one way to think about stanza choice.

 

A comparison between the two poems illustrates what form does to the same material. “Jet” feels more freewheeling, more associative, less structured—and it literally stumbles into its end. “Coming and Going” feels more parceled out, almost clinical in the way the couplets divide it, which produces a different emotional texture even though both poems are about loss.

 

Structure as Counterweight — 0:49:07

One of the most interesting things formal structure can do is work against the subject matter. When the content is chaotic or emotionally charged, a tight form can hold rigidly together in a way that plays off against the falling-apart inside it. A marriage dissolving, a self-justifying drunk, a child absorbing adult grief she doesn’t understand—each of these has a structural choice that comments on or resists the emotional content rather than simply reflecting it.

 

How do poets decide on structure? For most people, it tends to be intuitive—oh, this feels like couplets—or retrospective: you notice partway through that you’ve been gravitating toward four-line stanzas, and you decide whether to commit to that or not. Trying a poem in a different form after the fact can be a useful exercise: if you reformat from couplets into tercets or quatrains, you change which ideas and sounds get grouped together, you change where the pauses fall, and sometimes you find that a different structure changes the poem’s meaning more than you’d expect.

 

Closing Recommendations — 0:56:50

• Gregory Orr, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” — the essay the framework in this lecture draws from
• Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates — essays on poetry; highly recommended; her framework for poetic concentration has some overlap with Orr’s and some interesting divergences
• Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading — another set of categories (music, intellectual components, and images) for thinking about what poetry does; Orr takes gentle issue with Pound’s three buckets in the same essay, arguing there should be four