Donald Justice on “Meters and Memory”
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Metric verse sticks in the mind. If “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” isn’t lodged in your memory, something else iambic is: “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” or “to be or not to be.” But there are other means to this end. Donald Justice observed that “any ornament assists the recollection to some degree”: repetition or rhyme; parallelism, or just “fine and exact phrasing.” Anyway, the “purely mnemonic character of a passage contributes very little to its aesthetic power.”
If meter makes reading poetry easier, it makes the writing harder: it offers “a certain resistance to the writer’s effort to call up his subject,” “like the stone of the sculptor.” This resistance may not be bad. A poet’s efforts, blocked, may be redirected in a more fruitful direction. But like the first, this second observation tells us little about meter’s “aesthetic power.”
Some say, in this free-verse age, that meter is an aesthetic defect: no one talks in iambic pentameter, and the language of poetry should be the language of real conversation. Justice will have none of this:
to object to the meters as unnatural because unrealistic is to miss the point. Like the odd mustaches and baggy pants of the old comedians, they put us on notice that we are at a certain distance from the normal rules and expectations of life. The effect has been variously called a distancing or a framing.
Justice quotes Wordsworth: metric writing serves “to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition.” Don’t ask me what that means. And surely this is no essential effect of meter: In Robert Frost’s own account, he aimed to get, and often succeeded in getting, “the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation” into “strained relation” with the “regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse.” Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man starts “Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table / Waiting for Warren”: no baggy pants here.
Metric verse also seems, to Justice, “to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable.” If you can later recall, and then express, an emotion in metric verse, you must to some degree have mastered it; you were not left speechless and at its mercy. If this is meant as a claim about meter’s aesthetic power, the power is an extrinsic one: the virtue is not in the verse’s perceptible rhythm, but in something that the rhythm is a distant sign of. Justice acknowledges as much when he says that “the very act of writing at all” implies “an attempt to master the subject well enough to understand it”; meter just “reinforces” this impression already given by other features of the act.
A final idea about the aesthetic power of meter surfaces at the end of Justice’s meditation. Meter casts over the words of a poem
the illusion of a necessary or at least not inappropriate fitness and order. There is a kind of accrediting in the process, a warrant that things are being remembered right and set down right.
“Remembered right” can be read in two ways. The first says that a poem in meter strikes us as a more accurate report of some real event. That’s a silly suggestion, and obviously false. More plausible is that metric verse strikes us as putting its subject as it should be put, where this “should” is the should of aesthetic, rather than alethic (truth-related) requirement. In metric verse the word stresses are in the right or fitting place, and in this way metric verse is, simply, beautiful, and is therefore an appropriate medium for things that, in their poetic presentation, are to be made beautiful.
See also Sugar-Coated Pills; Meter and Rhyme—Defended?; and Dana Gioia on the New Formalism.
Perhaps the opaque/transparent distinction is helpful here. Meter allows us to enter into the dream of the poem, a more instinctive, imaginative place…
OK, a few thoughts in response to the larger essay, "Meters and Memory." I'll reiterate that I love Justice's poetry. He's criminally under-read. Really one of the best American poets of the 20th century. But his instincts on meter do seem to me quite wrong. (1.) He's not wrong that, in simple terms, our minds find it easier to remember two related things than one thing on its own. Memory experts and competitors make use of this principle all the time. The memory palace, etc. His relegation of this tendency to mere ornament seems, however, unnecessarily limited. Not to mention his surprising insistence on distinguishing ornament from denotation, which seems in the context of poetry--or maybe art in general--like a pretty basic misapprehension. Surely not suitable to the man who wrote "I say the song went this way: O prolong / Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong." Where, exactly, does ornament end and denotation begin? Or as Yeats put it "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" More on that later. (2.) I agree that it's silly to object to meters as being unrealistic, but it doesn't seem at all true that their function lies in distancing the reader from his reading material, let alone doing so in the goofy and ostentatious manner of comedian's conventional costumes. Very often the meter of a line of poetry makes it feel more rather than less intimately necessary to our experience of life. As Alan Alda has pointed out, people in daily life often speak in a showy, theatrical, expressly artificial fashion, depending on the professional or social context. A Method actor's marble-mouthed grumble is not necessarily any less a confection than the screwball heroine's mile-a-minute patter. Likewise there is no particularly compelling reason why "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow..." should be considered more natural, authentic, or close to experience than "Candy is dandy... / but liquor is quicker..." Sure, some poets endeavor "to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition," but it isn't at all obvious to me that this happens more often in metrical poetry than in free verse. Eliot's vers libre Waste Land comes to mind, of course, and on the other end of things maybe something like Larkin's "Wild Oats," but to return to Justice, I'd offer even the subtle contrast of two of his own (excellent) poems; say, the free-verse "Men at Forty"-"At rest on a stair-landing / They feel it moving / Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, / Though the swell is gentle"--and the metrical, rhyming "The Young Composers's Concert"--"...not that we are awed, exactly; still, // There is something to this beyond mere adult skill. / And if it moves but haltingly down the scales, // It is the more moving just because it fails." (3.) And I'll stop at this point because, as I said, I love Justice and I don't want to belabor (any more) my disagreement with him on this critical question, but he seems to me wildly mistaken when he claims that meters "seem to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable," though in the complete essay he qualifies this claim almost enough to make it sound reasonable. I could cite here any number of cases, but one that comes immediately to mind is Donne's celebrated Holy Sonnet X, in which he addresses Death directly, making--in meter and rhyme--a series of increasingly desperate and unconvincing boasts and claims, all of which achieve the effect not of persuading the reader that, say, "from rest and sleep, which but [Death's] pictures be, / Much pleasure, then from [Death] much more must flow," but rather that the poem's speaker (and probably the poet as well) is a man caught in an agony of denial and longing in the face of a loved one's death. It moves us--as does, say, Auden's "Funeral Blues"--not so much by its mastery of the subject as for the tension between its failure at mastery and the elegance of the attempt. And again, the longer argument in Justice's essay comes nearer this point than the except alone suggests (not a criticism, Brad--such is the nature of excerpts!). But Justice does seem strangely to believe that there really is an clean distinction to be made between the poem's truth (which he seems to identify with its extractable denotative meaning) and its "ornament." On the contrary, meter is not an obstacle to meaning or a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down (as Lucretius and Mary Poppins would have it). It is rather part of the larger lyric composition that produces an emotional effect in the reader, an effect caused no less by the ring of truth than by the "truth" itself. All right, got to get my daughter into bed. Thanks for this essay and for pointing me to Justice's piece. As I said, I disagree with him here, but he is one of my very favorite poets. Maybe Plato was right, and poets, like athletes, tend not to be the best authorities on their own work.