The result infused his poetry with music that combined the power of blank verse with the flexibility of a conversational free
verse line:
In Homer's poetry, one
verse line is often connected to the next, but generally loosely linked, in the famous adding or strung style always associated with him.
(31) Each illustrates what an English
verse line of six metrical feet can do when it obeys a metrical law that is properly "natural" and "poetic" in Swinburne's terms.
These metaphors convey both the connection and the distinction between the two terms: whereas the metrical pattern is a deep-structure defining feature of the
verse line, rhythm is what is fleshed out in the phenomenology of the specific line.
In particular, this new edition includes new material on Gloucester's first soliloquy in King Richard III, argues that stress maxima in weak positions do not necessarily render a
verse line unacceptable, and uses recent software developments to manipulate recordings of poems and bring out subtle differences between minimal pairs of solutions.
I annotate each last word in a
verse line, starting with 'a' and marking any rhymes at the end of other lines with 'a'.
The final
verse line reads "That she's not the only pebble on the beach".
This isn't to say that free verse poetry lacks rhythmic integrity and/or music, that its relation to the line is random or convenient; for tired arguments on the essential slackness of a free
verse line, one should consult The New Criterion.
The best way to characterize my impression of Gielgud 1 (see CD #00) was, perhaps, by punning on the English idioms "flat-out" and "flat out." The former is usually used as an intensive, that is, a modifier that has little meaning except to intensify the meaning it modifies; the latter suggests "in a blunt and direct manner." Later, when I analytically compared the two readings' handling of the complexities of the
verse line, this intuitive contrast was am ply ac counted for.
In these we can see Bishop imagining a metaphorical resemblance between the dynamics of water and those of the
verse line. These excerpts reveal that Bishop associates verse with water, especially with water's fluctuation between two and three dimensions, so that verse becomes felt as a deep surface, and she imagines the mind and nature as having depths created by crossing into one another's "intricacy of density" (Papers box 75, folder 2; hereafter 75.2).
verse line - a line of metrical text