In a workshop years ago, someone told a story about sitting next to an opera singer on a plane. The opera singer was looking at sheet music, and when asked what he was doing, the singer said, “practicing.” He knew music so well he could look at the notes and teach his voice. When I first heard this story, I knew its lesson; I should be able to hear a poem’s music just by looking at it, but I couldn’t. So I practiced.
My friend Claudia and I just finished a week of meter exercises: day one, ten lines of iambic pentameter, day two, trochaic tetrameter. We wrote sonnets, heroic couplets, and tried to create our own forms. We also scanned a poem we admired and tried to copy the same metric structure in one of our own poems. The poems themselves were disastrous, but I loved it. By focusing only on meter, I could turn off the logic that my brain always wants to impose on poems and simply play with syllables and nonsense for a week. I didn’t write a single usable poem during these meter exercises, but I made these lovely scraps of music that I’m sure will make their way into other poems in the future. In fact, the wastefulness of it was one of the things I enjoyed most. For a week, I made for the joy of making and making a mess. Nothing had to be completed or polished. I didn’t have to make meaning, just beautiful, useless music.
One of my favorite musical lines in poetry comes at the end of Robert Frost’s poem “Directive.” “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” There’s a beautiful symmetry in that meter. Mystery, too. Sometimes I write the scansion of that line on the top of whatever paper I’m writing on so I know what kind of music to listen for as I write. The meaning is there, but it’s the music that seduces you. That music could charm a snake or calm a storm or lead you deeper into the woods. The music is its own meaning.
Another one of my favorite lines of music is in King Lear. In my favorite line of iambic pentameter ever written, Lear cries: “Never, never, never, never, never.” It is a great lament, an elegy for his daughter, the very meter of mourning. A moment later he declares he sees her breathing, and with this hope, dies. Grief has music, but it has silence, too. In a poem it can be a stanza break or a line break, that white anticipation of the next word, the next note, the conclusion we want and dread, and which comes whether we are prepared or not. At the moment Lear dies, the audience waits. Perhaps Lear was right. Perhaps Cordelia lives. Even though he was mad, perhaps he was right, it’s not over.
But it is. The actors speak their iambic rhyming couplets, the music of endings. A song none of us wants to hear, but one we’ll never be free from. Never.
About Traci Brimhall
