The Anthologist Read Free

screw you to the back of your chair. Oh, Rudyard, you were good in the 1890s. You were a nineties man.
    But notice there that Kipling's second and fourth lines have a rest. A rest on the fourth beat. Listen for the booms now.

    And here's kind of a curious historical fact. Nobody, for years and years and years, centuries even, was able to say that poetry had those obvious booms. Nobody paid attention to the rests. Well, not nobody. There was a poet named Sidney Lanier, a flute player who was dying of consumption. He gave some lectures at Johns Hopkins on the musical basis of verse, but he had a fever, and he would get tired out and have to sit beside the podium and cough horribly and catch his breath and then continue--and his way of scoring rhythms was unfortunately wrong and only added further confusion. But he did understand that poems could have rests at the ends of lines.
    Besides Lanier there was really nobody of any significance talking about rests in the straightforward musical sense of a place where you tap your toe without speaking. Poets had to be hearing these rests in their heads, because they wrote a million poems with them, poems of great comeliness that you can prance around to--but they didn't know that's what they were doing.
    Finally came Derek Attridge, a man with a sensitive ear who taught at Rutgers. In 1982 he introduced the idea of what he called "unrealized beats" or "virtual beats." Quote unquote. In other words, rests. They're rests. How hard is that?
I almost had forgotten (rest)
That words were made for rhyme: (rest)
And yet how well I knew it-- (rest)
Once upon a time! (rest)
    That's Christopher Morley. A light verser. Four beats in the line, the fourth beat being a rest. I hope you can hear it.
    A good way you can scan something, by the way, is by saying it softly to yourself while counting with your fingers. Don't look at the line. Memorize the line and look away from it and say it to yourself. Start with all your fingers in the air, and when you hear a beat, bring down your thumb, then your index finger, then the next finger, then the next. "I almost had forgotten, rest." Like that. That's how to do scansion like a pro. I don't recommend the accent marks that some people use over syllables--they look so pedagogical. If you want to mark a line, use underlines.
    Anyway, that pattern, the four lines together, four beats for each line--sometimes with rests and sometimes without rests, sometimes with a longer third line that has a stretched-out ending that leads you right in to the last line and sometimes not--that pattern makes up what's called the common stanza or the ballad stanza, which is really the basis of English poetry. It was for Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Poe, Tennyson, Longfellow, all the way through to Yeats, Frost, Teasdale, Auden, Causley, Walter de la Mare, and James Fenton. Four beats is the key.
    And within each beat there are subsystems of movement, duplets and triplets, waiting and breathing and sliding. It's-- well, there's a lot more to be said. But we'll get to that farther on down the line.

    I WENT TO BUY a tablecloth to replace the one that Roz took when she left, so that I could wash it and hang it out on the clothesline. That way if she happened to drive by she might see it hanging there.
    Inside the store many women were slowly moving sideways, looking at the glassware and the placemats and the bowls. There must have been thirty women in the store, and one couple in their seventies. I moved past the couple, who were looking at a square white serving bowl with a lid. "It would be nice for soup," said the man. "Yes, true, for soup," said the woman. The man said: "Or for stew, a big country stew." And the woman said: "Yes, true, for stew." And he said, "So what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's square. I think perhaps we should get the round one, and if they don't want it they can return it."
    Finally I came to the tablecloths. There was one with a faint