From an Introduction to English Poetry: A Special AP2 Supplement

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Fenton, James

4.The Sense of Form

Who sits down and tells the parent where to place the stresses in the line? The parent of the parent does so. And the rhyme, if it still gets passed on, comes with its information about days gone by, for of course it is a long time since our streets have resounded to peddlers' cries. (But marketplaces still have their barkers, and auctioneers their patter, and there are places in the world where all these traditional practices are still common.)

For the most part, in the reading-and I would say in the writing-of poetry, the handling of rhythm and form is instinctive rather than codified. We think of a line that sounds well, and only later try it out against a template, to see if it actually fits into our schema. Or we start something, and then look at what we have done so far, and then we try to repeat, with variations, what we have already done. We write a line, and then try to compose another to match it. Or we compose a whole stanza and then see how many such stanzas we can devise in order to complete the poem. How many, or how few. We feel our way forward.

This is as dear a case as you could find of a poem whose form grows with its composition. The first line seems to be the given, the starting point for the creation of the form. But what kind of a line is it? Three bleak repeated words, three stresses. In classical metrics there is such a foot. It is called a molossus. But we can be pretty certain that Tennyson was not thinking, `Why don't I start a poem with something really obscure, like a molossus?' He had this bleak rhythm in his mind, and then he sought a line which would match it.

So he wrote the second line. And actually this line seems to have four stresses, although it can be read as a three-stress line ("On thy cold gray stones, O Sea"). By the time he has finished the first stanza, this is the form he seems to have chosen: a three-stress-per-line stanza of four lines, a quatrain in which the second and fourth lines rhyme. And this is certainly the form of the second stanza, which comes across as a much more regular piece of versification than the first.

But when he reaches the third stanza, and he comes to the third line, he adds what is definitely a fourth stress to the pattern he has created. And he clearly likes the variation thus created, because he repeats it in the last stanza, putting an extra stress into the third line. Tennyson's love for Hallam and his grief at his death were expressed passionately and at length in In Memoriam and other poems such as this. And we know independently that the germ of In Memoriam was a poem in which Tennyson regretted the chance to touch his friend's hand and kiss his brow. In this poem, the line that introduces the variation, `But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,' is also the line that tells us for the first time what the unutterable grief is about. The line varies, it expands, because it suddenly has an extra freight of emotion.

Regularity, in this poem, is not at a premium. Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form.