How Meter Is the Memory of Poetry
Mnemosyne’s Sighs
Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes is a poet’s journey into the silent center of his being, “the enclosed house where all is united in God.” Yet before the poet can live a silent, monastic existence in the Church of his own interior, he must first contemplate his mission in this world. He is called to be a poet, a man who not only dives deep within the waters of his own interiority, but a man whose subjective experience is subject to the rigor of craft, so that it may find permanent existence outside of himself. Claudel begins his Odes by invoking the muses of Greek mythology. Each muse lives within the poet; each is busy with a special activity. Terpsichore, the muse of lyric poetry and dance, unites the, “eight fearful sisters,” around herself. She is at the center of the chorus, the “cluster of living women” who, together, form a single, “creating presence.” As Terpsichore dances, laughing Thalia, the muse of comedy, “sweetly marks the measure with her toe.” As the music unfolds, Polyhymnia sleeps; Uranus teaches. Yet this celestial scene, like all earthly ones, is marked by the presence of an outsider. Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, remains apart from rest of the chorus, in the, “quiet of quiet,” of the poet’s soul. There, she sighs.
Claudel treats Mnemosyne with special reverence. She is the eldest of the muses, the “one who doesn’t speak.” She is the “spiritual weight,” which grounds the creative activity of the others. Thus, she is silent and somewhat separated from her sisters, “placed ineffably on the very pulse of Being.”
Though Claudel gives the muse of memory special praise, his Odes are a departure from the past. The poet had a fraught relationship with the alexandrine- the 12-syllable verse line which was standard for French poetry. In his essay, Reflections and Propositions on French Verse, Claudel associates the clock-like predictability of the alexandrine with a French national character, “horrified by chance, and all that is accidental or unpredictable.” “The same principles which determine the life of the Frenchman have guided him when he acts to give his ideas an official form and definitive expression,” he writes, “the same horror of chance, the same need of the absolute, and the same mistrust of sensitivity that we find again today in our character and social arrangements, are modeled in our grammar and prosody.”
In the Odes, the restrictions imposed by the alexandrine are cast aside, and French verse is given some breathing room. Indeed, Claudel conceptualized his verse as being comprised of “breaths,” which, like the breaths of our bodies, are silent, rhythmic, and life-giving. One breath is roughly equivalent to one phrase, and the various bursts of enthusiasm throughout the poem, coupled with expansive, lyrical descriptions, convey the motion of breathing. Nourished by the oxygen of experience, the poet expires the breath of verse. As Georges Duhamel formulated, verse is, “a detached fragment of phrase that corresponds to a breath length. Its end incites the retaking of a new breath.”
In these opening lines of the Odes, contrasting breath lengths convey the jubilance of the muses’ dance:
Nine Muses; in the center, Terpsichore!
I know you, Maenad! I know you, Sibyl! I await in your hand not a cup nor your breast even
Writhing under your nails, Cumaean woman, in the whirl of golden leaves!
But this heavy flute pierced with mouths at your fingers is enough to show
That you no longer need to join it with this breath that fills you,
And bids you, O virgin, arise!”(Five Great Odes, translation: Lauren Elizabeth Butler Bergier, 2018)
The mnemonic quality of these lines is not intuitive, especially for those accustomed to remembering poetry with recourse to auditory devices such as rhyme and meter. Yet when we think of these phrases as breaths of contrasting lengths, which each mirror the larger breath of the poem itself, our reading becomes grounded in the very silent heartbeat, or breath, of the Odes. While the second line, for instance, is fragmented into three phrases, I know you Maenad!/ I know you Sibyl! I await in your hand not a cup nor your breast even, we are invited to hear each phrase as a whole breath. The first two are short, ecstatic bursts; the third phrase is enjambed, causing our breath to writhe along with the line break.
The subsequent phrase, which begins with a heavy flute, is similarly weighty. This makes breathing difficult. Yet the final invocation (arise!) finishes the section with the same ecstatic lightness with which it began. Though its symmetry is imperfect, there is an undeniable shape to these 6 lines; the long and drawn-out breaths are sandwiched by short, punctuated bursts. This contrast between long and short phrases continues throughout the poem. The lyrical musicality of contrasting phrase lengths becomes more perceptible when I am sensitive to the fact that each phrase is a whole breath unto itself, each a microcosm of the breathing poem.
Mnemosyne by Dante Rosetti
Memory of Meter
Paul Claudel’s prosody of breaths is born, in part, of a complicated relationship with the alexandrine. Though Claudel’s breath technique does not have the clock-like predictability of the alexandrine, the traditions of French poetry are still present in the Odes. The alexandrine was the cage which Claudel, through a poetry which at once resembles the primal rhythms of the Psalms and the galvanic harmonies of Stravinsky, was called to break free from. Certainly, the Odes do not have a stable recurring meter which, in traditional forms of metered poetry, easily anchors the ear. When hearing alexandrine poetry, the ear naturally picks up on the recurring pattern of six syllables, a mid-line caesura, followed by another six syllables.
Repetition is very important for memory. To memorize a poem, I must repeat it many times. While the Odes to not have the repetitive stress patterns of metered poetry, repetition still constitutes the principal mnemonic device of the poem. Throughout the poem, the psalm-like repetition of phrases expresses the poet’s praise of Greek muses, Mother Mary, and God himself (I know you Maenad! I know you Sybil!/ My God, take pity on these desiring waters! My God, you see that I am not only spirit, but water!). Yet besides the repetition of words, the repetition of breaths, is a repetition which, though inaudible, is just as salient as the repetition of sounds. When a person speaks, the repetition of word stress and vocal intonation combine to form an individual’s particular voice. Yet before our distinct voices are formed, we are babies who babble a sort of universal jargon of sounds. We are humans who breathe, who have beating hearts. This is the rhythm- a rhythm that is found in speech yet is primordial to it- that Claudel hoped to retrieve in the Odes.
In his essay on Vers Libre, T.S Eliot seems to have found a middle way between the unmetered, “breath-based,” versification of Claudel and the perfect iambic pentameter of Dryden and Pope. Verse, writes Eliot, should maintain, “the constant suggestions and the skillful evasion of iambic pentameter.” Poetry should not be able to scan iambically, yet the memory of meter should remain subtly, but firmly present. In Eliot’s Quartets, iambic rhythms pervade, though it is rare that a line will perfectly submit to the laws of scansion. Here are the first lines of his second quartet, East Coker:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
In these lines, no line is completely iambic (most have an anapest or two). Yet there are still enough iambs for the memory of blank verse to pervade. Eliot’s approach to versification is also present in the poetry of Dana Gioia. While the first two lines of Gioia’s poem, Haunted are in perfect iambic pentamer, the next lines, with trochees, a mid-line pause, and a headless line, quickly interrupt the perfect flow of metered verse. Here are the opening lines of Gioia’s poem:
It happened almost forty years ago.
The world was different then- not just for ghosts-
Slower, less frantic. You’re too young to know
Life without cell phones, laptops, satellite.
You didn’t bring the world with you everywhere.
And then, the last line of the stanza returns to perfect iambic pentameter.
Out in the country, you were quite alone.
Dana Gioia’s poem is more overtly metrical than Eliot’s which contains, as it were, a faint ghost of meter. Still, his scansion is that of a thoroughly modern poet, as he strives to mold traditional metrical codes into a modern idiom. The adoption of past modes to the present age is a hallmark of Gioia’s work. As chair of national endowment of the arts, he instituted the first ever national poetry recitation competition, Poetry Out Loud, which had school children across the United States performing poetry in their classrooms. In his seminal essay, Poetry as Enchantment, Gioia describes how poetry, over the course of the 20th century, had become a highly specialized discipline, subject to esoteric analysis in the university. Traditionally, though, poetry is a highly social, unexclusive art form. It is “the primal form of all literature,” even predating history. Poetry, “not only existed but flourished before the invention of writing.” By reconnecting poetry with its oral roots, Poetry Out Loud brings the art back into the popular realm of discourse.
Popular poetry- the kind of poetry that is passed down orally through generations- will always favor mnemonic devices that we can hear. Meter and rhyme are catchy, they stick to the backs of our ears, they are memorable. In an interview with the National Review, James Matthew Wilson laments the modern loss of a poetic tradition that, “dates back from Shakespeare through Chaucer.” People do not write in meter and rhyme anymore, and the traditions of poetry, which T.S Eliot, Yvor Winters, and W.H. Auden were all sensitive to, are gradually being lost. Gioia describes how these auditory aspects of poetry are married to the art form’s musical origins. “Purely verbal forms of poetry,” he writes, “only emerged gradually, probably after the invention of writing, but the art’s musical origins were preserved coded in the meter and other formal elements.” Both Gioia and Wilson have a particular affinity for the musical elements of poetry, as it is these elements which center us in the great tradition of the art.
Claudel, Eliot, and Gioia exemplify the shift in attitudes towards metered poetry which occurred throughout the 20th century. They are of particular interest because, while their poetry certainly stretches beyond meter’s fixed rules, the memory of meter pervades. Though Paul Claudel’s Odes are unmetered, the silent and psalm-like repetition of “breaths” are intended to cause verse to subtly impress itself upon our memories. These poets, then, invite us to ponder the nature of meter more deeply. Do loose meters or different forms of free verse serve the rhythm of a work? What is rhythm? Is it simply a recurring beat which is best represented by perfectly even meter?
These poems, which subtly interweave metrical elements with free verse suggest that suggest that no; rhythm is more alive and complex than the repeated sound of a ticking clock. To gain a better understanding of how meter functions in a poem or piece of music, we must delve a deeper into meter’s raison d’être: rhythm.
What is Rhythm?
Lexi Eikelboom, a scholar from Oxford and founder of the Rhythmic Theology Project, defines rhythm as the intersection of organized patterns through temporal experience. Rhythm, then, is not just the beat of a metronome; this beat is but one layer in a much more complex network of intersecting patterns. In poetry, the top layer of rhythm is the “narrative arc” which drives the piece towards its end and is usually associated with the meaning of the words; “The relationship between this forward-moving arc and the very repetitive beat, which makes up the bottom layer of the rhythm, creates a tension that the poem mediates through middle layers of repetitions like lines, stanzas, phrases, etc.” Rhythm is a network of intersecting patterns. While its performance is directed by fixed markers on the page (i.e.: a 4/4 metrical marking), rhythm, to truly be rhythm, must be experienced in time.
Rhythm is always present, continuously flowing from past to future. When I perform a piece of music (and when I read a poem aloud), the note I play exists in relationship to the note that has just been played (unless it is the very first note of the piece). Yet the note, or word, is also going somewhere; it is aspiring to the next note, and ultimately towards the end of the piece. This movement from past to future constitutes the essential narrative arc of the piece. A single note or word is of little significance. Yet when a note or word is born of a preceding one and directed towards a finality- when the word becomes part of a greater pattern of words- then the work becomes a rhythmical one.
The irony of rhythm is this: Though it always occurs in time, that is, on a continuum from past to future, it cannot exist unless it is present. We are told, in music class, to keep the beat, and perhaps, by our children to, “keep up with the times.” These expressions imply the necessity of being present, of not slowing down or rushing the rhythm of things. Indeed, unless I am present to a piece of music I am performing or a poem I am reciting, I am not truly in time. If I am a couple beats behind or ahead of the conductor, I am not in the rhythm of the piece. The moment I look back on what I have just played or recited; I am no longer in time. Yet, to be in time, I must always remember that which came before. It is this remembrance of the past which will keep me in the present of the piece, a present which is not fixed, but in motion towards an end.
How Meter is the Memory of Music
While rhythm is the intersection of organized patterns through temporal experience, meter can be defined as the measurement of rhythm. The rhythm of a piece of music is measured in notes of a certain value, the rhythm of a poem is measured by patterns of stress. Now, from this point of view, it seems that meter serves a merely representational function. I need it to represent the rhythm I desire to convey, so that others may understand it. While it is certainly true that it is impossible to represent the rhythmic complexity of a Beethoven symphony without recourse to notated meter, this is only half the picture. Meter does not only denote rhythm; it allows me to remember it.
I cannot have rhythm without memory. Rhythm always takes place in time, and the present is always performed in memory of the past. But while I cannot have rhythm without memory of the past, I am at a loss to remember without the aid of meter. I cannot remember what it was like to be a baby because, while I experienced the world with my senses, I did not have the capacity to abstract from and filter my experiences through memory. Indeed, I did not have very much working memory at all. Meter, then, is akin to the working memory of music, and poetry. The world of rhythm is all around us. Rhythm is life itself, a continuous intersection of organized patterns in time. But when I represent the rhythm which is everywhere, when I convert an experience or emotion to the da-dum, da-dum, da-dums of iambic verse, suddenly, I am given a certain ability to memorize that I did not have before. The moment I turn to meter, be it either a 4/4 measure of music or an iambic pentameter line of poetry, I am making the rhythm of lived experience memorable. Yet rhythm—to be truly experienced in time—needs to constantly remember itself. As meter helps rhythm to remember itself, it allows for rhythm to be truly rhythmical.
Mnemosyne and Lot’s Wife
As memory sits on the very pulse of being, meter sits on the very pulse of rhythm. Meter is the measurement of rhythm, and this measurement is what allows rhythm to remember itself, and therefore be what it truly is: patterns experienced in time. So, while the poetry of Claudel, Eliot, and Gioia isn’t metrical in the strict sense of the term, insofar as it doesn’t follow a strict pattern of syllable count and word stress, each poet, in their own way, conveys a certain memory of meter. Eliot and Gioia convey this memory by their, “constant suggestion, yet skillful evasion,” of iambic pentameter. Claudel, on the other hand, does away with the alexandrine entirely. Yet his “breath-based” approach to versification attempts to convey the very silence of Mnemosyne herself.
The deep silence of Mnemosyne is, like the breaths and heartbeats that keep us alive, ever-present, yet always in motion. However, there is another kind of silence, that does not, like Mnemosyne, bear new life. This is the silence of stagnancy and death. As we are proposed peace and quiet by something which will momentarily numb and quiet our minds, we are led to forget ourselves. This silence is typified in the story of Lot’s wife, who, when fleeing the burning cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, turned back to look upon the destruction. Right when she did, she turned into a lone and pillar of salt, standing fixed amidst the chaos.
The story of Lot’s wife is indicative of what happens when, in a mistrustful effort to hold on to the past, we do not remember, but look back. The result of this is stagnation. As we turn away from the present to look back on the past, we lose the beat. The loss of rhythm is indicative of the loss of life in the deepest sense. As the heart no longer beats, the body rushes to decay. It can only be preserved artificially- perhaps with salt.
In the Gospels, Jesus instructs his followers to remember Lot’s wife. In so doing, He warns us of the danger of looking back and becoming stagnant. Yet this warning also signals to the redemptive power of memory; In remembering Lot’s wife, we remember her instance of forgetfulness. As Lot’s wife was fleeing the burning cities, she likely forgot about God’s ordinance not to look back. Curiosity about destruction, and perhaps even nostalgia about the life she fled, got the better of her. She turned back to catch a last glimpse of her hometown, to impress one last picture of it upon her memory. As she looked back to remember, she forgot what was most important: God’s decree. In remembering Lot’s wife, then, we are remembering the sin of forgetfulness.
As we remember even our instances of forgetfulness, we begin to live in a way that is truly mnemonic. When we are too nostalgic or wistful of a past life- perhaps even a past which included metrical poetry- the tendency is to look back, become stuck there, and lose the motion of time that impelling us forward. If, over the course of the years, our relationship to meter had become stale and dry—if meter had ceased to serve the rhythmicity of poetry in a meaningful, tangible way—the solution isn’t to pretend that something hadn’t gone awry. Rather, our poetry must remember even our fraught experiences with meter. Gioia and Eliot’s poetry, which evokes only the memory of meter, is directly suggestive of the very nature of what meter is: a mnemonic device. The breaths of Paul Claudel’s Odes take us beyond sound, and into silence. As Mnemosyne sits on the very pulse of being, she sees all, but rejects nothing—not even the meter we may wish to do away with.