Sara Teasdale did quadruplets, too:
Hear it? People always say that this quadruplet rhythm is for light verse. It doesn't have to be, but it can be. Listen to this four-beater.
That's light verse by Mr. Newman Levy. One of the lesser Algonquinites. Wrote a number of poems about alcohol, as befits a poet of the Prohibition, using that same quadruplet rhythm. Notice there's no rest on the third line, just as in a traditional ballad. W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, also uses it-"He's a modern major-general." And A. A. Milne:
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I'm going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.
And Thomas Bailey Aldrich: "And the heavy-branched banana never yields its creamy fruit." Vachel Lindsay used it: "Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley"-hear the sixteenth notes in "respectable McKinley"? T. S. Eliot used it, under Vachel Lindsay's influence. "Macavity Macavity there's no one like Macavity." Rappers use it a lot-
That's by Ludacris. And Kipling used it a lot, and Poe used it, too. Poe's "Raven," which is probably the best quadruplet rhythm ever written-listen to it slowly:
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Isn't that smooth?
Four very slow striding beats, with four steady silken swells filling each one. It's so simple and so hypnotic.
And the metrists don't know what to do with it. Here's what one introduction to poetry says. A good introduction by John Frederick Nims. He says that Poe's "Raven" is written in-ready?-"trochaic octameter with lines two and four catalectic." Catalectic meaning cut short. And how far does that get you? It actually disables any understanding of the poem to say that what he's doing is trochaic octameter. Because it's still really a basic four-beat stanza. Poe chose to set it in a different way because the lines came out long, but it's just a ballad. He said so himself. Poe is just taking a certain kind of beautiful stroll. Whether or not he stops under a bridge is not for us to say.
I WENT TO A BEAD STORE in town, and I bought some wire and a clasp and a clamping tool. I've decided to make some of the raw beads I bought for Roz into a real string of beads and give them to her. Not as an aggressive gift, but just as a friendly gift, to thank her for helping me when my finger was bleeding. I've learned to type without using my finger, by the way. Sometimes I type "dinger" for "finger" and "invlude" for "include."
So I went to the bead store in town-Beadle Bailey, it's called. It was very quiet inside. There were thousands of beads in tiny plastic cells, and I was amazed by the choices, the profusion of possibilities. It was like being a poet in that you had indivisible units that you could string together in certain rhythms. You can't alter the nature of a given bead, or a given word, but you can change which bead you choose, and the order in which you string them on their line. And I wanted to string together the beads I chose as a gift, which meant I had a certain person in mind when I looked at the colors. I was looking at the colors with Roz's color sense in my eyeballs. And I had an ideal in mind of rhythm and of randomness. Other beaders were bending, staring into the containers, or looking at the strings of beads hanging from metal hooks on the wall.
I saw some dusty pale small ceramic beads, and I felt the immediate clench of knowing that these were the ones that Roz would like best mixed with the ones I already had from Second Avenue. I asked the beadseller at the register about clasps, and it turns out that you can buy a certain kind of magnetic clasp that frees you from the problem of fitting tiny spring-loaded hooks together. The beadseller put on her reading glasses-she had them on a black-and-yellow beaded string-and she said, "I love these," pointing to one of my selections. She put the singles in a little plastic bag, and the strings, too. The whole purchase went into a pale green paper bag, and I walked out blinking onto the street carrying the raw materials for my present to Roz and feeling a joy of knowing that I was going to make something for her-something like a poem, but better than any poem I could write.
I think I'll do a quadruplet rhythm, a love-has-gone-and-left-me rhythm: one gray-green bead and then three other beads of near-random colors, and then a gray-green bead again.
11
I LOOKED FOR AN HOUR for a certain file in my office and couldn't find it. I found many things that I should have acted on a long time ago and have not. I found nice letters- unanswered letters, which cause searing guilt beyond all imagining. Also bound galleys of books of poetry from editors hoping for a blurb. Unread and unacknowledged. These bring less guilt, but some, because how hard would it have been to write the editor and explain?
I didn't find the file I was looking for, which holds the drafts of my flying spoon poems. These have swerved in and out of my life for so many years now that I have quite a fat file. The file now stands for the reality. I thought, If I don't find this spoon file I won't be able to write the poem that I was put on this earth to write and my life will have been in vain.
I sprawled in bed grieving for the loss of this file, although I knew it wasn't lost but was somewhere in my office. And then I saw that the only chance I had of writing a half-decent spoon poem was in not finding the file. As soon as I had the file in hand it would smother any new upwellings I might have. I felt released from a heavy burden and I lay in bed blinking at my good fortune. Then my eye moved in a great arc across the ceiling and down the wall across the room. I saw a pile of books that I'd forgotten about, stacked leaningly under a table next to a bookcase. At the bottom of this pile was a folder about an inch thick. I knew from the familiar position of the blue Post-it notes projecting from it that it was the spoon file.
I drove to the John Greenleaf Whittier house in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and joined the tour.
WHITTIER WAS A NINETEENTH-CENTURY POET who wrote a once-famous four-beater about a blizzard, called "Snow-Bound."
On the tour, I sat down in a rocking chair that Whittier sat in. I saw the minuscule stock of books he had in the house when he was a boy, and the poem he wrote about them. It was the tour guide's last day, and she gave our little group-a family of three, a silent woman, and me-her best shot. She brought out the funny bits and the sad bits and showed us the china and the linen and told us about the yarn weasel in the guest room. You crank this weasel to measure out how much yarn you've spun-it keeps track by counting the number of clicks it makes, one click for a certain number of crankings. Hence "Pop Goes the Weasel," a poem with interesting nineteenth-century off-rhymes-"needle," "weasel"-and a surprising number of verses, because you recited it while cranking, and I guess there was a lot of yarn to measure.
Most of Whittier's poetry wasn't good, the tour guide told us. It was tedious, often, and there was too much of it. But his life was good. He'd spent eighteen years writing and editing antislavery newspapers. Once the office of a newspaper in Philadelphia was stormed by a proslavery mob. Whittier, who was the editor of the paper, stole away and put on a wig and a different outfit and joined the looters in the building. They reached his office, calling, Where's Whittier? Where's that whoreson slimedog Whittier? He broke into his office with them and was able to loot his own papers to safety before they set fire to the building. It was after the Civil War that he wrote "Snow-Bound." Which is extremely long, but has several good moments.
The tour guide almost got tearful at the end of the tour, while she sold me a postcard of the room we stood in. Her Ford Mustang was for sale, parked on the grass. She was going west to work for the State of Kentucky.