Rhyme and metre - welcome to my blog

A poignard is a small dagger - so, pointed and also poignant. (My son suggested 'Get the point?' as a sub heading.) Architecture and poetry are my main interests but I'm not sure how much architecture there will be. One reason for starting the blog is to have somewhere to put my poems where people can read them. I've put a few on separate pages, as you can see. I hope you like them and I would love to receive comments of any kind. I will occasionally change the poems, though I don't have a huge store to draw on and new ones appear rather sporadically. But perhaps your feedback will encourage me.

Most of my poems are quite formal, that is to say they use metre and rhyme. This is not because I'm old fashioned (though sometimes I am - see 'Three old fashioned sonnets' and 'After Marvell') or because I have anything against free verse, but I believe that self imposed rules are a spur to creativity, not a brake on it. Rules help to steer me away from laziness and self-indulgence.

Because so many of the poets I know almost always write in free verse, I feel the need to offer a theoretical justification for metre and rhyme. The justification goes something like this: Poetry should be heard as well as read. What it sounds like is part of what it means. It is akin to music and like music it is rhythmic. This is because it is created by and for rhythmic beings, beings that breathe, with hearts that beat, beings that walk and run and dance. These beings are rhythmic because they evolved on a rhythmic planet, a planet that pulses on a daily, monthly and yearly cycle. The rhythm of poetry can be complex, like jazz drumming, but still maintain a regular pattern - a number of beats in a bar or feet in a line. Rhyme is just another kind of rhythm which emphasises the beat, or the off-beat, at longer intervals. Rhyme enriches rhythm by giving it an extra layer, like counterpoint in music.

Rhyme often has another function: to mark the end of a line. There can be internal rhymes, of course, like subtle touches with the drummer's brush, but rhyme is a useful way to make the ends of lines audible as well as visible on the page. It bothers me that in certain kinds of free verse line breaks are not audible. Why have them at all? Lines breaks can be marked by phrase or sentence structure (so-called 'end-stopped' lines), by a combination of sense and metricality, as in blank verse, or by rhyme, as in most of my poems.

There is another aspect to my preference for metre and rhyme, and here perhaps I am rather old fashioned. I think tradition is an important dimension of poetry. It is not a useless thing to be discarded in the striving for novelty, but an essential aspect of communication. Novelty is created by individuals; tradition is what we all share. It is the essential ground without which novelty would be meaningless. I am not interested in impressing my readers with my originality; I am interested in sharing my experience with them. I am not trying to say that my experience is special and must be expressed in a new way; I am trying to say: "I have experienced this, and I bet you have too". Traditional forms are like an already open channel of communication. They are anti-elitist, bringing writer and reader together on the same level.

In my next post I might try to say something about content. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you.