In reading over a large part of the current amateur verse—as well as many of the ephemeral rhymes in newspapers and minor professional magazines—one is led to wonder just why the writers ever chose a metrical medium for what they had to say. We glance at these more or less measured lines and behold an unlimited number of statements, opinions, and admonitions on a few extremely familiar subjects, each phrased in the literal narrative manner of prose, and reflecting some conventional point of view made popular by copy-book repetition. There may or may not be some valid reason for the writer’s wishing to say something. But is there any valid reason why he should depart from unrhymed, continuous prose text when he wishes to state facts, register beliefs and predilections, and make ethical or prudential recommendations?

These processes, notwithstanding the custom of many old-time versifiers of wide household fame, belong essentially to the domains of science, history, administration, and philosophy, and rest basically on intellectual explanation and clear definition. From their very nature they demand embodiment in forms suited to accurate exposition, rather than in those suited to emotional catharsis and imaginative symbolism. Why, then, do so many offerers of statements, doctrines, and sermons persist in assuming the ill-fitting cloak of rhyme and metre which was designed for the poet?

It would be well if every metrical aspirant would pause and reflect on the question of just what, out of the various things he wants to utter, ought indeed to be expressed in verse. The experiences of the ages have pretty well taught us that the heightened rhythms and unified patterns of verse are primarily adapted to poetry—which consists of strong feelings sharply, simply, and non-intellectually presented through indirect, figurative, and pictorial images. Therefore it is scarcely wise to choose these rhythms and patterns when we wish merely to tell something or claim something or preach something.

The time to use verse is when some mood or feeling about something becomes so strong and insistent that it calls up various concrete pictures and resemblances and symbols in our minds, and makes us long to shout it or put it on record vividly in terms of these images and symbols. If the sight of the white clouds arouses in us only a wish to point a moral based on their insubstantiality and deceptive aspect, then the best thing for us to do is either to preserve silence or write a sermon, preferably the former. If, on the other hand, such a sight makes us think of things like ships or swans or fleecy flocks or ethereal castles, then we may properly begin to consider whether the feeling is strong enough, and the especial image fresh and original enough, to warrant our breaking into metre.

Poetry, the normal subject-matter of verse, never defines or analyses or asserts or urges or proves anything. It merely depicts, emphasises, symbolises, illuminates, or otherwise expresses some mood or strongly felt object. Therefore when we try to write it we must not state and describe and argue in direct, literal fashion, but must instead convey our meaning through suggested comparisons, elusively symbolic visual images, and—in general—concrete associative pictures of some sort.

As a recent specimen of the amateur didactic utterance which could obviously find a more appropriate channel than rhyme, one might cite the following:

“Gossip sometimes does some good

While other times does not but should.

Thus, when it’s said with words unkind,

Consider it with a just mind.”

Contrasting with this the following quatrain of real poetry from the same magazine—a sample of the kind of emotional utterance which does indeed call for metrical dress:

TO MOTHER

By Albert Chapin

I saw your loving eyes—yet mine were closed;

   I heard your tender voice—though stilled in death;

I felt your gentle touch, and as I dozed

   There came a summer breeze—your sweet, warm breath.

The question of light verse, involving some apparent contradictions of the principles here suggested, forms a wholly separate subject, and one which merits subsequent treatment in these columns. Meanwhile it is any case wise to pause carefully before beginning a piece of rhyme—asking oneself whether the subject is indeed fitted for such a vehicle, or whether a prose conveyance could better accommodate its particular bulk and contours.