ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 93
The poem is written in ten lines of loose iambic pentameter. The
meter is unsystematic, and includes a trochaic reversal on line 6,
and a feminine ending on line 5, oddly in semantic conflict with
the naïve meaning of the word “manliness” on line 1. There is no
obvious rhyme scheme, though both assonance and consonance
(a kind of alliteration) are evident throughout. Observe “manliness”
and “think,” “rootish” and “boon,” “hill” and “smith,” “heaped” and
“ring” for assonance. The assonance between “manliness” and “think”
occurs on the “i,” and is unstressed, another mark of rank incompetence and failed simulation. There are more examples throughout, beginning on line 1, of vowel echolalia. Also beginning on line
1, there is alliteration, if less and less competent, as exemplified
by “that” and “think.” What we are to make of this cacophony, I am
unsure.
It wants, one supposes, to evoke Anglo-Saxon usage of alliteration,
updated to the wonderful standard of Tolkien’s translation of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight. It fails entirely at this, to a humiliating degree which ought to embarrass the author. A student’s copy
of that translation observes that the alliterative syllable is to be
that syllable which first receives stress in the line, and the student,
realizing his bitter failure takes a shot in shame, shambles off, and
shuts his mouth.
The poem wants also, in its use of meter, to imitate something of
the free verse exploits of Shakespeare and Milton. Here again the
effort is embarrassing. The phrase “door is a dog” is not simply a
trochaic reversal, which would be acceptable to both Shakespeare
and Milton, it is a stressed syllable, followed by two limping halfbeats, and crowned with a syncopated “dog” to cap the end of what
is, in fact, a dactyl. One wants, I’m sure, to vomit, half convinced
the writer’s not quite sure of his craft, and even thinks, grimacing,
of Dr. Seuss, and his couplet, “And NOW comes an act of Enormous
Enormance! / No former performer’s performed this performance!”
Such amphibrachic drivel.
85
