Poets' Blog

I’ve been playing around with the same meter and rhyming scheme that Burns uses in ‘Address of Beelzebub’. If you’re interested in the technical details, each line of this poem is a tetrameter (pronounced te-TRAM-e-ter), which means it has four ‘feet’ or four beats to each line:

Long LIFE, my LORD, an’ HEALTH be YOURS,

UnSKAITH’D by HUNGer’d HIGHland BOORS!

And you can also see it’s written in rhyming couplets. But somehow this scheme wasn’t working for me, so I’ve tried making the lines longer by adding an extra foot or beat to each (making them into ‘pentameters’). Burns’s poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is written in pentameters:

From SCENES like THESE, old SCOtia’s GRANDeur SPRINGS

That MAKES her LOV’D at HOME, reVER’D aBROAD…

However, none of this has been working for me. I feel if I could just get the right form for the poem, something might emerge quite quickly. This is weird, because usually I have an idea and then find a way to express it. But on this occasion it’s as if I need to find the method first, and then the idea will come. It’s that old dilemma: which comes first, the idea or the word? Can you have ideas without words? Can you have words without ideas? I’m reminded of Tom Leonard’s poem which ends with the line ‘In the beginning was the sound’. Quite. And not a pentameter in sight.

Categories: James