much wariness and protective dishonesty, and they were able tornsee how a tyrannical government tri”ializes most of its citizens.rnWhen people are powerless, when they dare not think forrnthemselves and have no say in anything, they are too readily reducedrnto mean material concerns—to envying the neighbor’srnfur hat and trying to wangle a better television. All order, alas,rnis not good; it wasn’t quite enough for Mussolini to make therntrains run on time; and I think of a French man of letters who,rnrecalling the Vichy regime and its apologists, observed that nornpeople have ever raised a monument to Order.rnWhich brings me back to poetry. Toward the end of hisrnpoem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevensrnexclaims, “Oh! Blessed rage for order.” What he is celebratingrnis the power of art to create imaginative unities in which bothrnthe spirit and the objective wodd are fully and truly expressed.rnSuch unities of vision, in which self and world meet at the full,rnare the great forms which poetry achieves, and which formalrntechniques like rhyme and meter merely serve to implement.rnWhen poetry does not bring “the whole soul of man into activity,”rnas Coleridge says it must, or when it does violence to outwardrnreality, it fails, and here is a well-known little poem ofrnStevens’ about a poetic failure. It is called “Anecdote of thernJar”:rnI placed a jar in Tennessee,rnAnd round it was, upon a hill.rnIt made the slovenly wildernessrnSurround that hill.rnThe wilderness rose up to it,rnAnd sprawled around, no longer wild.rnThe jar was round upon the groundrnAnd tall and of a port in air.rnIt took dominion everywhere.rnThe jar was gray and bare.rnIt did not give of bird or bush.rnLike nothing else in Tennessee.rnThat jar declares itself to be the center of a circle, and thus organizesrnthe wilderness of Tennessee; but it does so in such a wayrnas to nullify the wild birds and bushes, while asserting its ownrnsterile dominion. What the jar accomplishes is not an imaginativerninterplay between jar and wilderness, but an impositionrnof itself, a tyranny; it is a little pre-Gorbachev Kremlin of a jar,rnand Stevens elsewhere sums the matter up by saying, “A violentrnorder is a disorder.”rnThere are various ways in which poetry can leave things outrnand thus be less than itself—through the distortions ofrnpropaganda, for instance, through the omissions of sentimentality,rnthrough the evasions of timidity. At its best, poetry hasrnalways confronted our sorrows and described our fears, and Irnwant to offer a modest but genuine example of that—a poemrnby the mid-19th-century English writer Charles Kingsley, thernauthor of Westward Ho!:rnWhen all the world is young, lad.rnAnd all the trees are green;rnAnd every goose a swan, lad.rnAnd every lass a queen;rnThen hev for boot and horse, lad.rnAnd round the world away:rnYoung blood must have its course, lad.rnAnd every dog his day.rnWhen all the world is old, lad.rnAnd all the trees are brown;rnAnd all the sport is stale, lad.rnAnd all the wheels run down.rnCreep home and take your place therernThe spent and maimed among;rnGod grant you find one face therernYou loved when all was young!rnWhat that says is pretty awful: it says that we begin life full ofrnadventurous energy and romance, and end in weariness, disillusion,rnand lonely infirmity. Those assertions may not be universallyrntrue, but they have some painful pertinence to everyone,rnand so one might ask why such a grim message is wittily conveyedrnin clever rhymes and a rollicking ballad meter. Is Kingsleyrnsugarcoating a bitter pill? I don’t think so. For one thing,rnthe jaunty ballad rhythms are appropriate to the youthful vigorrnand zest evoked in the first stanza, and the same rhythms arernpoignantly slowed as the poem saddens. For another thing, thernpoem’s breezy movement reflects the high morale that poetryrnalways has when it faces up to depressing or dreadful truths.rnAuden, in his elegy for Yeats, urges poets tornSing of human unsuccessrnIn a rapture of distress,rnand there is indeed a sort of rapture in any line of verse whichrnarticulately braves the darker areas of our experience. A recentrnmagazine article about Yevgeny Kissim spoke of music as a wayrnof mastering bad noises; poetry, which aspires to the fullest possiblernconsciousness, masters bad thoughts by uttering themrnperfectly. I think that Shakespeare must have rejoiced when herngot our fears of the grave into one horrible line: “lb lie in coldrnobstruction and to rot.”rnI seem to have come round, now, to talking about meter andrnrhyme and verse-forms as they may further the utterance of arnpoem. The founders of the free verse movement (people likernFord and Pound and Williams) envisioned it as a kind of recessrnperiod—a “formless interim,” as Williams put it—after whichrnpoetry would return to a fresh formality. Unfortunately, thernfree verse experiment, like most experiments, became institutionalized,rnand has dragged on for most of this century, producingrna certain number of triumphs and a lot of drearyrnminced prose. As a result, there are many writers and readersrnwho don’t understand what meter is and how it works. Theyrnimagine that Pound was correct in his foolish statement thatrnmetrical verse is metronomic; they suppose that words in arnmetrical stanza are like soldiers doing close-order drill and strivingrnfor a maximum of mechanical regularity.rnThat’s not how it is at all. A metrical form—the pentameter,rnfor instance—is an underlying paradigm or model which wernnever hear, though a line like Tennyson’s “The woods decay,rnthe woods decay and fall” may come near conforming to thatrnsilent model. What one does in writing a metrical poem is tornoutrage the paradigm, to counterpoint the unheard model withrnthe rhythms of emotion or description or dramatic speech.rnThe result is that those rhythms, underlined by variance fromrnthe tidy norm, are heightened, strong, and definite in a way thatrnSEPTEMBER 1997/29rnrnrn