Michael Donaghy alerted me to this passage from Marjorie Perloff's "Janus-Faced Blockbuster," on some lines by Georgia Douglas Johnson:
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on;
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tires to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks, on the sheltering bars. (1918)
These chug-chug iambic pentameter stanzas rhyming aabb remind one of a Hallmark card.
Uh-huh. And Charles Bernstein, in his "Poetics of the Americas," thought this, from Claude McKay, was pentameter:
Just to view de homeland England, in de streets of London walk
It appears to be contagious.
8:27:26 PM
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