What we've got here is a post on syllabic verse in English, and those of you who've read these comments at Gary Norris's DagZine will recognize its origin. There are some metricists who do not consider English syllabics to be metrical at all — neither the Poetry Free For All nor Eratosphere will consider them in their metrical forums — but I am not one of them. I have myself written two poems using awdl gywydd, a Welsh syllabic quatrain, seven syllables per line, in which lines one and three cross-rhyme into lines two and four, which in turn rhyme with each other. Sunday night's was written in a fit of pique and shows it, but I like this one.
If, by some wild chance, you're not convinced by my example, consider Richard Wilbur, perhaps the greatest living American poet, and these opening stanzas from a new poem in his Collected Poems 1943-2004, "Sir David Brewster's Toy":
In this tube you see
At the far end a batch of
Colored-glass debris—
Which, however, grows
Upon reflection to an
Intricate pied rose,
Flushed with sun, that might,
Set in some cathedral's wall,
Paraphrase the light.
That's rhyming haiku, a form he's used before, and there's a tanka among the new poems, and these and other syllabic forms are scattered throughout his later work.
Still, the skeptics have a point. In English, and I suspect in any language having a strongly developed stress system combined with lots of diphthongs and habitual elisions, it's very hard to hear syllable counts. Syllables in our language are neither isochronous (are they in any language?) nor do they vary in length in any systematic way. In speech, they often disappear altogether. Even when written, it's sometimes hard to say how many syllables a word has: is "fire" and "higher" a true rhyme? Sometimes, in some dialects. It seems to me that English syllabic lines, unless short and preferably odd-numbered in syllable-count (and rhyme doesn't hurt), are simply imperceptible to listeners and readers who aren't willing to count on their fingers.
That doesn't mean long unrhymed syllabic lines are of no use to poets. One of the functions of meter and other formal devices — too much emphasized in the handbooks these days — is to aid invention, to force the poet out of habitual language and thinking. Marianne Moore may have repudiated syllabics and serially free-versified her poetry, but surely those intricate stanzas were part of what allowed her to make poems in the first place. After complaining for two pages about the diatribe on rhyme in the introduction to Paradise Lost, Johnson acknowledged no one wished Milton had been a rhymer. I certainly don't wish Moore had written iambs.
The more important function of meter, however, one which in our language long syllabic lines cannot fulfill, is to affect a listener or a reader silently voicing the lines. It gives the sounding line more power and makes it more memorable. For that very reason, some poets distrust meter — it can make very silly things sound convincing, at least for a while. But I'll end by once again quoting this passage from the dread Timothy Steele's Missing Measures:
To reiterate a point made earlier, meter is neutral. It is a means by which poets can make what they say more forceful and memorable. Indeed, if poets care about an issue, they should want to give it the best possible treatment. The poet who says his subject is too urgent for meter may be deceiving himself. If we care about what we say, if we want to communicate it to others, if we want them to consider it as having more than ephemeral interest, we should aim to make what we say as memorable as possible.
5:08:32 AM 
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