Tunes Above the Bass Line

With the exception of Clark Ashton Smith's, the verse in Weird Tales often rivaled the worst of the fiction in banality and clumsiness, to the point where even a decent poem seemed like a gift.

This one, for example. It's not a great poem, but it has a lightness, a confidence, a sense of personality, hard to find in the pits of Weird Tales. I'd be happy to read more by this poet, but this appears to be the one thing she had in the magazine, or anywhere.

What do I find in this poem?

The initial stanza feels "neutral" to me: impersonal, a bit stiff, with a plodding use of iambic pentameter.

But the second stanza comes to life. Even if I can't forgive the awkward sounds of "depression in" and "call all" (Revise aloud!), I'm always pleased by fresh images or metaphors like "the wind's white songs."

Notice, too, how she plays against the established rhythm, and then returns to it:

"And to the WIND'S WHITE SONGS, the DRIP of DEW."

This is why free verse has never appealed to me. Once you have set up a rhythm in the reader's bones, you can play with it as a composer might play with a tune above a bass line. This break between what the reader expects to hear (in this case, an iamb) and what the reader actually hears (a pyrrhic, and then a spondee) can bring a lightness, a liveliness, to standard metres.

This musical approach halts the metre of the last line, and turns lightness into sadness:

"NO // but for THESE // I'll NOT come BACK to YOU."

One of the many things I like about the poem is the way it emphasizes joy to build up a sense of grief. A happy, generous woman is gone, and her dismissal of loss, of mourning, makes her all the more likely to be missed and mourned. The last line reflects the shift in mood, and that shift is created through technique.