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I have never understood those people who love to read, yet never seem to read verse. After all, the same qualities and techniques that we find in good prose, we find in verse: a studied use of alliteration and assonance, parallel construction, rhetoric, imagery, metaphor. Even if the concentration of a poem goes beyond much of what we find in prose at its most prosaic, I doubt that many readers would be tripped up by this intensity.
Readers unfamiliar with poetic techniques of metrical regularity and substitution can still hear what a poem is doing. For example, this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay uses iambic pentameter as the basis for its rhythm, but plays against the rhythm by replacing iambs with trochees, pyrrhics, and spondees. Must readers understand these methods to appreciate the result? No, not as long as they can read aloud, attentively, with a normal pronunciation of words.
SONNET: HERE IS A WOUND THAT NEVER WILL HEAL,
by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of a dearness and a death,
But of a love turned ashes and the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
The grass on the scarred acre, though I sow
Young seed there yearly and the sky bequeath
Its friendly weathers down, far underneath
Shall be such bitterness of an old woe.
That April should be shattered by a gust,
That August should be levelled by a rain,
I can endure, and that the lifted dust
Of man should settle to the earth again;
But that a dream can die, will be a thrust
Between my ribs forever of hot pain.
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From
The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Modern Library, New York, 2001.
