I attended an excellent lecture two weeks ago entitled "Poetry: the Movement of Meaningful Sound through Time", in which Ms. Schubert discussed the rhythm of Milton and Spenser's verse. (Iambic pentameter, 'feet', 'stichic' vs. 'strophic', etc.) It opened with these lines by T.S. Eliot:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern
Can words or music reach the stillness...
I took particular inspiration from discussion of the importance of form to Spenser and Milton's work. 'Rules' are so amazingly critical in the crafting of the lines because they establish a defined space in order to reveal the beauty of tension within it. It was said that poetry without rules is like tennis without a net (or lines, I'd add), in that the artistic element of the work is found to be greater as a result of the boundaries. 'Rule breaking' then becomes an artistically meaningful divergence.
Anyway, I decided to try my hand at a few lines within a defined meter last night, which I haven't really done before. The tetrameter I used is more sing-songy and hurried than pentameter would be, but I'm a novice, after all. Here it is:
Not Quite the Good Samaritan
Oh, what a jumbled bag am I
Indeed, and what a growing list
Of contradictions. Yes, I lie
A free man having sorely missed
The purposed point of his free living.
(‘Tis truly not the game of fakes.)
For men find pardon in forgiving
A fool whose faint heart only takes.
The pitied plight of this mistaken
Man yet yields his Truth unshaken:
Though jumbled in a bag, at rest;
Though listed and unchosen, best.
Nothing like I've done before. Hopefully there is more and better to come.