In Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy,
Robert Jourdain points out that music
relies on two kinds of meter.
I mean, I'm sorry, two kinds of rhythm.
Meter, which is what is indicated by the time
signature, like this piece is going to be 4/4
or this piece is going to be 6/8, which
assigns and subdivides the equivalent units of duration
and forms a predictable pulse.
We're going to be in 4/4, and it's going to go like this.
And all the beats are going to be equivalent to one another.
So it makes a pulse, an ongoing pulse.
That's one kind, that's not the only kind.
The other kind of rhythm that exists in music
is phrasing, which according to Jourdain,
chunks together separate notes in measures in order
to present coherent sound.
Phrasing, says Jourdain, is the rhythmic system that builds,
quote, "large-scale musical objects and thereby induces
large-scale musical perceptions."
The distinction between the two kinds of rhythm is very clear.
If you think on the one hand of a fourth-grade marching band
that only uses meter, doesn't use phrasing, all right?
All it is is we're chugging along this regular pulse.
Versus say, Gregorian chant, which only uses phrasing
and does not use meter, OK?
That difference.
The two conceptions of rhythm are sometimes
referred to as vocal, that's for phrasing,
and instrumental, that's for meter.
Phrasing is vocal because it naturally
arises from song, and thus, from speech.
While meter, says Mr. Jourdain, arises from the way
we play musical instruments and a need to play together.
Meter organizes small groups of notes, and sometimes larger
ones, and thereby provides a sort of grid
upon which music is drawn.
On the other hand, phrasing gives a kind of narrative
or a story to music.
It's the mechanism by which a composition can play out
a grand drama.
Broadly speaking, meter organizes musical time
on the small scale, while phrasing organizes it
on the large scale.
Yet, says Mr. Jourdain, the two kinds of rhythm
are not entirely at peace with one another.
He's talking about music here, right?
The two kinds of rhythm are not entirely at peace
with one another.
Meter in poetry can never be as strictly mathematical
as meter in music, since it only approximates
duration, the foundation of meter in music,
and does not always account for such manipulation
as happens by long vowels, and alliteration, and the like.
But poetry, too, usually employs two rhythmic systems, the line
and the sentence.
And the two systems, not entirely
at peace with one another, is an apt description,
it seems to me, of what happens in the Larkin poem
or what happens in "Cut Grass."
Because of the powerful unbalanced syntax,
that asymmetry that I was talking about, short sentence
then really long one, large-scale rhythm
muscles out of the way in irregular,
mostly predictable measure.
As a result, we start off with two strokes
per line in stanza one.
And we move by stanza two into three strokes per line.
This shifting of expectation is akin to a poetics
from early last century, what was
called the verse libre that came before verse
libra or free verse.
Where accentual monosyllabic meter, like iambic pentameter,
was not forsworn but subverted, no longer
kept stable but among the moving parts, a prominent foot
without the predictable number of feet in the line,
as in "Cut Grass," or a fixed number of scannable feet
without predictable placement of stresses
among unstressed syllables.
The objective in verse libre was pattern without boredom,
asymmetry without incoherence.
What Larkin does is establish a grid or a pulse,
not with rigid meter, but with his iambs and spondees--
remember, there's two stresses in a row--
and by making consonant the relationship between the line,
and the chunk of the syntax.
It dies in the white hours of young-leafed June
with chestnut flowers, with hedges snow-like strewn.
He doesn't go, "Oh, my God.
If their tree peaks in that last line, I better change that."
He doesn't care about that.
What cares is to make all those wind phrases parallel
and to use the line.
So that you will hear that pattern,
and so that you are going to be up at the surface of the poem.