Donald Justice, on the other hand, and "To the Hawks."
She's on the next page.
Uses a different kind of grid.
This one is mathematically very, very strict, and at
the same time, is musically flexible.
Which is to say, he uses five syllables per line
without variation, but he arranges them
into every possible metrical foot known to mankind.
And it's two lines stanza that is most often,
although not completely, consonant
with those chunks of the syntax, and sometimes, rarely
syncopated by it.
The effect is something like jazz improvisation.
You cannot predict where he's going to go,
but there is no loss of coherence.
"To the hawks."
"Farewell is the bell beginning to ring.
The children singing do not yet hear it.
The sun is shining in their song.
The sun is, in fact, shining upon the schoolyard on children
swinging like tongues of a bell, swung out
on the long arc of a silence that will not
seem to have been a silence till it is broken,
as it is breaking.
There is a sun now, louder than the sun of which the children
are singing, brighter, too, than that other against whose
brightness their eyes seem caught in the act of shutting.
The young school teacher, waving one arm in time to the music,
is waving farewell.
Her mouth is open to sound the alarm.
The mouth of the world grows round with the sound."
Competing patterns of music dominate this poem.
It starts with what we call a closed couplet.
That means that the sentences, when the two lines end.
OK?
Period, it stops.
It's closed.
There, in that first one, one line is "end-pause,"
one line takes a little pause where the syntax would,
and one line is end-stopped.
Farewell is the bell, farewell is the bell what?
Beginning to ring, stop.
Closed couplet.
OK?
That's the little initial pattern.
The two lines are made out of dimeter.
Dimeter just means two meter.
OK?
So two feet in the line, that's what that means.
The two dimeter lines have exactly matched metrical feet,
by the rising and then a little skippy rise.
That's called an iamb, and then an anapest.
Farewell is the bell beginning--
that was different to ring, but you get that first one?
Farewell is the bell.
It's going to come back again.
This little marvelous followed by another closed consonants
dimeter couplet.
The children singing do not yet hear it.
But the meter is just a little bit different, because they're
not made the same way, right?
The relationship of those stresses
to all the unstressed syllables around
them is a little bit different.
They are still two.
You can hear it, right?
The children singing do not yet hear it.
But where the little unstressed syllables
are going to fall in relation to those,
it's not the same as what the first one was.
So there, again, you got pattern,
and you have some variation on the pattern.
Meanwhile, the two independent couplets
have been linked, and lines two and three with end rhyme,
and internal rhyme, and linked to the next couplet also.
Beginning to ring, the children singing,
the sun is shining in their song, the sun.
But the new couplet is substantially
different from the others, that couplet number three.
And not only because it is open this time
and not close by the syntax, this time,
the metropole match is also linking, not self-enclosed.
Line five has the same meter as lines three and four,
line six has something different.
And it's also, for the first time,
we get this stop in the middle of the line
where the period comes, the syntax ends,
and the line is not yet over.
He hasn't finished with his five syllables.
That's called a caesura, if you want to know the name of it.
So all of a sudden, the thing that
has been established, that the line is going
to be correspondent with the syntax,
that's going to be exactly the way we talked.
And it's also going to be metered,
and we're going to have two stresses in every line.
All of a sudden, that shifts.
It's just a little shift, but it's not
in fact all that little.
What happens once we get that caesura
is that we get one more key word that's isolated,
and that is the sun.
The sun is shining in their song, the sun.
And once that happens, then Justice
lets the rhyming syllables loose into a kind of mitosis,
generating couplet after a couplet down the page
without ever stopping.
Sun is shining and song, sun is in shining
upon school on children swinging tongues, bells swung on long,
silence will bend, silence till is broken, as is breaking.
You hear all that repeating sound?
So, once he puts a sound out there, it's going to echo.
It's going to come back again.
And it makes this entirely dense fabric of sound that just
sort of unwinds, and unwinds all of that syntax.
And it starts, because we only got a half a line.
We put that period in the middle,
we only got two syllables left, because it's
five for each line.
The sun.
What's missing?
The whole rest of the sentence.
Where's the predicate?
Where's this thing going?
Once it starts going, it's just going
to go zooming right past all that meter, right
pass all those five syllable lines,
right past all those couplets.
That's the force of the poem.
That is the force of the poem.
It seems to me, as much formal pattern as we have in Justice.
All that these five syllables and what's
every possible combination of metrics
that I could come up with.
And if you are interested at all in traditional meter,
I suggest to you that you just study this poem.
Just study this poem, and go through it,
and see where the stresses are.
And you will have a little textbook
in accentual syllabic verse.
Because he takes five syllables, and he arranges them
in every foot that has been identified
by prosodists across the land.
So go do that if that is of interest to you.
That's not my main interest here.
I want to talk about again in this poem why
it seems to me a great deal of symmetry,
lines are all alike, couplets that
are all made the same way, end stop, then end stop.
All of that dense rhyme, this is a huge amount
of pattern, huge amount of pattern.
And at the same time, it's not the source of the poem.
You know this already.
Again, it's very hard to talk about it
without using some of those more technical terms,
like the names for those patterns.
But that notion of starting with a pattern,
and establishing something, and then overturning it,
you know from other sources of art.
Can you do my whole thing?
I can.
OK.