WEBVTT

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Donald Justice, on the other
hand, and "To the Hawks."

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She's on the next page.

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Uses a different kind of grid.

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This one is mathematically
very, very strict, and at

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the same time, is
musically flexible.

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Which is to say, he uses
five syllables per line

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without variation,
but he arranges them

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into every possible metrical
foot known to mankind.

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And it's two lines stanza
that is most often,

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although not
completely, consonant

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with those chunks of the
syntax, and sometimes, rarely

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syncopated by it.

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The effect is something
like jazz improvisation.

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You cannot predict
where he's going to go,

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but there is no
loss of coherence.

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"To the hawks."

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"Farewell is the bell
beginning to ring.

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The children singing
do not yet hear it.

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The sun is shining
in their song.

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The sun is, in fact, shining
upon the schoolyard on children

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swinging like tongues
of a bell, swung out

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on the long arc of a
silence that will not

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seem to have been a
silence till it is broken,

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as it is breaking.

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There is a sun now, louder than
the sun of which the children

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are singing, brighter, too,
than that other against whose

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brightness their eyes seem
caught in the act of shutting.

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The young school teacher, waving
one arm in time to the music,

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is waving farewell.

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Her mouth is open
to sound the alarm.

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The mouth of the world
grows round with the sound."

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Competing patterns of
music dominate this poem.

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It starts with what we
call a closed couplet.

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That means that the sentences,
when the two lines end.

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OK?

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Period, it stops.

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It's closed.

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There, in that first one,
one line is "end-pause,"

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one line takes a little
pause where the syntax would,

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and one line is end-stopped.

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Farewell is the bell,
farewell is the bell what?

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Beginning to ring, stop.

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Closed couplet.

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OK?

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That's the little
initial pattern.

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The two lines are
made out of dimeter.

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Dimeter just means two meter.

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OK?

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So two feet in the line,
that's what that means.

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The two dimeter lines have
exactly matched metrical feet,

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by the rising and then
a little skippy rise.

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That's called an iamb,
and then an anapest.

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Farewell is the bell beginning--

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that was different to ring,
but you get that first one?

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Farewell is the bell.

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It's going to come back again.

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This little marvelous followed
by another closed consonants

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dimeter couplet.

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The children singing
do not yet hear it.

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But the meter is just a little
bit different, because they're

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not made the same way, right?

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The relationship
of those stresses

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to all the unstressed
syllables around

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them is a little bit different.

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They are still two.

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You can hear it, right?

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The children singing
do not yet hear it.

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But where the little
unstressed syllables

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are going to fall in
relation to those,

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it's not the same as
what the first one was.

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So there, again,
you got pattern,

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and you have some
variation on the pattern.

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Meanwhile, the two
independent couplets

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have been linked, and lines
two and three with end rhyme,

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and internal rhyme, and linked
to the next couplet also.

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Beginning to ring,
the children singing,

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the sun is shining in
their song, the sun.

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But the new couplet
is substantially

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different from the others,
that couplet number three.

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And not only because
it is open this time

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and not close by the
syntax, this time,

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the metropole match is also
linking, not self-enclosed.

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Line five has the same meter
as lines three and four,

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line six has
something different.

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And it's also, for
the first time,

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we get this stop in
the middle of the line

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where the period
comes, the syntax ends,

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and the line is not yet over.

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He hasn't finished with
his five syllables.

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That's called a caesura, if you
want to know the name of it.

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So all of a sudden,
the thing that

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has been established,
that the line is going

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to be correspondent
with the syntax,

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that's going to be
exactly the way we talked.

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And it's also going
to be metered,

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and we're going to have
two stresses in every line.

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All of a sudden, that shifts.

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It's just a little
shift, but it's not

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in fact all that little.

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What happens once
we get that caesura

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is that we get one more
key word that's isolated,

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and that is the sun.

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The sun is shining in
their song, the sun.

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And once that
happens, then Justice

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lets the rhyming syllables
loose into a kind of mitosis,

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generating couplet after
a couplet down the page

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without ever stopping.

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Sun is shining and
song, sun is in shining

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upon school on children swinging
tongues, bells swung on long,

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silence will bend, silence
till is broken, as is breaking.

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You hear all that
repeating sound?

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So, once he puts a sound out
there, it's going to echo.

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It's going to come back again.

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And it makes this entirely
dense fabric of sound that just

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sort of unwinds, and
unwinds all of that syntax.

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And it starts, because we
only got a half a line.

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We put that period
in the middle,

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we only got two syllables
left, because it's

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five for each line.

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The sun.

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What's missing?

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The whole rest of the sentence.

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Where's the predicate?

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Where's this thing going?

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Once it starts going,
it's just going

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to go zooming right past
all that meter, right

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pass all those five
syllable lines,

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right past all those couplets.

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That's the force of the poem.

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That is the force of the poem.

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It seems to me, as much formal
pattern as we have in Justice.

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All that these five
syllables and what's

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every possible
combination of metrics

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that I could come up with.

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And if you are interested
at all in traditional meter,

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I suggest to you that
you just study this poem.

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Just study this poem,
and go through it,

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and see where the stresses are.

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And you will have
a little textbook

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in accentual syllabic verse.

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Because he takes five
syllables, and he arranges them

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in every foot that
has been identified

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by prosodists across the land.

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So go do that if that
is of interest to you.

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That's not my main
interest here.

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I want to talk about
again in this poem why

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it seems to me a great
deal of symmetry,

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lines are all
alike, couplets that

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are all made the same way,
end stop, then end stop.

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All of that dense rhyme,
this is a huge amount

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of pattern, huge
amount of pattern.

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And at the same time, it's
not the source of the poem.

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You know this already.

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Again, it's very
hard to talk about it

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without using some of
those more technical terms,

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like the names for
those patterns.

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But that notion of
starting with a pattern,

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and establishing something,
and then overturning it,

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you know from other
sources of art.

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Can you do my whole thing?

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I can.

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OK.

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