[OPENING OF BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY PLAYING]
It's a pattern.
Then starting the asymmetry.
Here, it takes those little short chunks,
and he's lining that up.
So now we go to longer phase.
Momentary repose, stop.
[INAUDIBLE]
Then you go back to the beginning again.
Pattern, then we go again.
It's going out, it's going out.
It's going further this time, on to a new territory.
Is it ever coming back?
What now?
He turned it upside down.
Do we know where we are?
Momentary repose, you hear that?
It gets you back to the pattern.
So you say, oh, that was a long phrase.
That was a long musical phrase.
It went like that, and then it came to rest.
Now we're starting another.
This is another, this is a little subtheme.
You hear pieces of it, creating a longer phrase.
We don't know where we are.
Longer phrase, do you hear it?
That's good.
All right, and we'll come back to that momentarily.
[MUSIC STOPS]
So, you hear that, it's little trochees.
Da-da-da, that's a chunk.
That's a little chunk.
Da-da-da.
You won't repeat it, da-da-da.
And then that longer phrase is where the chunks
are put together to make some larger
thing that goes like that.
That's what we thrill to when we hear music.
If all we heard was chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk,
you're back with the fourth grade marching band.
That's a fourth grade marching band.
And that's one kind of rhythmic system that is meaner.
And it's a pulse, and it's unvarying, and it is boring.
Go listen to Bolero again, OK?
[LAUGHS]
Cause it doesn't build--
I mean, that piece builds, but it builds the same way
every single time.
OK, this is talking about a structure, an architecture
around those sounds, OK?
And they are two things at work.
One is the kind of steadiness that's happening
and the regularity of the meter.
And the other is this longer thing,
and it's that that seizes our hearts, OK?
Poetry has got to do that, too.
If it's nothing but iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb,
it's boring.
It is boring.
And if it's nothing but an uncontrolled movement
into unfamiliar territory, with no moments of repose,
with no sense of development, with nothing
leaking where you start with, where you ended up,
then that's chaos.
OK.
And there's no reason why we can't have both.
Because we write in sentences, and we write in lines.
OK.
I'm going to just--
I think I'll skip now past more of Mr. Justice.
Because I don't want to read through a whole lot of them.
We are going to do a whole lot of meter with you,
but I do encourage you, I mean, I'm
doing a very bad job on that poem.
Because I'm skipping over what happens with the little what
Jourdain calls the "small-scale music."
OK, where he has--
each time, each line is going to have two feet.
But the two feet are going to be different from one another,
I mean slightly different from one another.
So when he brings it back around,
well, that's the only other thing that just-- you notice,
you probably noticed that yourself.
Farewell is the bell beginning to ring.
One sentence, two lines.
The children singing did not yet hear it.
One sentence with two lines.
The sun is shining in their song.
One sentence, not quite two lines.
The sun is in fact shining upon the schoolyard on children
swinging like tongues of a bell, swung
on the long arc of a silence, said
will not seem to have been a silence till it is broken,
as it is breaking.
That's the fourth sentence.
You see how out of whack that is,
like how the first two were?
That same [INAUDIBLE] that Larkin did.
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.
Another long sentence.
Now, watch what he does.
The young schoolteacher, waving one arm in time to the music,
is waving farewell.
That one's got four lines in.
Her mouth is open to sound the alarm, two lines.
The mouth of the world goes round
with the sound, two lines.
Do you see how he makes this absolutely perfect shape,
classical shape, that he ends up where he's going?
OK.
Starts here, here's the pattern, here's
how long their sentences are.
They're perfectly balanced.
This whole middle goes, oh, like that.
And then, he's going to bring us back around.
He would never do like old Larkin.
Even Justice would never write a poem that's so ends out there
on that very long sentence.
But he's going to bring us around to the end.
OK?
So you can check that on the meter,
too, because he does the same thing.
He goes back, and those last couplets to the meter
that he started out with.