I wrote yet another new poetic sketch yesterday—the sunlight through the clouds on the wheatfields was magical—and had to pause.
It occurred to me that I had been treating the collection like an infinite publication, and of course, it cannot be so—a limit must be set.
I have therefore put this new sketch into a “for a future collection” category, and shall do the same with all new poetic sketches.
In traditional poetry, a line should—in every sense—reflect its content. I am reminded of this daily as I compose—writing, revising, rejecting and refining ideas, words, lines and stanzas.
In “Mist from the Mountains” (the poem I am currently developing), consider this line:
Its purpose is to describe the gentle passage of the mist down a rock face; but when read, the natural stresses of the words (down the ridges creeps), the plosives ([duh] in “down”, [djuh] in “ridges”, [kuh] and [puh] in “creeps”) and cadence of the phrase (DUM, da DA-DUM, DUM) are at odds with the subject—more suggestive of a bouncing ball than a drifting vapour—and therefore not ideal—its words should be weightless, its accents airy.
Then there is the position of the line within the stanza and the poem, and its rhyming scheme: since it concludes the second of three stanzas, does its terminating “creeps” create a perfect or imperfect rhyme with what precedes it? A perfect rhyme neatly concludes a stanza, making it “stable”; but an imperfect rhyme leaves one hankering (for a perfect rhyme), making it “unstable”—one wavers on a lingual precipice, ready for the next stanza.
Depending on the theme and style of the poem, any one consideration may override another—a blemish here may be necessary for a sublimity there. The poet must weigh every factor (too many to mention here—some literary, some intuitive) when deciding the fate of a word, line or even punctuation. This involves a repetitive process of exploration and reflection for which he requires time, perseveringly to search Language for Beauty.
A delightful fact I neglect to mention is that my beloved Gladiolus liliaceus, commonly known as the Large Brown Afrikaner and Aandpypie1 (“little evening pipe”2), has yet another common Afrikaans name: the Ribbokblom3, that is, the “rhebok flower”!
Whence the name, I can only speculate—perhaps because the rhebok itself is as rare, or that both are found on hillsides and are brownish-grey? Nonetheless, what are the odds that two of my favourite things—an antelope and a lily—should be thus connected!
Forgotten Fields 