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.

The page above shows the current state of the first direction¹ for “Mist from the Mountains”.² In the top half, you see rows of words and lines that attempt to generate ideas for the theme (for example, how to describe the fog), resulting in a shapeless nebula of possibilities. From these, I extracted the rough stanza variations you see in the bottom half where the familiar shape of a poem slowly emerges. This direction will have one quatrain which I shall eventually come to after many more pages like this one.

As always, highlighted black text are those lines I am actively developing and grey text are notes (for example, a reminder as to why I chose this word over that one, or what shortcomings there may be in this line or that one); a forward slash separates variations of the same stanza and coloured letters help me keep track of words (namely their sounds³, literary alliteration, visual alliteration⁴, and frequency of use⁵). All this is of little interest I am sure but such is my numbingly meticulous nature!

1. As noted here on 5 September 2019.
2. There is, of course, a preceding page with the initial draft that spawned the three directions, as well as two subsequent pages with variations I have already written for directions two and three.
3. “And everywhere that Mary went…”
4. Words similar in shape and letters (I made this one up, I fear): The peasant plucked a pheasant.
5. For example, I make a significant word red the moment it appears more than once lest unwittingly I repeat it too often—it is easy to lose track of the obvious even in so short a poem when one is rapt in the writing process.