Moonlit

Faceless cities' repetition echoes and flickers -

Gone in the blink of an eye, then renewed as if nothing had happened;

Sit immobile by the window. Train carriage bickers,

Snarls as it ploughs into midnight and winds through the lines on the map-land.

People asleep never notice the rumbling ride through the moonlight -

Far too tired to watch the criss-crossing roads and the street-lamps

Weaving their way far below in the mish-mash maze of their dark night,

Or to watch their own reflections gaze in with a rapt glance.

Bright lights keep me awake, though my sore eyes cry out for sleeping -

Let them, while I dream of sitting and watching and thinking

On a train late at night where the place names flutter by, sweeping

Onwards, home, to my warm bed and to restfully sinking.

But how could I sleep, when my head is still rolling and reeling

From her sweet, sharp words and the thunderstruck awe of their feeling?

for J

Background

This was written on a train while I was nearly asleep, typing the lines into my phone as they came to me. I'd been visiting the "her" in question earlier that day, and I like how that sort of aura of having just visited someone you love pervades it. Well, I think it does. Death of the author and all that. (I'll probably talk about that more later.)

Technically

Technically - and as you may have noticed from the rhyming (incidentally, "street-lamps"/"rapt glance" works if you have a Northern accent, which I do indeed have) I do like forms - this is a Shakespearian sonnet written in dactylic hexameter, a form I'm pretty sure no-one else has bothered with.

The way I use hexameter, basically, is that there are six stresses in a line, with one or two unstressed syllables after, the last two stress groups always going DUM-dee-dee DUM-dum. Here's the first quatrain with stress groups marked:

You might notice that the stress groups (feet, technically) with three syllables (dactyls, hence the metre name - the word comes from the Greek for finger, which goes long-short-short from your knuckle) and the ones with two syllables (spondees, from the Greek for libation, as far as I can tell - it scans as itself, anyway, like dáktylos did) match in rhyming lines - if you go through the rest of the poem and look where the stresses come, you'll hopefully see that this is generally true - at least look how the rhyming lines are roughly the same length (stress in lines can be fairly subjective, I've found).

Dactylic hexameter has been used for epic poetry in Latin and Greek (Homer, Virgil, Ovid all wrote in it, and in Latin it became effectively the default metre for poetry, like iambic pentameter in English), and has a nice rhythmic flow. I find the relative freedom of the number of syllables brings out the stresses nicely, and the fixed clósing Adónic (see what I did there...) acts like a chorus in a song, gaining momentum through repetition. It's no accident it's the stuff they built huge epic poems out of - the rhythm marches (to me it goes DUM-dum DUM-dee-dee DUM-dum, one-two one-one-two one-two) rather than bounces (DUM-di DUM-di DUM-di-di DUM-di), a feature rare in iamb-dominated English versification.

Oh, and take note of the DUM-dee-dee DUM-dum rhythm. Its technical name is an Adonic, after Sappho's use of it to go "Ó, ton Adónin!" ("O, for Adonis!", as Stephen Fry suggests for a translation into the same figure) in praise of the particular youth. Wait for fúrther discússion...

And don't worry, they won't all be this long.

Links

Well, if you're interested in a more formal definition of how dactylic hexameter works in Latin and Greek (quantitive rather than accentual), the Wikipedia page is helpful to start with. WP is generally good for the basics of anything, versification being no exception.

If you're not familiar with the strictures of the Shakespearian sonnet, again, Wikipedia is your friend.

All this talk of strongly stress-based metres with variable numbers of unstressed syllables may put you in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his sprung rhythms - he is a favourite poet of mine, but I only properly came across his stuff after I wrote most of this. Honest... Look at Pied Beauty, which does everything I could ever hope to do much better than I ever could - the mark of really good poetry; it has to break your heart a little.