From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
> >Robert Service?
>
> Oh, absolutely.
Trying in the cold light of dawn to unpick some of the tangles of this
wool-jersey, it strikes me that Service, for all his ur-Americanism, is
strangely English. Or European. (Which was why I raised Pierre the
Apache.)
But two poems and a general comment spring to mind.
"Eskimo Nell" (which Service, too prissy, surely +didn't+ write -- any
consensus on who +did+ write it, Doug?).
And that strangely eccentric William Empson poem, "Waiting for the End".
Those would be the specifics, and the general would be the way that trochaic
meter is the VP an the cider of syllable-accent meter.
Now, Empson was picking up on Auden, and tucked away in Auden (leaving aside
"The Platonic Blow") is some severely worrying stuff.
(Well, not, surely, as worrying as Eliot in Sweeney.)
And behind +that+ is Kipling and Danny Deever.
Seems to me, in a curious way, what Service picked up on was a peculiarly
+English+ (sic -- not Scots) tradition. Something not talked about -- the
flip side of the iamb since way back. Gascoigne in "Gascoigne's
Woodmanship".
And more recently (The Ultimate Bush Poem?) James Baxter's "Lament for
Barney Flannagen".
The Meter That Dare Not Speak Its Name ...
I have a sort-of feeling that poets avoid trochaic octosyllabic quatrains
the way confirmed drunks avoid wood alcohol.
Robin
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