Rules for the Dance—Mary Oliver

Previously, I posted about Mary Oliver’s book, A Poetry Handbook. I read it twice, and also purchased her book Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. This book, focused on more traditional forms of poetry, is just as excellent; since it’s short, I’m on my second read through.

Just as A Poetry Handbook was poetry 101, Rules for the Dance is a 101 style survey about the elements of metered poetry. It covers what a metrical foot is, types of feet, meters, and a smattering of traditional forms like sonnets, villanelles, and ballads. Another thing I love about the book is that it includes a small anthology of metrical poems in the back. Oliver draws examples from these poems throughout the book so after learning poetic basics from excerpts, you can enjoy the poems in their entirety.

Modern poets sometimes suffer from chronological snobbery; forms are just constraints, silly rules that stifle the artist; we are superior because we discarded them. I enjoy writing free verse as much as the next poet. But I equally enjoy formal poems because they present a different kind of challenge, requiring a different kind of creativity. In Oliver’s treatment of metrical verse, there isn’t even a whiff of condescension toward formal poems (which comprise most of the poems ever written, in fact). Oliver’s devotion to these kinds of poems radiates from every page and, without a doubt, helps the reader warm to her subject.

“The Tuft of Flowers” by Robert Frost is one poem Oliver uses to illustrate how metrical verse works. It was new to me, but I immediately took to its hopeful message. In the poem, Frost finds a freshly mowed field but the mower has already gone. This leads to a melancholy reflection about our essential loneliness. But something happens that moves Frost to a realization of our essential togetherness. It is a wonderful meditation on the human condition born out of a mundane occurence. Below is the beginning of the poem, followed by a link to the whole thing. It takes less than two minutes to read.

The Tuft of Flowers
Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
 
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
 
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
 
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
 
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

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