Philip Larkin is a poet I’ve liked for many years. About four years ago, I read Larkin’s Complete Works. Among his many free verse poems are formal poems, some of which used forms I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure if these were forms Larkin invented or are just lesser used. A couple of them intrigued me enough that I diagrammed their structure so I could use them for my own poems. Over the years, I’ve written poems based on forms by Ben Jonson, Christina Rossetti, and Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a fun exercise that forces my brain to take a road “less traveled.”
Larkin’s “The Spirit Wooed” employs a form I was not familiar with. The rhythm of the poem is iambic, but the meter changes each line: trimeter, dimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter.
The rhyme scheme is also unique. Line one rhymes with the third foot of line three, and line two rhymes with the fourth foot of line three.
My newest book, The Anonymity of Waiting, includes a poem I wrote using the form from Larkin’s “The Spirit Wooed.” I can’t remember now if the title or the poem came first; I think the poem grew out of the title. Either way, it was a bit of serendipity that the titles are so similar.
The Spirit Wounds
Lashed to a mast, I hang
in a world bleached
to nakedness by angry, seething
sunlight shattering itself on churning currents.
There is no wind. The gulls
cry out in the
salt air as they circle above
the boat, which is still and dead in the water.
When I imagined filling
and billowing
with wind, a wind willing, blowing
the ship along as if by some spirit,
I never dreamed I would
see days like this:
transfixed on this rough wood pike, listless,
and left in this asphyxiating calm.
A Wandering Minstrel 