30 PA RT O N E
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.A primal pulse moves these poems, footfalls from four beats to three, deep in
memory.
With its firm pace, our anonymous song has one line prompting the next:
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Then this pair balances with a second:
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!Binary like breathing in and out, or outdoors-indoors, nature-humankind, the
two couplets weave together through meter and rhyme.
First we absorb the rhythmic energy of “Western Wind” by scanning the
verse, noting where its actual spoken stresses fall, getting a sense of its physical
body—for a poem acts like an organism. And giving it our own voice, animat-
ing it, brings out the play of spoken rhythm against a metricalnorm—life versus
art, we might say.
This norm shows up clearly in lines of four “feet” or units, iambic feet.
For instance, Dickinson: “The Bráin/ is júst/ the wéight/of Gód.” An iamb
(sounds like “I am”) is two syllables, the second one stressed: “The smáll ... can
ráin, /... And Í ... agáin.” In “Western Wind,” though, iambs don’t become
the basic unit right away. It starts with a stress, “Wéstern,” then five more syl-
lables can all take stresses as the alliteration presses on wavelike. So playing off
against the metrical norm, we could actually speak the line this way: “Wéstern
wínd whén wíll thóu blów.”
Early readers bothered by that brusque beginning smoothed the line by add-
ing “O,” “O wéstern wínd.” But the words should seize us abruptly, like “smáll
ráin dówn” pressing three words together, and “Christ!” striking sooner than
expected. It ’s musically syncopated, this play of spoken rhythm against pre-fixed
meter. Just as Coleridge ’s ancient mariner grips his listener, you can’t choose
but listen to a poem that starts, “Western windwhenwill... ” While the vowel
sounds alternate eh-ih-eh-ih,those accented and alliterating w’s grab your at-
tention, like infants crying wah-h-h wah-h-h.
Not that sound alone has any built-in meaning, only that vocal music, espe-
cially vowel music, intensifies whatever it touches, imprints the verse deeper
than its mere message. In Coleridge ’s “Frost at Midnight,” snow melting from
the eaves creates “silenticicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon,” and