In other words, lines. Why do poets use them? What are they for? How does a poet decide where a line break goes? Does it make a difference?
When I began to write I didn’t know the answers. Poems need lines because poems are songs, but that’s no help – all songs have different tunes. Rhyme helps because the rhymes tell you when to stop and start a new line. Counting syllables can spoil the meaning and the music. Counting the beat can work, but not all poems should thump like bass guitars. Some poems need the rhythm of natural conversation, and that goes for most of mine.
When I wrote ‘Baby-Sitting’, and later ‘Catrin’, I still hadn’t worked it out. In ‘October’ I’m getting better, By the time I wrote the other 5 poems in the AQA anthology – here listed in the order in which they were written: ‘Cold Knap Lake’, ‘The Field Mouse’, ‘Mali’, ‘A Difficult Birth’, and ‘On the Train’ – I think I’d learned, by reading and listening, how to do it.
The end of the line makes your eye flick left to the beginning of the next one, creating a split second pause. It’s shorter, even, than a comma, too short to breathe. The voice continues, reading across the gap. We take in and hold the line’s last word before reading the first on the next line.
The pause is a potent moment. It lays stress on the words and the lines it parts from each other. The pattern on the page is the tune. I’d call a line-break timing. As in acting, comedy, or music, you’ll only find it by listening.
The night the poet R.S.Thomas died I wrote a poem in my notebook. Over the next 24 hours I murmured these lines to myself in trains, in station buffets, trying them for size, for sound. Just as important, I listened for lines and for stanza breaks. Even when a sentence seems to be in charge of the poem, the syntax can leap the breaks. Leaping a stanza break offers a double pause, and therefore more silence, casting more light on a word, more echo, more resonance, more of a chance for the reader to pick up the tune and the meaning from the pattern. Here is the first version of ‘RS – for R.S. Thomas’, and then the final one.
version one
His death on the midnight news.
Suddenly colder. Gold September’s
driven off by something afoot
in the south-west approaches.
God’s breathing in space out there
misting the heave of the seas
dark and empty tonight except for the one frail coracle/boat
borne/carried out ot sea burning.
final version
His death
on the midnight news.
Suddenly colder.
Gold September’s driven off
by something afoot
in the south-west approaches.
God’s breathing in space out there
misting the heave of the seas
dark and empty tonight,
except for the one frail coracle
borne out to sea,
burning.