Free Will and Free Verse

It is a mystery to me how a poet determines where to break a line. I would love to learn the secret; the code that makes all the difference. I have been dissecting Williams' “A Sort of a Song” for some time now and am not sure I’m closer to an answer! The biggest factor I can think of to explain the poet’s decision is obviously timing. Where do they want the reader to make the slightest pause with their eye and ear, to help separate it from prose? After all, if they wanted to write prose, they would write a simple paragraph, or prose poetry—I suppose! So in the case of this poem, which is obviously brilliant and contains the famous line we’ve been asked to explain, “No ideas but in things,” why did Williams break it as he did? I will do my best to come up with some ideas…

I think regardless of punctuation and whether or not the line is enjambed, the reader pauses - ever so briefly - at the end of the physical line, simply because of the way we’re taught to read. So breaking the lines more frequently causes you to take in each separate line nearly as an individual image, with its own sound. So, in the first stanza, I think Williams wants you to take it in slowly, just as he is describing the snake, waiting. Instead of giving you the line all at once, “Let the snake wait under his weed,” he breaks the images up. “Let the snake wait under”….where? a slight pause. “his weed.” The next line ends in “writing,” which accentuates the importance of composition. He speeds things up in the next line by giving us more syllables, and ends the line again on a closed consonant sound, “sharp.” The harshness of this sound almost prepares us for the “strike” in the next line. He ends the stanza with just 1 word, 2 syllables (and he ends the poem with 2 syllables, most likely no accident). The word is “sleepless,” which clues us into the action coming in the second stanza.

Line breaks are also a very musical choice. Although it’s free verse with no set meter or rhyme scheme, there is still a rhythm the poet wants to achieve. In the second stanza of this poem, it’s almost fun to say the first line, “through metaphor to reconcile.” It makes sense to end the line there. I wish I could write musically through my blog: da DA DA DA da DA DA DA. Williams only wants to put so many syllables in a line, syllables that sound “right” when spoken as one.

I think it’s very interesting that in the 3rd and 4th lines of the second stanza he inserts his famous quote, parenthetically, buried really, in between 2 words, “Compose. Invent!” I take this burial as his way of telling the reader he is calling up his subconscious, in the middle of these two lines. How is he going to compose? Invent? What’s it going to take for the flower to split through the rocks? Let’s put it right in the middle of these 2 words, which would have each been their own line, but his subconscious broke through. Again, he ends the poem with those two syllables, “the rocks,” to mirror the sound of the last line in the first stanza.

Williams in particular had a way of saying multitudes with very few words, when he desired. I thought maybe there was a “secret code” in this one, but what I came up with is that he wrote it in 2 stanzas, 6 lines each. 27 syllables in stanza one, 35 in stanza two. Not exactly a major decoding breakthrough. All I know is it sounds beautiful when you read it!

Overall I think it’s a poet’s personal choice. How do they want the poem to sound, spoken? What words do they want hanging in the air, even briefly, as the reader/listener takes it in? How can they change it up so that it doesn’t get sing-songy and monotonous and hold the reader’s attention?