The trees are in their autumn beauty, the woodland paths are dry, under the October twilight the water mirrors a still sky; upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans.
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” by William Butler Yeats
I attended a thoughtful, thought-provoking lecture by the author, Garth Greenwell, entitled “What Prose Writers Can Learn from Poems.” For years he wrote poetry before turning to prose and writing his award-winning novel, What Belongs to You, followed by his award-winning second novel, Cleanness.
This poem is one of his favorites. How does the opening sentence of Yeats’ poem influence Greenwell’s prose? One bridge between the two forms for him is the meter of the poem, the heavy stresses and the light stresses. The rhythm follows that of the ballad poem, with the first and third lines carrying four heavy stresses (syllable sounds) and the second and fourth lines with three heavy stresses. Separated into lines, the poem looks like this (the heavy stresses are capitalized):
The TREES are IN their AUtumn BEAty, (4)
The WOODland PATHS are DRY, (3)
UNder the OcTOber TWIlight the WAter (4)
MIRrors a STILL SKY; (3)
uPON the BRIMming WAter aMONG the STONES (5)
are NINE-and-FIFty SWANS. (3)
The poem primarily uses the iamb, which is a rhythm of one light stress followed by one heavy stress. Our ears are very familiar with this sound since iambic pentameter is the most widely used line in English metrical verse. (uPON/those BOUGHS/which SHAKE/aGAINST/the COLD –Shakespeare, Sonnet, LXXIII). Or the song, ROW, ROW, ROW your BOAT…
Yeats shakes up the traditional ballad by including the fifth line with five heavy stresses. That’s something prose writers need to do: disrupt patterns to mimic human speech. For prose writers, in the absence of poetry’s line breaks, we have syntactic phrase groupings. To put it simply, we use punctuation, commas, semicolons, and colons to group together phrases. The phrase is the basic unit of analysis for prose rhythm.
Yeats also uses a comma splice, which Greenwell also uses in his prose. Rather than a coordinating conjunction or a semicolon, two independent clauses are connected with a comma. English teachers hate this. Yeats pisses off them to keep the iamb rhythm. If he listened to his English teacher, he would have written it like this:
The trees are in their autumn beauty, and the woodland paths are dry, and under the October twilight the water mirrors a still sky; upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans.
But that would throw off the rhythm. I recently finished teaching a style class this semester, and one student said it was so helpful to learn when she could defy her English teacher to create meaning at the sentence level. If you need it, here’s your permission: you can use a comma splice to create rhythm. (You can also use it to create speed, a tumbling forward momentum).
Greenwell has memorized Yeats’ poem, (Yeats' poem), and many others. The process of memorization embeds the rhythms in your body, he says, and he feels the magnetic pull of the rhythm as he writes. Reading poetry is a critical part of his writerly practice.
How do you memorize poems? Greenwell copies a poem and carries it around with him. When he’s waiting in line, riding a bus, instead of scrolling on his phone, he memorizes the lines of the poem.
I’m adopting this practice. Maybe we all take this on. Let’s call it a New Year’s Resolution.
Try it!
The Yeats’ opening has four base clauses. Your first base clause has four heavy stresses. If you have a background in music, you’re at an advantage and can probably hear the beats. Even if you do, read it out loud to hear the stresses. If you still can’t hear them, a dictionary shows you which syllable is heavily stressed.
Add a comma and write a second base clause with three heavy stresses.
Add a comma and write a subordinate phrase with four heavy stresses. Note here that the fourth stress comes from the third base clause, which is “the water mirrors a still sky.” You don’t have to do that, but it’s an option.
In that third base clause, include three heavy stresses.
Add a semicolon, then a subordinate clause with five heavy stresses,
Here is your fourth base clause with three heavy stresses.
You can go through it again and see if you’ve included primarily iamb rhythm.
Let me know how it goes!
About me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. As an adjunct professor, I’ve also taught Techniques of Long Fiction, Architecture of Prose, Workshops, Characterization, Making Metaphor, Point of View, and many other classes. My new novel, Afterword, will be published by Clash Books in May 2023 and is available for preorder.
If you get a chance, I highly recommend Garth Greenwell’s classes. I found his class through The Shipman Agency, www.theshipmanagency.com
This was hard! My highlighter was busy marking stresses, but I lost the count. Is it 4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 4?
Winter overtakes the pleasure garden, overhead brittle remnants of bouyant, twirling vines, a brush of rime crunches underfoot; songbirds flit and hide, mute ushers of spring to come.
I have just written the full Yeats poem out in the back of my notebook to read at the train station and other waiting situations - what a brilliant idea - thank you! :)