Metre and meaning in Jane Kenyon’s ‘Song’

ABSTRACT

As experienced poets are well aware, ideas and emotions are not only contained in semantics, but in the poem as a performance of sonic, rhythmic and metrical development. The discussion of metre in ‘Song’ provides a good example of how ‘free verse isn’t free’. Jane Kenyon’s ‘Song’ is an excellent example of how formal techniques of metre can be employed by lyric free verse poets to great effect. In ‘Song’ suspense and tension is created between triple metre and two kinds of duple. This metre-induced suspense is woven into the poem’s meaning. There is a pattern in which the triple metre states its theme, the duple metre states its contrasting theme, and the two clash during the poem’s development. The metrical motifs used in ‘Song’ consist of trochees to express the natural world, while using dactyls to underscore more prosaic actions in the foreground. Finally, iambs create gravitas, complication, and resolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• craft
• critical reading
• Jane Kenyon
• prosody
• lyric poetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Michael Jackman holds an MA in literature and creative writing from the University of Louisville, and an MFA in poetry from Spalding University. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Indiana University Southeast. His work has been published in Jewish Currents, The Thomas Merton Seasonal, The Louisville Review, Poetica, The New Sound: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Arts & Literature, and others.

Notes

1 The New Yorker version omits the word ‘hotel,’ rendering that line less symmetrical and less effective.

2 Credit: Jane Kenyon, ‘Song’ from Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.