The Strict Iambic Poem Analysis

Much of the strength of the first poem of this book rises out of its steady beat plus light variation, almost the “blood beat” of the poem with a flutter of the pulse as danger and fear threaten. Although the poem carries such a steady four beat line that the accentual meter of the Germanic poetries, almost the Old English Alliterative beat, comes to mind, this is an example not of Jennings’ usual “loose iambic” meter but of the “strict iambic” which has been termed accentual-syllable”(Fussell 11). There are eight syllables per line through-out, and Jennings appears to adapt a Romantic subject, great fear and feeling, into an eighteenth century mold. Though she has obviously reached poetic maturity, her own comment of stages of poetic growth fits into the present discussion “I believe most profoundly that all poets, good and bad, major and minor, pass, in their youth, through most of the stages in the history of English poetry itself. This is certainly so in my case” (Jennings, Let’s Have Some Poetry 46). There is not only tension in the meter itself, especially in the third stanza where the variation is greatest, but between the close , first person experiencing of the poem’s subject and the objectifying formality of meter and form. The grim message comes over

A pattern of stresses becomes discernible and aids the musicality already at work in the rhymes. “It was the amazing white, it was the way he simply/ Refused to answer our questions, it was the cold pale glance.” (104)The words fall into pattern of stresses either side of the caesura for the first two lines. Three stresses are often grouped either to the line, or within a line of up to six stresses. Some triple stresses emphasizes like a fist hammering home a belief, or a truth: “This man was dead.” There seems to be a natural movement: a bunching then relaxation of stresses with the whole poem conducted by this sense of three