In Pursuit of the Pearl in James Merrill’s First Poems

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

  

     Readers who are neither professors nor poets are likely to stress the communication function of literature at the expense of its essential aesthetic role.  At its most vulgar this tendency appears when a schoolteacher asks a class “What is the poet trying to say?”  Scholars, too, are accustomed to tease out meaning – political, psychological, spiritual – from artistic texts as though these are subjects about which the writer may educate the reader.  While such inquiries are not altogether groundless, the fact is, of course, that the only field in which artists are expert is likely to be art.  In essence, art is self-justifying play.  All arts rise from people entertaining themselves and others by performing recreational symbolic manipulation.  Among the chief pleasures of this universal human activity is the experience of beauty in formally structured patterns, patterns of sound, of meaning, of color and movement, patterns satisfying for their own sake, regardless of reference to anything in lived experience. 

     The role of formal beauty in art is evident in forms like dance, music, and abstract painting but it is never absent from literature as well.  One advantage of critical discussion of theme is that the issues can often be more or less demonstrable, whereas perception of beauty is ultimately subjective.  One may prove that a given work has been considered beautiful by the best authorities for centuries, one may document one’s own motives for applauding a poem’s form, yet it remains impossible to force another to experience pleasure in consuming it. 

     This does not mean, however, that critics do not present judgements of value.  The primary role of a journalistic book reviewer is evaluative, and more scholarly commentators do not shrink from gauging aesthetic quality.  Indeed, their opinions are often spirited.  In appraising the work of James Merrill, many critics express an odd ambivalence.  He is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest American poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet virtually all discussion of his work includes descriptive adjectives that foreground the poet’s mastery of what Pound called melopoeia while treating this skill as a weakness.  Readers’ sensibilities are doubtless shaped by the fact that sound is the most neglected aspect of poetry today.

     In the years since Merrill’s First Poems, poetry has proceeded ever further on the path toward prosiness and the colloquial, and sound has been neglected to the point that it is imperceptible to many readers.  Like Roethke and Lowell the fashions of the time led Merrill to loosen his practice of prosody, yet from the start many readers found his work precious and over-refined.  Even in an era when academic poetry governed most critics’ standards, these poems struck readers as insufficiently vulnerable.  Merrill attracted curiously qualified praise in which his expertise was cause for applause but also for suspicion. 

     This oddly ambiguous rhetorical pattern describing Merrill emerges clearly from a perusal of New York Times reviews of his books.   The review of First Poems in the New York Times heralded the book and called attention to the poet’s “superb elegance” heralding “the rise of a new American formalism.”  Yet the critic’s reservations, though muted, were clear in the review’s title “Mannered World,” and his later reference to the poet’s “highly-mannered style.”  The Times’ next reviewer felt it necessary to mount a defense, asserting that “The verbal elegance, and the Jamesian or Proustian world he draws his people and images from, are neither frivolous nor precious.”  The third Times critic to treat Merrill’s poetry constructed a miniature imaginative flight on the now familiar theme.  “One could imagine him (or the persona of his poems) aging into a perfectly dapper Henry James villain: a Gilbert Osmond, to whom life consists of figurines to be manipulated. Brilliant, technically flawless, terribly aloof, involved in their own artifice.” He finds, however, in Water Street, an increased “humility,” as though the Christian virtues had aesthetic currency.  The reviewer of Nights and Days balances Merrill’s “suavity and technical polish” against a newfound “complexity of feeling,” noting in sum the same bipolar opposition: “This poetry fascinates and exercises the intelligence as much as it liberates the emotions.”  The commentator on The Fire Screen repeats the pattern.  In an article titled “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” he describes Merrill’s work as “elegant and cosmopolitan . . .  decorative, sumptuous, tinged with world-weariness . . .rarified” and regards the most successful poem as that least assertive of form, thus “freeing” the subject and  “compelling it to speak for itself” unlike a poem in a more demanding form which would hold “its subject still by enclosing it in a complex frame.”  Well after Merrill’s death the theme continued, with the Times writer noting his poetry’s “high, almost lacquered finish” and its “refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment,” while regretting his being “in thrall to a certain kind of poetic decorum.”  He is “a hopeless voluptuary when it comes to language” whose “hyper-refined style” recalls the Decadents.”  In short, he is “recherché” due to the unfortunate tendency for his “gifts with language” to “become his vice.” [1]

     A procession of reviewers continued with the same theme since, suggesting again and again that virtuoso technique, while worthy of praise, yet was likely to signal some sort of emotional emptiness.  A few further examples of this all-but-universal judgement will suffice. 

     Secondary codes developed to imply this sort of ambivalent assessment of Merrill’s achievement include references to Wallace Stevens and to Mozart.  Helen Vendler, a partisan of Merrill’s oeuvre, after stating the opposition in her title “Ardor and Artifice,” ensures its understanding by the subtitle “The Mozartian touch of a master poet,” and proceeds to build her essay on it.  She notes opponents of Merrill’s receiving the 1973 Bollingen Prize had objected to his poetry, “a hermetic cultivation of one's sensibility and a fastidious manipulation of received forms."  Observing that the poet was consistently accused of “snobbery, affectation, preciousness, artifice, perversity, and elitism,” she enlists the author himself to concede that his early poems were a "melodic, empty-headed fin de siècle sort of thing." [2] 

     One sympathetic reader says that Merrill was a poet who preferred “wit over emotion,” who “embroidered his effects, unable to let loose in a soulful voice.” [3]  Another critic has felt it necessary to rehabilitate First Poems though her appreciation is limited by calling the poems “borrowed,” “an imitation” with “a cold, transparent medium intervening between the self and the world,” “all dressed up without much of a place to go,” and lacking “the animating spark of individual experience.”  She even accuses the elegant Merrill of “awkwardness.” [4]             

     As Vendler’s quotation of the poet’s own self-denigrating characterization of his work suggests, Merrill had heard this opinion commonly enough that he adopted it in part.  In an untitled poem from 1972 (which he chose to highlight with italics to indicate its significance in 1982) Merrill characterizes his early work in a warm but somewhat condescending tone, rich in aristocratic indulgence, using the most unassuming terms. 

  

-- Not after all a work so vile

That portions even now aren’t guaranteed

To make the simplehearted read

And who know better, smile.                [5]

 

 The most that can be said of these poems then is that they “blaze tinily,” and the awkward, slightly unusual adverb reinforces the author’s humble pose.  Of course this is in effect nothing but an unusually gracefully performed modesty topos, demonstrating rather than apologizing for literary sophistication.

     There can be doubt that Merrill is a highly self-conscious practitioner who makes considerable use of both pure sound as well as of montages of ideas and images.  The care with which he builds his lines is evident to the analyst.  Merrill’s mid-twentieth century reaction to the danger of meter and rhyme sounding child-like, mechanical, insincere, or off-putting is not to abandon traditional forms but to loosen them comfortably. 

         One need only open First Poems and glance at “The Black Swan” (also the title of the poet’s first chapbook, privately printed) to note the poet’s concern with form.  The poem’s five stanzas are visually similar, looking much like rhyme royal, an intriguing invitation to the reader much as the entrance to a meticulously tended French-style garden beckons toward the stroller.  The number of feet per line varies  5-3-5-5-5-3-4 (pentameter, trimeter, pentameter, pentameter, pentameter, trimeter, tetrameter) and the feet are basically iambic.  Merrill said of the iamb in general that “no other meter will do,” calling the foot “our virtual birthright,” [6] but this basic backbeat is subject to considerable variation.  The rhyme scheme is always AABCABC, but the rhymes are virtually always partial. 

     An appended chart provides the data, but simply reading the text reveals his approach at once.  Merrill has composed an elaborate stanza of his own invention which is yet similar enough to earlier forms to seem natural, yet it is clearly “modern” due to the considerable irregularity of the metrical and rhyme patterns.  A courtly dance is in progress, but it is not one of absolutely predictable patterns.  Merrill’s form is sufficiently complex that the arrival of rhymes and the length of lines are often something of a surprise in spite of the overall regularity.

     The sound structure of the poem has an appeal of its own, accessible even to a non-English speaker, yet the melody, as always, is functional and expressive in support of meaning.  As the present concern is not hermeneutic, a few examples must suffice. 

     The poem begins not with an iamb but with an arresting downbeat like the “Hwaet!” that opens Beowulf.  The last line of that stanza is hypercatalectic, i. e. adding a syllable, indicating in the pace the excitement of the poet’s suspended “wonder.”  The fourth line of the second stanza includes an extra syllable in the second foot corresponding to the “thing in itself,” an object then described in regular feet.  In the last seven lines of the final stanza a regular pentameter is followed by a regular tetrameter and then four lines more disordered in meter as the speaker accepts his relationship to the extraordinary swan.

     Meanwhile, the rhyme words squirm and turn, differing with each other as much as they agree.  Thus “lawns” and “swans” are all but harmonious, while the word “draw,” with its increased difference, indicates the problem poised by the “private chaos” that accompanies the fine bird.  The effect is increased by the comparative extent to which “splendor” and “wonder” and “wake” and “lake” consort well together.

     The expressive potential of Merrill’s sound effects is secondary, though, to the altogether formal pleasure of observing theme and variations, expectations satisfied or turned in the serial experience of the reader or listener following the poem as it unfolds.  With line lengths and rhymes in flux, yet under the governance of an overall pattern, the poem is at once formally elegant and unpredictable.  Merrill resembles in form the highly conventionalized yet ever-fresh structures of a Bach fugue. 

     Those critics who find Merrill too skillful a poet link this characteristic with a lack of affect, a deficiency in emotion, yet “The Black Swan” ends, having passed through “wonder,” “pain,” and “grief,” with a declaration both direct and passionate: “I love the black swan.”  One need not venture far into biographical details (he called his professor Kimon Friar “the black swan”) to see how in fact he foregrounds feeling not only in his first book’s first poem, but throughout his career and, incidentally, his life. 

     The theme is elaborated in “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards.”  A tour de force with in six sections in varying forms, each of them a sort of cabaret song detailing one variety of love-longing, united by the opening and closing mentions of “sweet air,” suggesting the goodness of life in spite of doubts, pains, regrets, and frozen feet. 

      Two eleven-syllable lines conclude section one after six with ten syllables each, as the “hungering waves are both ornamented and limited by the thistle’s pain.  The rhymes are tightly but irregularly wrapped with an ABCBCADD pattern though a, b, and c all share the vowel-r sound.  The d rhymes state the poem’s central tension, the linkage of pain and pleasure, with the “pearl-eaters” a distant ideal of satisfied desire.  

     The second section not only builds a shapely self-contained verbal structure; it also plays against the first.  Instead of the insistent if off-base rhyme scheme of the first section there seem to be no end-rhymes at all (only the pleasant internal echo of “rambler”/”brambles” in the first stanza) until the ninth line when “blows”/”grows” comes as a surprise, only to be capped by the tenth line which resounds rhyming fully with the fifth.  Lines five and ten are also each eleven rather than ten syllables in length though in these stanzas twelve syllable lines appear as well. 

     The third section switches to shorter lines suggesting children’s verse.  Doubtless to balance the expectation of heavily stressed meters and full rhymes associated with the nursery.  The syllable count varies randomly from five to seven while rhymes are etiolated almost out of recognition, with the first two being the ironic pair of “nursery”/”mercenary” and the sinister one of “witches”/”matches.”  The light expectation associated with children’s poetry is belied by the haunting third stanza in which people, like flowers, either “fall helter-skelter” or, turning “wry like thistles,” like Keats’ bees in the Autumn Ode, deceive themselves into believing that “each latest/ Is safest, is sweetest.”

     Four architectural octets, recalling the septets of “The Black Swan” form the fourth section which shifts abruptly from the nursery to the drawing room and the enactment of an ambiguous love relationship in languorous lines recalling “Prufrock.”  Here the half-rhymes again are regular in their appearance ABABCDDC.  The shapely form of then stanzas is defined by the line lengths, basically pentameter with lines one, two, three, five, six, and eight approximating pentameters (though varying between ten and fourteen syllables) and lines four and seven trimeters (between five and seven syllables).

     The poet disorients his readers once more with the fifth section, an unlikely representation of the pains of love in a vignette of Henry IV seeking absolution in Canossa for what was essentially a political struggle with Pope Gregory VII in five-line stanzas with partial rhymes ABBAA.  In an example of Merrill’s meticulous attention, the penultimate line “Whatever I tasted, wherever I strayed” stands out with eleven syllables slowing and spreading the implications of the magical moment at which everything the poet encounters becomes “at once of pure pearl made.”   He here resumes the pearl imagery which had been running underground since section one and which is also informed by earlier texts from the parable of the “pearl of great price” in Matthew through the fourteenth century Pearl and beyond.  Taking readers by surprise with a sort of verbal shell game, just when Merrill seemed to have wandered from his theme, he lands suddenly in what looks like its ecstatic culmination.

     In section six, the final lyric of the variations, iambic pentameter dominates, though the syllable count ranges from ten to thirteen and even partial rhymes are so dispersed as to vanish.  Yet this conclusion is a ringing call, as the poet affirms the quest for love, however imperfect, reaching a total acceptance of the flip side of the erotic coin in what he calls the “sweet air” of the final words, which then reader realizes had been implicit from the start, but which has been justified by the series of lyrics.      

     What is most important about the form of both “The Black Swan” and “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards” is not the specific forms the poet employs or the alterations that enrich the poems meanings, but rather the fact that any reader or listener will perceive structures in the sound.  Whether consciously or not, the poem’s consumers react to the patterning.  Merrill might be compared to the masters of bebop whose wild polyrhythms and changes on melody could only be heard if traces of enough regularity to create expectations persisted.  Careful analysis of Chaucer or Shakespeare reveals considerable variation even in these canonical poets, but Merrill’s choice of rough cut rhymes and cadences that stumble or skip as often as they march distinguishes his work. 

     If the poet is showing off, it would be a shame were the reader not to enjoy the display.  Merrill’s pyrotechnics may not be to the taste of all, but they are masterfully constructed in a way impressive to anyone sensitive the sound value of words.  It is as theoretically absurd to suggest that too great a skill in managing the sound of a poem can entail a lack of strong feeling as to suggest that excessive brilliance in imagery or in narrative might imply some other faults.  In fact there is no reason to regard artistic technique and passion as in some way opposed when in fact the former is so often in service to the latter.

     Critics are simply wrong when they suggest that technical virtuosity is anything but a strength.  The error arises due to the fact that many readers, both lay and professional, retain Romantic assumptions.  The recreational manipulation of symbols called literature may cultivate the illusion of passionate self-expression.  Yet the author also may strive for a variety of effects.  A writer may, for instance, construct a description of a place or a personality.  Another may be more tendentious, stressing theme over other elements.  Story-telling may dominate some novels or poems.  The creation of beauty is a universal artistic goal; little wonder that in some works this foundational element is foregrounded.

     Most works include an array of these aesthetic ends, though they are not mixed in equal portions.  None is inherently superior to another.  A description, a didactic theme, a good story, a verbal object of startling beauty, each must be judged to fail or succeed on its own terms.  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the fictions of Ronald Firbank are certainly not to everyone’s taste, but they have consistently found admiring readers.  Should Merrill’s fate be similar, he will be in good company. 

 

  

 

1.  Anthony Harrigan, “Mannered World,” New York Times, July 8, 1951; William Meredith, “Images and Reality,“ May 3, 1959; X. J. Kennedy, “Four Fashions of Contemporary Verse,” New York Times, November 25, 1962; Gene Baro, “New In Poetry,” New York Times, June 26, 1966; Daniel Hoffman, “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” New York Times, August 2, 1970; August Kleinzahler, “Changing Light,” New York Times, November 7, 2008.

 

2.  The New Yorker, March 4, 2001.

 

3.  David Mason, “Merrill’s Intimations,” The Hudson Review Summer 2015.

 

4.  Rachel Hadas, “James Merrill's Early Work: A Revaluation,” The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4337717. 

 

5.  Merrill, James, From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (1982).

 

6.  Both phrases are quoted in Bill Pahlka, “James Merrill's Secret Scansions,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 59, No. 4 (winter 2017). 

Formal Play in a Canso by Cercamon

Though the reader without Old Occitanian may wish to consult a more literal version in connection with this essay, the finest translation is probably Ezra Pound’s which he regarded as the most successful in his “Langue d’Oc” sequence. Typically, Pound makes quite free with his original, not only placing the stanzas in a sequence different from all the manuscripts, but contributing as well a novel spelling of his author’s name, evidently with the aim of pointing toward its etymology. See “Descant on a Theme by Cerclamon” in The Little Review vol. 15, no. 1 (which bears on its cover the slogan “Making no compromise with the Public Taste”).


     Cercamon in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” (“When the sweet breeze sours”) announces his theme unambiguously at the outset as “Amor” (“love”), but what follows is more a formal unfolding of the theme in the manner of a fugue than it is an emotional outpouring. The polarity of the very first line is expressed using terms of weather, animal behavior, and then the persona’s experience in turn. The opposition implied in the rhythmic alternation of the seasons carries affective associations for the sensitive human consciousness which finds springtime delightful in the spring while the fall is unwelcome. From the start the grand, purely abstract music of the cosmos is complicated by the emotion of a human subject for whom the most emphatic form of passion is surely Amor.

     The energy of the emotional struggle for love is the dynamo that sustains the entire poem, but the turnings of amorous fortune are played out against a grand pattern unsusceptible to sentiment. Like most love songs in troubadour times and today in popular culture, this is largely a lack-of-love song, but it oscillates. Every verse contains references to the potential both of suffering and joy that desire entails. There is no progress, no narrative; the poem ends where it began. Cercamon’s focus is the tension itself rather than any fulfilment or other resolution. Rather than satisfy desire or, in the manner of the birds, fall silent, the poet makes a poem of his own frustration, turning pain into the stuff of beauty.

After establishing the polarity with a simple twist of the reverdie introduction that presents the reader with a symbolic paradox. With the coming of autumn, harbinger of the year’s death, though the birds cease their singing, his own song rises in place of theirs, but his is a radically ambivalent melody, one in which the passion of the original is transmuted into a beautiful formal pattern like his rhyme scheme.

     When considered not as sympathetic emotional states but rather as abstract signs, the alternation between the joy of love and the suffering of rejection becomes a dance, beautiful for its own sake. It is peculiarly appropriate to love, in which desire is often intensified and prolonged by denial of satisfaction. Troubadour poetry is capable of considerable coarseness, but in this poem the pressure is raised to such an extent that a single metaphor such as “joja” (“jewel”) becomes highly erotic and the poet thrills to such kinky imagery as to imagine himself “lassat e pres” (“tied up and taken”); he is excited to thinks of himself spending two or three years in her service before receiving any recognition.

     Rhymes always call attention to themselves. Often a poem may be traced through its rhyming words alone. Elaborate rhyme patterns were cultivated in the rhyme rich language of Old Occitan which can rapidly waylay the translator in this age in which poetic sound effects in the far less hospitable American English are rarely the writer's focus. Though Troubadour forms were highly demanding, they were endlessly flexible at the same time. Troubadours prided themselves on their originality and novelty and were able to freely tailor new patterns to suit the material at hand.

     Listeners were capable of perceiving even distant or subtle sound relationships, and, in the absence of the music, in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” the rhymes are the most prominent structuring device. The poem as a whole rhymes ababcd with a double tornada cd cd. The same rhyme sounds are sustained throughout the poem’s fifty-eight lines, a virtually impossible task to duplicate in English in which chiming rhymes would sound childish in any event.

     All the stanzas with the exception of seven end on a note of hope, using words such as “plazer” (“pleasure”), “lezer” (“leisure”), “ver” (“truth”), and even an image of her going to bed (“anar jazer”), thus sustaining the poet’s quest in spite of the lady’s showing no apparent receptiveness to his advances. In the double tornada the signals are balanced, reasserting uncertainty.

     In the opening stanza all the rhyme words have associations of coercion and rejection except two which have to do with singing, a negative use (the birds’ ceasing their song) and a positive one (the poet’s beginning his). Thus the problem of the poem is posed and the solution in art suggested. More subtly, in the eight remaining stanzas, the rhyme words in the quatrains are consonant in nine instances (five good and four bad), contrasting in two, and neutral in six (a neutral word is associated with a good one three times and with a word with bad connotations three times).

     This level of symmetry indicates not planning but a highly sensitive intuition about constructing a poem. The writer applies rhetorical figures like dabs of paint in an abstract composition, seeing to it that looks or sounds right without having to specify a reason. Art excels at expressing the often deeply ambivalent feelings that accumulate around themes such as love. The aim is not to say that love is this or that but most often some form of both and neither. Love may be quite different person to person or day by day.

     The texture of sound patterns with rhyme at the fore constitutes then both a formal pattern with an appeal of its own and a reinforcement of the poem’s self-contradictory investigation of the experience of love. As in tragedy the structural design of the poetry’s melody is a redemption, with its artistic control exerting a power over circumstances over which humankind has no other power. The poet sings his way melodiously through self-declared suffering and thus maintains dignity and pride in spite of helplessness. Desire becomes nearly a force of nature coming and going like the tide or the daylight, but, like Venus, rising and falling with rhythmic regularity.




Appendix: Rhyme Words

The patterns of rhyme words may be traced in this list in which b indicates a negative association, implying constraint or frustration, g means a good one, n is neutral, and s reference to song. Translations of the rhyme words themselves follow.

1-6
bs
ns
b
b

7-12
gg
bg
n
g

13-18
gg
gg
n
g

19-24
nb
ng
n
g

25-30
bb
gn
n
g

31-36
gg
gn
g
b

37-42
bb
bb
g
g

43-48
bb
bn
b
g

49-54
gg
gb
g
g

55-56
b
g

56-57
g
b







1-6
becomes bitter/ language
branch/ sing
taken
power

7-12
won/ acquire
suffering/ desire
thing
have

13-18
rejoice/ dumbfounded
so much/ desire
it [seems]
know

19-24
saw/ darkens
glove/ shines
might have
go to bed

25-30
tremble/ might die
awake/ ask
three
truth

31-36
healed/ figure out
great/ when
mercy
fall down

37-42
maddens/ mocks
mute/ behind
good
pleasure

43-48
die/ killed
command/ semblance
ought, must
to see

49-54
enjoy/ fine, true
make love/ deception
courtly
leisure

55-56
annoys
retain

56-57
court
despairs

Distant Rhyme in Two Medieval English Lyrics

I
It is a fundamental paradox of language that, as the Muses told Hesiod, it both lies and speaks the truth, expresses and conceals, represents and obscures. This antinomy is a constant subject for poetic language in particular which is, in Eco's terms, “ambiguous and self-focusing.” Two of the most frequently used devices in aesthetic texts — metaphor and rhyme — mirror this simultaneous likeness and difference. As such they may in their least significant uses merely mark off a text as poetic, but they are more likely to bear considerably more information.

Irregular uses such as “distant rhyme” in which the sound similarities occur separated by many lines of verse present an intriguing special case. Eva Guggenheimer’s Rhyme Effects and Rhyming Figures which finds meaning in inexact correspondences separated by twenty lines of epic verse suggests the attractiveness of the territory, to say nothing of Saussure's fanciful anagrams.) Without attempting any general theory on the specific properties of the phenomenon, I would like to offer a few observations on the use of distant rhyme in two Middle English poems. I have selected one example in which the relevant rhymes occur as part of a regular stanzaic pattern and one in which they do not, and regarding each I comment first on formal properties and second on thematics.


II
In the well-known “Bitwene Mersh and Averil” the rhyme scheme is ABABBBBC (stanza) DDDC (burden). The C lines here have an obvious structural utility. As the most consistently recurring end-sound of the piece, they bind it together. More specifically, they link each stanza with the burden and relieve the monotony of the series of B rhymes (which have created a situation in which even a non-rhyming line would be acceptable, perhaps even a relief). As a formal element, too, these rhymes raise the historical question of the relation of this sort of lyric stanza to the carol or other dance forms on the one hand and to the processional hymn on the other. Further, and more problematically, this pattern could be treated as an elaboration on the BBBA CCCA AA identified with Moorish poetry in which the A rhymes bind the whole.

Thematically, the rhyme has the definitive effect of returning the subject with an appropriately obsessive chime always to Alisoun. Just as her name concludes each refrain, it is partially contained and thus evoked in each stanza’s end. The specific rhyme words of these A lines explicate as well as buttress the poem’s theme: her “bandoun” is the problem of the poem; “adoun” emphasizes the gravity of the lover's distress; while “toun” strikes me as a throwaway conventionalized choice without specific weight in this instance. “Roun,” the last rhyme, directs attention to the poem as a poem, as though in the completion of the form Alisoun herself has been transcended by the power of language. The tension thus relieved, the piece can end.


III
In “Worldes blisse, have good day” the rhyme pattern is AABBAABA, CCCCDDC, CCEEEAA. This melodious and complex pattern, while not altogether predictable includes a return at the end of each of the first two stanzas to the rhyme of that stanza’s beginning, and at the end of the third a return to the rhyme of the opening of stanza one. This knits the structure neatly, reproducing the smaller in the larger and defining a pleasant circularity for the whole.

The rhyme words here indeed trace the poem’s development in miniature. The first two A rhymes are imbedded in an apotropaic formula increasing in vehemence from the ironically dismissive “good day” to the command “away.” One might say the day must “away” to clear the ground for the speaker’s meditation.

It is noteworthy that these opening rhymes are spelled (and pronounced?) differently from all the other A rhymes as though the disappearance of the –ay marks the success of the command of lines 1-2. “Me,” the next A rhyme, places the poet's project internally, while “tree” and “three” (evoking the Trinity) announce the subject and means of access. These images are themselves insufficient for his purposes, however, and the second stanza proceeds to the devotional exercise of visualizing the Passion. Its very lack of A rhymes sets it apart as a separate contemplative act. Finally, the likeness in difference between the “thee” which is Christ and the “me” as worshiper encapsulates much of the mystery of Christian myth.