Wet Evening in April
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
the melancholy.
~~
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
from Kavanagh's Weekly, April 1952
[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]
Patrick Kavanagh biography
Christian Volmer, Birds on Tree in Winter, 2022 (detail). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Free verse: The thought, "No rhyme or reason." No consistent meter pattern. No rhyme. Following the rhythm of natural speech. Lines of any length, a single word to much longer.
ReplyDelete"reason: a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event." Oxford Languages
"The definition of vers libre is: a verse-formal based upon cadence. To understand vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader. Or, to put it another way, unrhymed cadence is "built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. Free verse within its own law of cadence has no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' if it had." ~ poet Amy Lawrence Lowell
Cathleen Harvea