Here's a line from a poem that Edgar Allen Poe wrote...I quoted it in an earlier post, but it got stuck in my head this morning, so I'll quote it again to get it out...

"Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore..."

Say it out loud. Not just whispering it over the edge of your lips, as if just giving voice to the in-your-head reading...actually say it, as if you were telling the story of a bird whose very face turns your morose wonderings into a smile. Say it out loud again, and listen to the rythym of the thing...

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore...

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/ ... it's what the English majors call trochaic octameter (pronounced tro-KAY-ick ock-TAH-meh-ter). It rolls, it kinda chugs along, and almost seems to build up speed in that sentence.

BY the GRAVE and STERN deCORum OF the COUNTenANCE it WORE. It's a marching, driving rythym. It's eight beats, almost like the "four on the floor" (thanks, Robbie, for the term) kick drum driving through two rock-and-roll measures. You could set music to this...heck, you could almost set a clock to it.

Can you imagine if we spoke like this...if we argued like this, philosophised like this, ordered our pizzas like this?

STERNS: Time itself just marches onward, driving us a tad bit closer, leaving us a wee bit colder than ever we had been before.
FOSTER: But time alone defies the present, past is just a reminiscent light from all we wished that isn't ever as we'd wish it were.

COLLEGE GUY: Pizza guy, my cheese is melting, all the sausage looks so tempting, the ripe anchovies that you sent me send the great drift wafting o'er.
PIZZA GUY: Harry, man, I love to hear it but I cannot help but fear that you may in haste have come too near it, for it's inverted in your floor.

OK, so it's not Shakespeare, but it's fun. It makes me wonder about how we're built...how we're pieced together by the Great Author. Is it cultural that we're built ready for a 4/4 rythym or that the end of each line of trochaic octets makes your gut pull forward, expecting the next? Is it conditioning that, for whatever reason, makes the 7/8 meter seem unfinished, or the "near rhyme" largely unsatisfying? Is it years of plugging through Dr. Suess and Shel Silverstein that make internal rhyme appealing, but too much internal rhyme feel contrived (no matter how natural the phrasing is, it seems)? I dunno...I feel like we're just built for it. I feel like our words, our music, our buildings, our paintings aren't so much CREATING art as reflecting it, in all of its divine pre-existence. When I write even the silly lines of verse above, there's something inside of me that is deeply gratified by finishing each line, by clearing the rythym out so I can start over, by reading it out loud and, regardless of its meaning (or lack thereof), feeling it out as its organized color leaves my mouth and circles around to my ears.

But, I may just be in one of those artistic moods. Maybe tomorrow I'll be on a mathematical kick...or maybe just hungry for pizza.

Peace,
Justin