The Pike
Essence is beauty. Motion says essence
Is beauty, but it lives in stasis too
In Keats’ ode. In static incandescense,
As in painfully imagined blue
Sky higher than lowing sacrifice,
The heifer in her fatal garlands lives
Eternally. Yet beauty lives in ice
That breaks off, floats from glacier, and gives
Itself to long delayed and melting death,
An iceberg vast and ancient far past mind.
Beauty as young and dead as Ashtoreth
Is temporary as the arrowed hind.
00Beauty is as old and arch as Cretan
0000Gods—and swans whose cygnets have been eaten.
Just noting some things about the meter in this poem. I do NOT think this necessarily means one has to “FIX” such meter to make it all metronomically regular!! But there are some . . . divergences here from your normal practice. But don’t change it unless it’s really making it better!
In the first line it’s standard practice (and fine!) to have a trochaic foot replace an iambic one, such as “essence” does twice.
In line three the main stress in “incandescence” is on the third syllable, which is very appropriately, then, the tenth syllable, treating the final unstressed eleventh syllable as an okay part of the line as is the usual way with “feminine” rhymes. AND then you actually use that eleventh unstressed beat in the third line as a sort of pick-up note leading into the fourth line, acting as the first unstressed syllable of that line if you hear the whole thing read out loud, say. Given that, the fourth line then (with only nine syllables) actually reads as if it were a regular ten-syllable iambic pentameter line. Nice touch, actually, I think, using that variety with the form while keeping the essential read rhythm/beat.
But then your fifth line has only nine syllables also, and here the meter/beat does seem to be broken:
“Sky higher than lowing sacrifice,”—one wonders if you could just add “a” before “lowing,” yes?
I’m guessing that in line 8 you must give 3 syllables to the word “glacier” instead of two? That way the line would scan, so . . . I’m guessing, though I’m not familiar with that pronunciation in English.
The closing couplet is metrically interesting! You use a feminine rhyme, so to make it fit in ten syllables you have simply made the line regular “trochaic pentameter” instead of iambic pentameter. The usual way to keep a line iambic pentameter that ends with a feminine rhyme is simply to add an extra half foot (the eleventh unstressed syllable not being “averaged up” to make it more than pentameter). But, hey, this is a neat solution also! (One COULD add a single-syllable word such as “Such” before “Beauty” to begin line 13, and then use the unstressed eleventh syllable of that line as a sort of pick-up note to the 14th line, like you did in the third and fourth lines I discussed above; I do kind of like that option also, I think. I like the enjambment carrying straight over into “Gods” from “Cretan” across the line break, so I would NOT handle the feminine rhymes in the traditional way of giving BOTH lines 13 and 14 eleven syllables—no! It think your instincts/ear were much better than that would be! DON’T let me kill it by analysis . . .j
Do note also that the indentation of the final two lines is confused.
p.s. It’s definitely worth pondering over the details in this poem! Of course it’s right down my alley, playing off of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” one of my favorite poems. Grand themes of art/beauty and death/time/change . . .