A Perfect Market

Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,

Or, even better, sing them. Common speech

Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized

In poetry. He had much more to teach,

But first he taught that. Several poets paid

Him heed. The odd one even made the grade,

Building a pretty castle on the beach.

But on the whole it’s useless to point out

That making the thing musical is part

Of pinning down what you are on about.

The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art:

All this is patent to the gifted few

Who know, before they can, what they must do

To make the mind a spokesman for the heart.

As for the million others, they are blessed:

This is their age. Their slapdash in demand

From all who would take fright were thought expressed

In ways that showed a hint of being planned,

They may say anything, in any way.

Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?

Nothing to study, nothing to understand.

And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme

And reason is a technically precise

Response to the confusion of a time

When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.

It isn’t that their deafness fails to match

The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.

No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice

Of idle talk. Always a blight before,

It finds a place today, fulfills a need:

As those who cannot write increase the store

Of verses fit for those who cannot read,

For those who can do both the field is clear

To meet and trade their wares, the only fear

That mutual benefit might look like greed.

It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange

Of showpiece and attention that has been

There since the cavemen took pains to arrange

Pictures of deer and bison to be seen

To best advantage in the flickering light.

Our luck is to sell tickets on the night

Only to those who might know what we mean,

And they are drawn to us by love of sound.

In the first instance, it is how we sing

That brings them in. No mystery more profound

Than how a melody soars from a string

Of syllables, and yet this much we know:

Ronsard was right to emphasize it so,

Even in his day. Now, it’s everything:

The language falls apart before our eyes,

But what it once was echoes in our ears

As poetry, whose gathered force defies

Even the drift of our declining years.

A single lilting line, a single turn

Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn,

Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.