workshop redux: give me a (line) break

by David Moolten

The ambition of this month’s Workshop Redux is to explore the world of line breaks. Why should you, as a poet, use line breaks? Well, the simplest reason is that at some point you run out of paper. In the old days, this meant hitting the chrome bar and making the typewriter carriage return so you could keep writing on the next line and not on the bare typewriter roller, which wouldn’t record your efforts.

Today, line breaks occur automatically and arbitrarily at the right margin of each virtual page according to the setting established in your word processing software. This is how line breaks work in prose, and for the most part no one writes or reads anything into them.

Poets generally choose to break their lines sooner (except in prose poems, where the poet forsakes the poetry of line breaks in favor of other verse elements). Unfortunately, these breaks can sometimes be or at least appear no less arbitrary, especially in so called free verse, earning the derision of poets who write more formally. Ideally, “free verse” poets engineer their line breaks to provide some enhancement to a poem’s rhythm, a slight visual, oral and/or aural pause. This pause tends to heighten the contrast between ending word (and idea) in the first line and the starting word (subsequent idea) in the next line, emphasizing both words and often creating surprise, sometimes through a pun on the last word of the first line. The effect is often more dramatic when a sentence doesn’t end at the end of the line (end stop) but continues onto the next line (enjambment).

In formal poetry there is a set number of beats and/or syllables per line, this number being discretionary, though generally regular and having some connection to the length of the human breath and the attention span of the human ear. The line break comes at the end of this determined length, although formal poets will also try to exploit an end of line pause for the same reasons as “free verse” poets.

This month’s poem was written by James Wright, a poet from the American Midwest who enjoyed an illustrious start in the formal camp and then became an apostate, switching allegiances quite famously in his third book, This Branch Will Not Break. The poem’s title is “A Blessing.” I suspect many of you will have read it before, its fame in no small part having to do with its line breaks. Nevertheless, I’ll first provide you with a version of the poem in which I’ve rescinded the breaks, and further down I’ll give you the opportunity to read the original text.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows to welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness that we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, for she has walked over to me and nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, her mane falls wild on her forehead, and the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear that is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.

Interestingly, Wright wrote many prose poems, some quite remarkable. This, however, was not one of them. Should it have been? And if not, did he do “Wright” by it with the line breaks he chose (sorry … )? As an exercise, you can if you wish provide your own line breaks and see how they compare with his. The poem with the author’s line breaks appears below.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

So let’s look at the line breaks. Ending the first line at “Minnesota” brings us suddenly away from the earmarked and well-mapped path of the unremarkable highway (and Wright’s prior path as a “formal poet”), into the wild fields where there is twilight, darkness yes, but also luminosity, mystery and risk, though of a supple living kind. This twilight bounds though without threat. Ending the line here emphasizes the idea of breaking free and surprises us with the wild twilit grass.

The second line is end-stopped, a complete thought, no reason to go on and possibly burden the line’s delicate breath. Beginning the third line with “And” implies continuation where there is none, creating a kind of in medias res effect — we’re looking at two ponies (and they at us) we didn’t know were there: more surprise, and reassurance. That they are “Indian” ponies has a certain noble outcast resonance, which the enjambment enhances by emphasizing the light effect via “Darkening,” reminding us of the twilight, the risk-taking, and now giving us confrontation, only to take it away via the oxymoronic “with kindness.”

The eyes darken by dilating, because of excitement, here joy, not violent intent. Again an end-stop, the thought over, and the line break so as not to burden the exquisite sound and thought of the line with any more language. The next line ends so as to emphasize “willows” and “welcome,” which heightens the emotion of the scene.

The “to” and other small words like it generally come at the beginning of new lines, rather than the end of old ones, though not always. Syntactical and ubiquitous, they tend to be undramatic and even clumsy at the end of lines, not so much at the beginning, where they are ignored, heightening the effect of subsequent words. Sometimes other prosodic considerations win out and ending a line with “from” or “and” is still artistically desirable.

The next line end-stops and breaks so as to remain small and nimble, in keeping with the poem’s mood and scene. The seventh line reminds us of the separation between highway and living field and emphasizes that word “pasture,” with its suggestion of peaceful rumination, as well as its earthy groundedness. The eighth end-stops on “alone,” underscoring the ponies’ isolation, auguring the loneliness the poem later addresses. The end-stop also lets the dynamic and perfectly descriptive ninth line hit us harder. Ending on “happiness” highlights the innocence and emotion of the moment, and the surprising fact that the human “we” is the source. Again a quick delicate end-stop, allowing the animated and metaphoric power of the eleventh line, “They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other” to hit us whole. End-stopped as well, this allows the marvelously surprising: “There is no loneliness like theirs.”

The ponies are perfect companions to each other; but something is missing, and the affection they show the interloper(s) proves it. The inclusion of line breaks tells us something in a way that prose could not. Again, the delicate thought and musical phrase are complete (why crush it with more language?) thus the end-stop, and another short line. With its quick pulse, suggestion of sudden accommodation (how ponies behave) and of a return to task, “At home once more,” quickly breaks, making us wait to find out what the task is, and setting up the variation of the long line to follow. The task is eating, the lowering of heads implicit, and the flaccid extent and scrunched syllables of the line suggest the luxuriant action. The end-stop allows the radical observation of the next line to wallop us, “I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,” the enjambment keeping the tension and letting us savor the image before continuing.

The next two lines. “For she has walked over to me / and nuzzled my left hand” return to the delicate phrasing and music compatible with the action. The following two lines are more descriptive — the poet face to face with his subject — and are carved out as quick and complete units. Then Wright radically returns to the tactile he only contemplated earlier, “And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear” the palpable materials of the environment taking him over. He ends the line at “ear” because the unit of the line in terms of music and meaning is complete and because he wants to surprise us with the amazing comparison he makes in the next. A girl’s wrist? Wow. Now the poem is also about his own quest for wholeness and intimacy, and we know, we absolutely know he discovered it just as we did.

There’s no reason to go on of course, so the line finishes with an end-stop, and the next line tensely advises us of the epiphany, of the search for and the excitement in discovery, “Suddenly I realize.” Keeping this short heightens the suspense of course: Just what did he realize? What follows in the enjambment is again amazing. “That if I stepped out of my body I would break” offers total surprise for the reader who is also stepping out of expectation, out of the confines of “the body” as it refers to the academy, to poets and poetry as confined by tradition. To step out of one’s body is nothing short of total transcendence and liberation. It’s also incredibly risky. So the enjambment turning on the word “break” focuses everything on this liminal moment of self-annihilation. What follows renders this one of the more notable line breaks in modern American poetry: “into blossom.”

So we are changed. The break doesn’t destroy anything; it’s pure rapture, pure innocent maturity and fecundity. Here is a man no longer galloping from a three-point stance into another man to smash his body in football or war. Here is a man no longer taciturn and muscle-bound from the searing factory floor, who can only push a woman around in drunken frustration, or herd animals towards the slaughterhouse. Here is a man and a poet no longer in the prison of expectation. But for the line breaks, we might not have known.

Reprinted from This Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963) with permission of the publisher.

David Moolten’s latest book, Primitive Mood, won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press. His work has been widely anthologized, and his honors include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. David is also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine. He writes at Edible Detritus.