Deliciously suggestive poem with a distinct leery-eyed "what's going on here?" tone. Had not read or heard it before and quite enjoyed it (and your delightful reading of it).
I'm not sure if this is the place for such, but I wonder if you might have any short comments about "enjambment" (or longer comments if you want -- I always enjoy such, but "extra time" is hard to be had these days, I recognize) and its place (if any) in this poem.
I perhaps don't know much about enjambment, except that I think I quite like it (of what little I know about it) and I know (I guess) that I likely tend to overuse it in my own poetic attempts (confession: to me enjambment is PRECISELY the sort of thing a mathematician of my ilk WOULD enjoy for its own sake, used or overused :-) ).
And I ask because, to me (again, I hardly know of what I speak here), this poem fairly reeks of enjambment (and, honestly!, I mean that in the best possible way, given the poem's "irony upon irony" -- as you note in your comments -- which seems to go, in this case, hand in hand with enjambment).
BUT.
I may be wrong, i.e., what I "see" as enjambment may not actually be so, if I knew more about it. See, I tend to "see" enjambment exercised profusely in, say, a lot of blank verse, current or classical (and yes, I recognize the difference between free verse and blank verse). And I also tend to "lump" enjambment with other "tricks of the trade" that use the line-by-line orientation (aurally or visually) of poetry as a literary device.
So, for example, George Herbert's shape poetry would, in my opinion, rate perhaps a nine on a scale of one-to-ten of "visual/physical location effects" on meaning for poetry in particular (and where I might place "enjambment" -- or at least my poor understanding of it -- at maybe a level five or six; just a guess off the top of my head).
In fact, I might suggest that low-level enjambment (suddenly thinking I could call it "enjambment microbursts" -- or maybe not...) is virtually a requirement of almost any good metered and rhyming poetry to keep it from sounding too sing-songy or nursery-rhyme-ish.
Anyway, as I mentioned above, the reason I'm going on about this is that this poem seems to have a lot of what I (at least) see as enjambment. And in light of another recent conversation (was it on a facebook thread? not sure) about potential overuse of enjambment (I think there was a comment in the discussion about it being seldom used in classic poetry, and, when used, then and now, was primarily for humorous or comic effect), I therefore naturally wonder about it here in this poem -- if it is even there at all, i.e., that I am, after all, only seeing my misunderstanding of enjambment.
I would just add that I'm not "aiming" at a position here, but rather, just a desire to learn more about something I think I enjoy quite a bit (if a mathematician has any call or right or nerve to talk about poetic thingys). But I may be wrong and am really only talking about puzzles and logic games in terms of enjambment
(And please, if this would be better placed as, say, a facebook thread question or elsewhere, let me know and I can easily transfer it to elsewhere.)
It certainly is -- the poem is written in rhyming couplets, but it is so heavily enjambed, you do not notice it; and that makes the Duke's claim that he has no skill in speech to be even more ironic than it already is. Metrically, the poem is a tour-de-force. Dramatically, too.
Deliciously suggestive poem with a distinct leery-eyed "what's going on here?" tone. Had not read or heard it before and quite enjoyed it (and your delightful reading of it).
I'm not sure if this is the place for such, but I wonder if you might have any short comments about "enjambment" (or longer comments if you want -- I always enjoy such, but "extra time" is hard to be had these days, I recognize) and its place (if any) in this poem.
I perhaps don't know much about enjambment, except that I think I quite like it (of what little I know about it) and I know (I guess) that I likely tend to overuse it in my own poetic attempts (confession: to me enjambment is PRECISELY the sort of thing a mathematician of my ilk WOULD enjoy for its own sake, used or overused :-) ).
And I ask because, to me (again, I hardly know of what I speak here), this poem fairly reeks of enjambment (and, honestly!, I mean that in the best possible way, given the poem's "irony upon irony" -- as you note in your comments -- which seems to go, in this case, hand in hand with enjambment).
BUT.
I may be wrong, i.e., what I "see" as enjambment may not actually be so, if I knew more about it. See, I tend to "see" enjambment exercised profusely in, say, a lot of blank verse, current or classical (and yes, I recognize the difference between free verse and blank verse). And I also tend to "lump" enjambment with other "tricks of the trade" that use the line-by-line orientation (aurally or visually) of poetry as a literary device.
So, for example, George Herbert's shape poetry would, in my opinion, rate perhaps a nine on a scale of one-to-ten of "visual/physical location effects" on meaning for poetry in particular (and where I might place "enjambment" -- or at least my poor understanding of it -- at maybe a level five or six; just a guess off the top of my head).
In fact, I might suggest that low-level enjambment (suddenly thinking I could call it "enjambment microbursts" -- or maybe not...) is virtually a requirement of almost any good metered and rhyming poetry to keep it from sounding too sing-songy or nursery-rhyme-ish.
Anyway, as I mentioned above, the reason I'm going on about this is that this poem seems to have a lot of what I (at least) see as enjambment. And in light of another recent conversation (was it on a facebook thread? not sure) about potential overuse of enjambment (I think there was a comment in the discussion about it being seldom used in classic poetry, and, when used, then and now, was primarily for humorous or comic effect), I therefore naturally wonder about it here in this poem -- if it is even there at all, i.e., that I am, after all, only seeing my misunderstanding of enjambment.
I would just add that I'm not "aiming" at a position here, but rather, just a desire to learn more about something I think I enjoy quite a bit (if a mathematician has any call or right or nerve to talk about poetic thingys). But I may be wrong and am really only talking about puzzles and logic games in terms of enjambment
(And please, if this would be better placed as, say, a facebook thread question or elsewhere, let me know and I can easily transfer it to elsewhere.)
It certainly is -- the poem is written in rhyming couplets, but it is so heavily enjambed, you do not notice it; and that makes the Duke's claim that he has no skill in speech to be even more ironic than it already is. Metrically, the poem is a tour-de-force. Dramatically, too.