Great Regulars: "With each new verbal or participial theater

of action of the stanza, there arrives a new agent," [Helen] Vendler writes, "making the clauses scramble helter-skelter, one after the other. The headlong pace is crucial." Since the stanza involves words like "dragon," "nightmare," "murdered," "blood" and "fighting," it's easy to see what she's thinking here. But to make a more modest use of Vendler's rewriting trick above, what if we kept the same enjambments, syntax, rhyme scheme and basic rhythm--yet changed some of the words?

from David Orr: The New York Times: Vendler’s Yeats

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