driven across stanzas ("dosed"/"bossed") and the flexible rhythms give this poem's iambic pentameter a muscular quality, full of action and movement and variation. The verse embodies Ku Li's ceaseless labour and the ruggedness of his landscape. Generous and outward-looking though the vision is, the reader can't help feeling that Hyde is not only paying tribute to the "bitter strength" of the indomitable Chinese peasant, but describing her own heroic quest to write the truth of her country and her self.[by Robin Hyde]
Ku Li
from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Ku Li by Robin Hyde
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The language is simple. Tetrameter and trimeter lines alternate, and the poet is happy to let the trimeter drop a stress now and again, in lines such as "The sacred vine", "The seely sheep". The rhythmical intensity of the lament is heightened by its numerous repetitions. The name, Walsingham, occurs eight times. It is the last word in lines one, three, and five, and so sets up a kind of soft dactylic chime which is audible throughout the poem. "Bitter" is another word repeated with painful emphasis. "Wracks" is the old form of "wrecks" but it does double duty here in its association with "racks".
Thought and syntax, sound and sense, are one throughout this poem, but there is a subtle development, almost what modern readers would call a "mourning process."
from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham
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