“I’M A RIDDLE IN NINE SYLLABLES”—SYLVIA PLATH
NOTES ON SYLLABIC POETRY
I’m going into the weeds a bit with this Substack, but not too far, I hope. There are people who are fascinated by poetic terminology and can talk ad infinitum about Latin and Greek meters, about spondees and troches and dactylic hexameter, but I’m not one of them. I know most of the terms, but that’s not what I’m thinking about when I’m working on a poem. There are, however, a couple of technical concepts that I find useful; these are syllabic and accentual verse. I’ll take up accentual poetry in a future Substack. For now let me focus on syllable counting. The best-known example of a syllabic poems is the Japanese haiku, which has three lines numbering 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Like so:
The old cherry trees’s final blossoms are her last cherished memory Bashō (trans. Sam Hamill)
Most haikus, like this one, focus on the natural world, and the form puts a lot of pressure on the third line, which has to close the deal. In this case, it’s a metaphor looking toward a serene end of life, and those final blossoms can also be read, it seems to me, as representing the poems of old age.
The poet best known for bringing syllabics into English is Marriane Moore. She didn’t follow the Japanese form, however, but instead took syllabics for a crazy ride, as in this widely anthologized poem:
THE FISH
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
If the title led you to think that the poem would be about a single fish, you were deceived. The fish (plural) of the title are just the first item in a list of creatures including mussels, barnacles, starfish, jellyfish, and crabs which inhabit the cliff-side setting the poem describes. And what about the form? First, notice the rhymes. Moore rhymes lines 1 and 2 and lines 3 and 4 of each stanza, with an unrhymed fifth line following. But there’s more. Each stanza starts with a one syllable line, which is usually a complete word (wade, an, sun, etc.), but not always, because in the next-to-last stanza we get “ac-“, the first syllable of accident (possibly a play on the word itself). Then the stanzas proceed by offering a different number of syllables for each line, giving counts of 3, 9, 6, and 8 syllables to complete each five line stanza. It’s a form Moore made up for this poem and I doubt that it occurs anywhere else.
The jaggedness, the apparent randomness of this invented form, seems to mirror the apparent disorder in the world the poem describes. And yet…and yet, by strictly counting the syllables we can see that Moore was working with a clear sense of order in mind. And you can read that as one of the poem’s themes: there is a hidden order behind the apparent disorder in the natural world. The survivor here is not any particular creature but the scarred and battered underwater cliff, “this/defiant edifice,” that they live on. Individual organisms come and go but the basic foundation underpinning life persist.
Following Moore’s example, many poets in English have worked in syllabics. Some famous poems based on counting syllables are W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” and Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” In an earlier Substack I looked at Robert Mezey’s “My Mother,” which uses seven syllable lines in rhyming couplets. Here’s another syllabic poem, this one by Sylvia Plath:
METAPHORS
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Nine lines, nine syllables per line, all involving metaphors for pregnancy, a nine month ordeal, and written by Plath when she believed (mistakenly) that she was pregnant. Clearly, she uses the form of the poem to push her imagination and comes up with some dazzling—as well as a few fairly predictable—results, catching the ups and down of pregnancy, and including plenty of playful humor. We rarely think of Plath as a light-hearted poet, but here we discover that she had it in her to sketch a cartoon image like “A melon strolling on two tendrils.”
When I’m writing a poem, I often count syllables, but I’m not necessarily going to end up with a syllabic poem. Rather I use syllable counting as a means of tightening my lines. If I have a poem that seems promising but loose, I’ll shorten each line by making it conform to nine syllables, say, or to eight, or seven. I don’t have many poems that wind up in syllabics, but here’s one that I wrote back in graduate school:
MARRIED Quakers perform their own marriage, but I couldn’t pass. Your doctor-father expected at least an Ethical Culture wedding like his. In the room your mother’d frantically unchristened and reupholstered the week before Christmas, Rabbi Jacob K. Shankman presides—in the name of Moses and the God of Israel. Then the champagne— the old dragon knows his champagne—those effervescent relatives, and we pose hand in hand and cutting the cake. Twenty-nine stories over Central Park, its skaters, zoo, and holiday lights, we went to bed early. We’re blocked by pain, fears, fail, wake unresolved from long dark. Rain on Friday. Look, down there’s the Met; the American Museum; that’s the Delacorte, where we saw Love’s Labour’s Lost and Troilus last summer, courting, promising. You’ve got an art journal to write; I take in El Greco’s vision; love’s uneasy. Night, Christmas Eve, and we retired early again. Now marriage makes us, who’d pictured only starry nights, weep. We hold our bodies, our spirits brace, but there’s a wall between us. Then between us the tense, immaculate fear gives way before your love. Your love, my brightest crescent, Ares am I, above the city, the world, the dozen gates of heaven squeak open; angels cry, carols rise from the ice rink speakers. We exchange art books, beam, have breakfast in bed. Christ, I love you, Nancy.
The lines are long and loose, and who’s going to notice that (yes, with some exceptions) they mostly have 14 syllables? But this formality was important to me in writing the poem. It told me that I wasn’t just breaking a prose piece into arbitrary lines. What’s more, when it came up in workshop, and one of the student accused it of being “formless,” I had an answer. I remember our teachers that day, George Starbuck and Marvin Bell, looking down at their worksheets and counting up syllables on their fingers. Initially the poem stuck strictly to the form but in later revisions some lines with 13 and 15 syllables crept in, as I modified the original version to make the poem read more smoothly.
There are three customary approaches to syllabics. One is to follow Japanese precedent and write haikus or in haiku stanzas. A poem comprising multiple haikus is called a rensaku, with three line stanzas that go 5-7-5, 5-7-5, 5-7-5, and so on. The tanka is another traditional Japanese syllabic form with a count of 5-7-5-7-7. Alternatively, you can invent your own stanza, varying the syllable count, as Marriane Moore did. And a third method is to choose a single line length and stick to it throughout the poem like Plath, Mezey, and me.
In cases like “The Fish,” the syllabic stanza will become apparent to a careful reader, and Sylvia Plath brashly announces her nine syllable plan in the opening line of “Metaphors.” But I suspect that with many poems that use the form, it goes unnoticed. Still, it doesn’t happen by accident. In every case the poet must have chosen the form, as I did in “Married,” to help manage the material.
You may be wondering what Nancy thinks of “Married,” and the answer is she hates it. It upsets her and she won’t allow me to read it at any event that she’s attending. However, I did talk her into letting me include it in “The Nancy Poems,” a chapbook that celebrates our 60 year marriage, because it’s an important part of the story.
And one final note. My thanks go out to Jim Lewis for including three of my poems in the May issue of Verse Virtual. The theme for the issue is poems relating to childhood. Here’s a link: https://www.verse-virtual.org/2025/May/morgan-john-2025-may.html
I really like reading these sub stacks. It’s like taking the graduate poetry class I never took.