MEET AND FIT

                Measures are my poem’s medium
                Whose feet-full meters patter out to rhymes
                Invoking tones that ban the tedium
                Of free verse, curse of these declining times.

                What suited Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne—
                The royal road of metric poetry,
                The way most all our current poets shun—
                May soon be lost to our posterity.

               And yet I’ll join with those few formalists
               Who joyfully march on the metric way,
               Each one of whom courageously resists
               A poetry that does not sing but say,

                   For only when there’s music in its spine
                   Will poetry resemble the divine.

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