UNFREE VERSE

Why is it that the music’s gone from verse,
As if that gives it some new liberty?
I think it, rather, a dismaying curse
Dispelling magic from our poetry.

In former days a verse was to be sung,
Not vocalized in boring monotone,
But tripped off lightly from a trilling tongue
And then reverberated to the bone.

Yet more than mere sonority is lost
When poems leave their meters and their rhymes:
Intention and invention pay the cost
If sound with sudden sense no longer chimes.

Such freedom is instead imprisonment,
While liberating form is heaven sent.

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