If you look through a bookshelf full of contemporary poetry you would be hard pressed to find a book that contained a poem that uses traditional rhyme or meter regularly, let alone a whole book of rhyming and metered poetry. This is not because contemporary poets are not as skilled or creative as those in the past but rather that the traditional rhyme and meter of poetry became passé and poets desired to experiment more. Things such as free verse, found poetry, or anything that did not strictly follow a regimented form has become the norm, yet you would not know that if you read John Updike’s 1958 book The Carpentered Hen and other Tame Creatures.
Now as the publication date of the book indicates, Updike is not exactly contemporary. Despite this he is recent enough and he wrote during a period when experimentation was at a peak but he still wrote with rhyme and meter. Thus his work is an interesting perspective on why a poet would use rhyme and meter, and that rhyme and meter does not have to be always associated with the likes of Shakespeare or Romantic poets. Updike’s poem “Player Piano” is a great example of this.
Player Piano:
My stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.
My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.
At times I’m a jumble of rumbles,
At other I’m light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.
The poem, due to its namesake, is describing a player piano(this is also a great example of why titles are important) or an automated piano. Speaking from the perspective of the player piano itself the poem playfully replicates a player piano in words using rhyme and meter. The repetitive and predictable pattern of rhyme and meter mimics a player piano as the poem’s words have to follow a pre-planned structure which is similar to a player piano playing a pre-planned piece. To illustrate this an analysis of the poem shows that it follows a simple end rhyme(when the last words of a line rhyme) pattern of ABAB. There are also several other instances of rhyme and other poet techniques that are not as strictly patterned as the end rhyme but they still add to the feel of an automated structure. This is heard in the first line of the poem with the words “stick”, “click” and “snicker” all sharing “ick” and also “fingers” and “snicker” sharing the “er”. This internal rhyme is continued in the second line with “chuckling” and “knuckle”. In the third line the poem also makes use of alliteration with the words “footed”, “feelers”, and “flicker”.
In addition to all this rhyme the poem also makes use of meter. It is written in iambs which means pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables. The lines alternate between nine syllables and eight or in other words four and a half iambs and four. The unstressed stressed pattern is not always strictly followed and this could be for musical effect, just how a song does not always have the same thing repeated. For example, the last line of the first stanza follows the pattern with “And pluck from these” but then has two more stressed syllables follow “these” making for a part that stands out from the rest. As the line is describing, it creates a sort of melody by breaking from the pattern.
All in all, rhyme and meter can add layers to a poem and make it so it is not just the words that are describing a player piano but the sound of them too.