I have a great fondness for two-line poems.
Robert Frost's poem "The Span of Life" is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:
The Span of Life
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden: "Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she's at rest, and so am I."
Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov's masterpiece of succinctness:
Bacon & Eggs
The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.
Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" being the most famous example.
Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes "Among School Children" (not a two-line poem) by asking "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
Emilt Dickinson's #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:
To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights – be!
The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it. -- DL
– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)
Terrific post, David! One of my favorite two-liner poems is the (well-known) one by Ezra Pound: “In a station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: /
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Posted by: Christopher Foss | December 05, 2022 at 02:54 PM
I have always been stunned by Dickinson's two-line masterpiece, taking us so swiftly, so breathlessly, into the unimaginable, the unspeakable. Novelists have written tens of thousands of pages about the heart of darkness. It took Dickinson ten words.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | December 05, 2022 at 07:14 PM
Thank you, Chris, and thank you, Emily, for your thoughtful comments.
Posted by: David Lehman | December 06, 2022 at 11:21 AM