from a parent's intimate, calming pat on an infant's back to the chill-
ing, mass display of goose-stepping Nazis. Rhythm is the motive feel-
ing of the life force, the "green fuse" as Dylan Thomas (a very great
rhythmer) put it. In poems rhythm is capable of producing trance-like
states of mind. Rhythm puts us so deeply into ourselves that we may
feel we are outside of ourselves. ( 2 ) In the section of N. Scott Momaday's
poem "New World" printed below, the reader is made to
experience the primal pulse of life-energy in lines that are as rhythmi-
cally stark as is possible--typically one accent for each of the two syl-
lables that make up each line:

At noon
turtles
enter
slowly
into
the warm
dark loam.
Bees hold
the swarm.
Meadows
recede
through planes
of heat
and pure
distance.

The stillness of the scene absorbs and mesmerizes us; we hear a beat
that is, at once, insistent and minimal. It is as if Momaday captured on
the page the very rhythm of time. There is no racing through the poem,
each line--though it is little more than a second--will have its say. (3)

As an oral and mnemonic art poetry always has honored the force of
rhythm. Poems are meant to be spoken aloud and the rhythmic force
communicated in a poem insists on the passion in the human voice. Ev-
ery poem is the movement of words in time and that movement as it em-
bodies the particular soundscape of a particular language conveys some

-2-