Rhythm and Rhyme Grab Bag
Lowell gets wild with rhyme and meter in the poem, but have no fear. We'll break his methods down so you can master his madness in no time. We'll start with the big stuff. Lowell divides the poem into seven sections of 17-27 lines. Two of those sections divide the lines into stanzas, which are just groups of lines. The other five don't; they just keep on a-goin'.
The second thing to notice is the varying lengths of each line. Many of the lines are long, but a few are short and stubby, causing you to take a pause when jumping to the next line. Often, that's to preserve the rhyme scheme, which plays a major part in the sound of the poem. The last word in each line often rhymes with other lines in the stanza, and that's how we determine the type of rhyme scheme Lowell is using. Let's take a look at an example from the first section, and we'll use letters to represent the end rhymes:
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket— A
The sea was still breaking violently and night B
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, C
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light B
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, C
He grappled at the net A
Now, compare it to part of Section II:
Whenever winds are moving and their breath A
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, B
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death A
In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear B
The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall C
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall C
Lowell uses these constantly-switching rhymes to give the poem the feeling of being on rough, ever-changing waves. Tricky, huh? It's not the only trick in his arsenal. Lowell uses meter to add rhythm to each of the rhyming lines. Meter is the underlying beat in each line, and we can see a good example of it in the first line of the poem:
The brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—
Notice anything? If you read this line aloud, you should hear daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM. This type of meter is based on something called an iamb. It's pretty common in poetry. Since there are five iambs in this line, it is written in what is called iambic pentameter ("penta-" means five). Still with us? Let's try another line:
Its open, staring eyes (9)
Still iambic? Yep, but we don't have five iambs here, only three. This line is an example of iambic trimeter ("tri-" means three). Lowell also uses anapests (dadaDUM), like in the first two feet of the following line:
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste (22)
And he also uses trochees (DUMda), like here:
Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph (128)
Lowell sure likes to keep things interesting, huh? Some might think it is silly to have all these different metrical feet in one poem, but it helps to see all the work that Lowell put into the poem to make it have a certain type of music (and it's a lot easier than being aboard one of the ships in the poem). So what type of music might that be? Well, we'd say it's closest to modern jazz. It doesn't stick to one set rhythm or melody throughout. Instead, it dips and dives, ducks and dodges. And if you've ever been on a boat, even in calm waters, then you know that feeling. Your feet are unsteady beneath you, and Lowell's constant metrical change-ups deliver that same feeling of being rocked about by the almighty force of the ocean.