And find his mouth a rein;

If you were queen of pleasure,

And I were king of pain.

Pretty good, eh? What is it? It's a four-beat line-three beats and a rest. Good with an inevitable step-slide of goodness to it.

Swinburne loved the old playwrights, where everyone ends up sprawled in a bloody heap. Once when he was drunk at the British Museum, he had some sort of seizure and cut his head and had to be carried out unconscious and bleeding by the guards. He had a decent shot at the poet laureateship, since he was far and away the most gifted living poet, but he didn't make it. Tennyson died and he, Swinburne, was quietly not chosen. Tennyson was morbid and strange, but Queen Victoria had been able to straighten his collar. And Tennyson had obliged by flipping on all the spigots and filling tankards with blank verse about King Arthur and the Round Table. But Swinburne couldn't be cleaned up. His collar couldn't be straightened. He was too strange, too sexually unaligned. One of his poems had to be printed with asterisks in place of half a stanza. All about "large loins."

What he could do was rhyme better than anybody. Deaf? Didn't matter. He heard what he needed to hear. Not only did he rhyme, he danced new dance steps while he rhymed. He mixed rhythms in a way nobody had done before. He was good at a certain kind of crooning, singing pulse, with the rhymes coming poom, pom, ching, chong. Nobody else came close to him in this. His sound was everywhere. It was trance music. It went around and around in your brain.

A land that is lonelier than ruin,

A sea that is stranger than death

Far fields that a rose never blew in,

Wan waste where the winds lack breath

Try writing your own couplets or rondeaus or what-you-wills after you've spent a day reading Swinburne. It's not easy. Louise Bogan was swimming in Swinburne's music when she began. Archibald MacLeish said in a letter that he'd gotten Swinburne in his head and couldn't get rid of him. Sara Teas-dale said Swinburne had invented a new kind of melody. John Masefield said he was possessed by Swinburne and by Swinburne's teacher, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Even Ezra Pound started off by writing Swinburne imitations-till he turned on him. A. E. Housman said that Swinburne's rhyming facility was unparalleled: "He seemed to have ransacked all the treasuries of the language and melted down the whole plunder into a new and gorgeous amalgam." You can hear Swinburne muttering behind the curtain in Dylan Thomas-"Altarwise by Owl Light" is a drunken version of Swinburne.

And Swinburne's big problem was that he wrote way, way, way too much. Any selection from his poetry is just a hint of the fluently tumbled profusion. Every song, every poem that he wrote was fully five times as long as it should have been. The rhymes and chimes kept coming. Internal, external. That's why he's so important to the twentieth century. Swinburne was like the application of too much fertilizer to a very green lawn.

THAT HAPPENED to one of my neighbors, Alan. Alan lives on the far side of Nan. His lawn glowed-it was a perfect malachite green. No weeds, uniform blade density, always mowed to the right height. He thought a lot about it. He tolerated my lawn, but I suspect that it made him unhappy. My lawn has weedy areas, pussy clover, dandelions. Roz told me that's what it's called, pussy clover. She knows the names of many plants. I let some of it grow tall because I like it. But Alan wanted his grass pure.

About five summers ago, Alan applied some kind of special very expensive fertilizer. He thought: This is going to take my lawn to the next level of lushness. But it must have been a bad bag, because a week after he applied it you could see big brownish yellow patches where something had gone wrong. The patches spread. They merged. Alan's lawn died. For two years after he applied it, the turf glinted like gold Brillo pads. There was no green left in it, and when you walked on its edge, it made a crunching sound of death. I don't think even the earthworms were alive underneath.

This isn't exactly what happened to poetry. Poetry didn't die. But Swinburne did drive his two-wheeled rhyme-spreader wagon all over the nineteenth century, and by the end of it he had gone back and forth and back and forth with his stanzas and his quatrains and his couplets and his lyrics and his parodies and everything else. It seemed like every word in English that could be rhymed in some melodious way he had rhymed. Some of the words, like "sea" and "rain," he'd rhymed hundreds of times. Rhyme words can't be used up, but even so, this was too much.

It took Alan years to get his grass back. Only this year is it again looking green and almost perfect. Poetry is still recovering from Swinburne.

I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with a tray that came from an order of Chinese food in front of me-clean-on which tiny beads rolled around. I tied a knot in the jeweler's wire. It's made of very fine wire threads woven together somehow so that it doesn't kink the way real wire does, but it's very strong.

I started to bead. The verb made sense. I was beading. What you do is pick up a bead and turn it for a while between the huge clumsy pillows of your good finger and your thumb, looking for the hole. You turn it until the shadow of the hole, or the light appearing through the hole, comes into view, and then you know where to insert the end of the wire. As soon as it's on, you lose interest in it and let it slip down and away, and you're on to the next one. Revising is difficult.

What I thought about was piecework. About the people who begin a set of beads, and then count, and are in the middle, and then they're done, and they pick up another string and start again. What kind of life would that be? Not bad as long as you weren't too rushed. I could string beads for a living. I kept thinking of the phrase "beads on a string."

The necklace got longer until finally I thought it might be long enough and I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't look good, and it was still too short for Roz, who looks best with a medium length of beads. So I added another two quatrains, and then I started to get the feeling that I'd reached the end-a feeling I know from writing. I looped the thread through the magnet clasp, and then back through the crimping bead, and I took the pliers and crimped hard and cut off the extra thread. When they were done I put them in tissue paper and wrapped them, and I had a present ready for Roz. But I didn't know if I should give it to her.

I'M STILL PACKING UP my anthologies. Here's another one- Bullen's Shorter Elizabethan Poems. It's blue and heavy and dusty. Anthologies should be blue, I think. Although I love the anthology by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, The Rattle Bag. It's green with the "ff" of the Faber logo all over it. The Staying Alive anthology is brown, and it has a girl's face on the cover. It's probably the best anthology that is mostly unrhyme. In fact, Staying Alive may be the best poetry anthology ever.

I bought Shorter Elizabethan Poems for twelve dollars from a used-book store in Portsmouth. The first song-a.k.a. poem-in it is by William Byrd, the lute player, from 1588, and I think it's probably the song that Ted Roethke had turning around in his head when he wrote his villanelle, the one that starts "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." William Byrd says: "I kiss not where I wish to kill, / I fain not love, where most I hate, / I break no sleep to win my will."

Do you notice those one-syllable words? The Elizabethans really understood short words. Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line. The first essay on how to write poems in English came out in 1587, by George Gascoigne. Gascoigne said that to write a delectable poem you must "thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be." The more monosyllables, the better, he said. Roethke learned that lesson, as had Tennyson and Leonie Adams and lots of other people. One time Roethke danced around the room saying, "I'm the best god-damned poet in the USA!"