Or rather, a plea.

Is there any way that you know of to stop The Yellow Rose of Texas from playing in my head whenever I read Dickinson's poetry? Because frankly, it's driving me insane.

This widespread, sort of accurate comic revelation is really a way of discovering something about English meter. In its variations, the arrangement of metrical feet and rhymes called "ballad measure" or "common measure"-- basically, alternating four-unit and three-unit lines-- characterizes many, many, many hymns, ballads, pop songs, etc. Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," our previous "classic poem" is in this measure, and prone to the horrible "Yellow Rose" affliction, as is Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." Some people do it with Frost. (There are other tunes that do this as well as "The Yellow Rose," but as with the Monte Python Fatal Joke I will suppress the dangerous material.) Some people find this afflictive tunefulness in certain popular poems by Robert Frost.

Or, look at it this way: Dickinson was drawing on the cadences of the English Hymnal, and so do the authors of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and many other songwriters and poets. So maybe by spreading the poison in your way of hearing, Serai, you can dilute it or even neutralize it.

(See also the fascinating information and references in Jennifer Clarvoe's response to Larry Rosenwald at: <link> )

Could be worse. A high-school English teacher pointed out to me that Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening loses a great deal of its profunditude when sung to the tune of Hernando's Hideaway. I've never been able to forget his comment, and regarding that poem, that has made all the difference.

I'm going to toss in a comment I made a couple of weeks ago, which I think is relevent to this tangent. If the subject matter is tangential, it remains a good example of the non-wysiwyg quality of Slate's formatting. <link>

Thank you, Mr. Pinsky, and everyone else too! Of course, you're right about the connections between sung meter and poetic meter. I've always enjoyed the echo and re-echo between sung and spoken rhyme and rhythms, and the way such patterns bounce around between song, poems, poets, and even prose. It's one of the things that best about being communicative creatures.

But I still can't get the damn song out of my head!

Oh well, I guess I'll have to find a way to live with it, and perhaps even enjoy it. (I must confess that the image I get of a line of Cowboys jauntily doing a line dance to Because I could not stop for death does cheer me up.) Maybe I could write a book about it someday.

I know the feeling, Serai. My one suggestion is to read some of her poems that really break up and slow down and work against the rhythm. Try "I know some lonely Houses off the Road," which is also just interesting because it's a different sort of poem for E.D., almost a narrative!

Not to get too technical, but as Robert Pinsky points out, "The Yellow Rose of Texas" is a ballad meter, alternating 4 beats with 3. E.D. wrote the bulk of, but not all, her poems in that meter, either common or ballad (the distinction depends not on the stresses but on the rhyme scheme I believe). Someone I'm sure has done the painstaking counting work of figuring out how many of each kind she wrote: hopefully they at least got a PhD for it!

So my suggestion is just to find poems that don't use that ballad or common, i.e. 4 stressed syllables alternating with 3. It's actually pretty interesting to start noticing which poems she uses it in, and which she doesn't, and to see if there is a difference in subject matter, mood, feel, etc.

Not to make a too attenuated analogy, but it's a bit like a jazz musician who takes a standard and messes with it. A bit, but not exactly like that. Just another thought.

Good luck!