A Tanka in English, and Some Thoughts from Its Making
One only feels delight
when they could squeeze some love from those
whom they find nobler.
Never would be filled the hole inside;
will they deeper drown in pensive plight.
The above is a tanka (short poem) I wrote on July 22, titled Drown in Pensive Plight. At first, I wanted to convert the 5-7-5-7-7 moraic pattern of tanka rather strictly into an equivalent number of English syllables, while also combining it with the iambic metre of English poetry. The final version retains only an approximate syllabic pattern—6-8-5-9-9—in exchange for a better rhythm in English. This article mainly records how I balanced syllable count, stress, meaning, and naturalness in English.
Metre
As mentioned above, the poem follows an approximate tanka structure. Rhythmically, it uses iambic metre as its framework—that is, each foot generally moves from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one—while retaining several substitutions and extra syllables. The final two lines also use a near rhyme for greater musicality.
My understanding of the iambic stresses is based on how the poem sounds when I read it aloud. With the stresses marked, it would look like this—underlined bold text indicates natural stress, while underlined regular text indicates metrical stress:
One only feels delight
when they could squeeze some love from those
whom they find nobler.
Never would be filled the hole inside;
will they deeper drown in pensive plight.
This is how I understand the distinction between “stress” and “metrical stress.” Consider Shakespeare’s famous line:
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
In natural speech, “be”, “not”, and “ques-” are clearly stressed, with “ques-” being, more strictly speaking, the lexical stress within the word. “Is”, however, is not normally lexically stressed in natural speech, though in metrical analysis it falls in the strong position of a foot. This is what is called metrical stress, rhythmic stress, or ictus.
When reading the line aloud, one need not stress “is” conspicuously; it is enough to give the position a slight degree of rhythmic support. My own approach is to lengthen “is” slightly, making the foot resemble a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth note in music (x/16 x/8., short then long). This is by no means the only possible reading, of course. One could stress “that” instead.
In my poem, most instances of metrical stress likewise occur in positions that would not normally be emphasized in natural speech but happen to stand at the end of a foot.
The final two lines are somewhat unusual. They contain phrases such as “would be filled” and “will they deeper”, in which two consecutive unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one. Musically, this resembles a sixteenth-sixteenth-eighth-note pattern (x/16 x/16 x/8, two short notes followed by a long one). This is, in a small way, a departure from the regular iambic pattern.
Of course, this is hardly radical by the standards of contemporary music. Rap has already pushed rhythmic experimentation to rather extravagant extremes. Still, within my own writing, it felt like a novel experience.
Sound Patterning and Rhyme
The poem contains almost no rhyme, including internal rhyme. The only instance is the near rhyme, or half rhyme, between /aɪd/ and /aɪt/ in the final two lines.
The last line does, however, contain alliteration between “deeper” and “drown”, both beginning with the consonant /d/, though the effect is less obvious because “drown” begins with the consonant cluster /dr/. There is also alliteration between “pensive” and “plight”, both beginning with /p/.
Together with the unusual rhythmic pattern described above, these effects make the final two lines, to my ear, the most exhilarating to read aloud.
The Line-by-Line Process of Revision
Below, I would like to look back on some of the deliberation that went into writing the poem.
The First Line
One only feels delight
My earliest version was “One only feels pleas’d”. I chose “pleased” rather than “content”, “happy”, or “delight” because it allowed the line to fit the five-syllable pattern. My actual intention, however, was to express the “happiness” obtained by extracting love from another person, and “pleased” felt slightly too restrained and detached, lacking in subjectivity.
At the time, I also used the poetic contraction “pleas’d” in an attempt to create an archaic effect. In the end, I abandoned this choice because the archaism felt contrived and did not fit particularly well with the poem’s relatively modern central idea.
As for why I expanded the line from five syllables to six rather than revising some other part to preserve the five-syllable count: three successive iambs—unstressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed—give the ending considerably more force.
The Second and Third Lines
when they could squeeze some love from those
whom they find nobler.
The second line originally had seven syllables: “when they could squeeze love from those”. In that version, “squeeze love” created two consecutive stresses. Rather than cling rigidly to the syllable count, I thought it better to insert an unstressed syllable and improve the rhythm.
The third line has remained exactly as it was from the beginning. Its five syllables make it very brief and abrupt, and “nobler” expresses precisely what I wanted to say. I was therefore unwilling to replace it with another word beginning on an unstressed syllable. As a result, if the line is to follow an iambic rhythm at all, its syllable count must necessarily be odd.
These two lines changed very little throughout the writing process, because the conflict between “squeeze” and “nobler” in the phrase “squeeze love from whom they find nobler” is the poem’s central contradiction.
I used “whom they find nobler”, rather than “who are nobler than them”—setting metre aside—because “find” makes it clear that the other person’s nobility is not necessarily objective. They are noble in the eyes of “they”, perhaps in terms of temperament or spiritual character.
At one point I did consider replacing “squeeze” with “wrest”, but I rejected it fairly quickly. Although “wrest love from somebody” is more idiomatic in everyday English, it conveys the active seizure of love from another person rather than the act of pressing, extracting, or squeezing it out. Only the latter, to my mind, carries the implications of invisible violence and meagre quantity that I wanted.
Another word with a similar meaning is “wring”, but that evokes the image of twisting a towel with both hands. The image suggested by “squeeze”—pressing water out of a sponge with one hand—is closer to the sensation I had in mind.
The Fourth and Fifth Lines
Never would be filled the hole inside;
will they deeper drown in pensive plight.
For the sake of metre and poetic effect, these two lines employ some inversion. In ordinary prose order, they would read: “The inside hole would never be filled; they will drown deeper in pensive plight.”
Beginning the fourth line with “Never” gives it a certain force, while also abruptly shifting the opening foot into a trochee, with the stressed syllable first. As mentioned above, the following phrase, “would be filled”, has something like a sixteenth-sixteenth-eighth-note rhythm. It could also be understood as though “would” were an extra unstressed syllable inserted to shift the line back from trochaic to iambic movement. (Analysing a modern rhythmic pattern with the concepts of classical poetry feels somewhat like using figured bass to analyse the harmony of contemporary music—though the mismatch disappears again if that contemporary music happens to be contemporary classical music.)
These two lines were originally strict seven-syllable lines and have since become almost unrecognizable. They also underwent the greatest amount of revision. The fourth line first read “Never’d their stomach be fill’d,” while the fifth was grammatically awkward and meant something roughly like “they are drag’d deeper down in despair.”
“Stomach” worked rather well as a metaphor, but I preferred the image of an “inside hole”—kokoro no ana, or a hole in the heart—which can suggest both unsatisfied desire and past emotional injury. It also has a better rhythm when read aloud.
The original “Never’d” could have stood for either “Never had” or “Never would”, thereby expressing both “had never been filled” and “would never be filled.” The present version retains only “Never would”, partly for metre and partly because it is more precise. There is no real need to assume that the hole had also never been filled in the past.
“Dragged down in despair” was originally meant to continue the stomach metaphor: as more and more matter accumulated inside the stomach, gravity would pull the person further downward. Once I changed the image to an “inside hole”, however, “drag” no longer made much sense.
Moreover, “be dragged” consumes two syllables, which left too little room if I wanted the line to match the nine syllables of the preceding one. At that point I thought of “drown”. The active voice saved me the syllable required by “be”, and the word also felt more poetic.
There were truly many candidates for the final three words, “in pensive plight”. I considered “in mere despair”, which would have extended the /d/ alliteration with another occurrence in “despair”. That version, however, would no longer rhyme with “inside”, so I discarded it.
I also considered “in sorrow’s tide”, which rhymes and creates an appealing image, but does not participate in the alliteration of “drown deeper”. Other possibilities included “in painful plight”, “in pitiful plight”, and “in dreadful plight”. Let us compare them:
- sorrow’s tide — “a tide of sorrow”: highly literary and well matched with “drown in”, but somewhat lacking in a sense of conflict or resistance.
- dreadful plight — “a dreadful predicament”: vivid, violent, and cruel, with a strong sense of confrontation.
- pitiful plight — “a pitiable predicament”: conveys either compassion or contempt, and introduces the perspective of an observer looking on, perhaps even from above.
- painful plight — “a painful predicament”: highly subjective and emotionally charged, placing the speaker within the experience in something closer to the first person.
- pensive plight — “a contemplative predicament”: outwardly calm but inwardly anxious, with an existential and philosophical quality.
I chose the “contemplative predicament” precisely for the modernity and philosophical resonance of the expression. The stillness of “pensive”, placed beside the distress of “plight”, creates a tension that tightens inward.
The choice also comes from personal experience. When I encounter something resembling the condition described in the poem, I do not in fact cry out or make a scene. Instead, tension and self-reflection cause me to withdraw further into myself than usual.
Different people respond differently, and for some, “dreadful” or “painful” may indeed be more accurate. For me, however, “pensive” is particularly apt.
One possible objection is that “pensive plight” is certainly unusual and may therefore be misread as though the plight itself were doing the thinking. What it actually means is “in a plight that leaves them pensive.” I looked it up and found that this rhetorical device is called a transferred epithet, so it is permissible within poetic language. “In pensive plight” also omits the article “a”, another fairly common poetic practice.
Conclusion
Through revision, I did manage to arrive at lines that I could accept and that even felt somewhat fluent when read aloud. I also found the phrase “drown in pensive plight”, which is admittedly a little strange but carries a philosophical resonance that I like.
I learned a great deal in the process, committed several less commonly used words to memory, and came away feeling that the experience had been richly rewarding. It has also encouraged me to continue experimenting and creating with greater boldness.