I have a great fondness for two-line poems.
Robert Frost’s poem “The Span of Life” is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:
The Span of Life
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden: “Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she’s at rest, and so am I.”
Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov’s masterpiece of succinctness:
Bacon & Eggs
The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.
Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” being the most famous example.
Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes “Among School Children” (not a two-line poem) by asking “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Emilt Dickinson’s #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:
To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights – be!
The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it. — DL
– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)
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Author: The Best American Poetry