Line 'em up

"Vermin"

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
What child cries out, "An Exterminator!"?
One dilligent student in Mrs. Taylor's class
will get an ant farm for Christmas,
but he'll not see industry; he'll see dither.
"The ant sets an example for us all,"wrote Max Beerbohm,
a master of dawdle,"but it is not a good one."

Those children don't hope to outlast the doldrums of school
only to heft great weights and work in squads
and die for their queen. Well, neither did we.
And we knew what we didn't want to be:
the ones we looked down on, the lambs of God, b
lander than snow and slow to be cruel.

-- William Matthews




My strategy for separating the lines in this poem was to first look at syntax and punctuation, then to find what sounds good. I know that lines in a poem are all supposed to have close to the same length and that stanzas are usually four to six lines long. The hardest part about separating the lines was when I realized that the line separations in this poem and, I assume most poems, can work and sound poetic in many different combinations. It was difficult to find the line separations also because, as the readers, we don't have any personal connection to the author or the speaker they create. My main goal was to have the lines be easy to understand and easily flow throughout the poem.This exercise helped me to realize how much thought can go into just the mere separations of lines can make or break a poem.