Line Lengths #2: Short Lines

This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate

In a previous article, I went over some ideas about how line lengths work in a poem, and how you might choose them for your own writing.

In this article, I want to deepen your understanding of this topic, by covering:

Some ways that short lines can boost a poem.

And to do that, I’m going to take you through how several very skilled poets use short lines, because good reading is always the best way to learn about poetry!

First, a quick recap

There are some fundamental things that short lines do which I explained in my earlier article. Just to remind you, they are:

Short lines tend to slow down the pace of a poem, because of all the line breaks.
They give each small unit of language an intense focus, because each one has its own line.
Because of both these things, they tend to make line breaks a particularly important structural element of the poem.

So you can take it for granted that these things are happening in all the poems I look at here.

Charles Simic: the silence around the words

A recent Poetry Parlor poem is “Brooms,” by former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic. One of the many interesting things about this poem is its use of short lines.

For example, the poem starts with these three very short lines:

            Only brooms
            Know the devil
            Still exists

Why does Simic break such a simple phrase into three separate lines?

I think the answer lies in Simic’s lifelong attempt to portray “being and its silence,” as he put it. As well as trying to show us aspects of real life (that’s the “being” part), Simic also always wanted to make us feel the presence of the unsaid, unsayable elements of life—using words to delineate the “silence” that lies behind and around everything.

He does this in many ways, including surreal images like brooms knowing secrets about the devil! But one of his main techniques for hinting at what can’t be said is short lines.

You see, when he breaks that simple sentence “Only brooms know the devil still exists” into three parts, Simic places such heavy emphasis on each tiny element of the sentence, that I think we can’t help but feel there must be something more to the words than is being said. The very slow pace that the short lines create also helps this sensation of extreme emphasis and implied significance.

Another way of putting it might be that there’s just so much space around these lines, that we’re compelled to fill that space with hidden hints and suggestions.

Simic uses this tactic often, and it almost always has this effect.

Jos Charles: the grief around the words

A variation on Simic’s approach comes from the long poem “A Year” by Jos Charles.

This poem depicts a year of grieving, and one of the ways it shows us the feelings of the speaker is through its use of short lines:

                        Walked
            slower each week
            I write
            of the city Women
                        weep here for
                        dogs

“A Year” is not an easy poem—the images are fragmentary, and they flit so allusively and so quickly from one to another that it’s often hard to see what the poem means on a literal level. But it’s always possible to know how the poem feels—and in part that’s because the short lines hint at the powerful sadness and loss that aren’t being directly said.

It’s a repurposing of Simic’s method, this time showing the emotion that’s unexpressed and inexpressible behind the words, and it works very well.

For example, in the extract above, how much less affecting would those lines be if they read like this?

            Walked slower each week
            I write of the city
            Women weep here for dogs

Frankly, those three lines would just make me puzzled, not moved.

But with the very short lines, I get a sense of the feeling that’s behind it all:

The line break after “Walked” enacts the slowness of the walking, makes the line feel halting, and suggest the heaviness of the speaker
The break after “I write” makes me wonder if the speaker is at last going to write about the person she has lost, but it turns out she’s avoiding that topic, and writing about “the city” instead
The weeping women seem consonant with grief at first, but then in the last line they are weeping for “dogs,” not people—and again there’s no direct access to the feelings.

It can be powerful stuff.

Fiona Sampson: terse anger

I guess all short lines suggest that more is present in the poem than is being said, but sometimes they do this to amplify a feeling that is in the poem, rather than something that isn’t.

“Vigil” by Fiona Sampson is an amazing poem that uses its short lines to intensify all its emotions. Here’s the beginning:

            God—crush this
            stem of anger,
            crumple my neck
            like paper

            Lord of Envies—
            Vinegar King—
            refuse me
            your unceasing heaven…

I love the raw honesty of this poem: the fusion of reverence and anger it feels for God, and the agonized mixture of yearning and self-loathing the speaker experiences as she longs for salvation and rejects it too.

And the short lines suggest a kind of suppressed explosion of emotion, feeling and meaning under immense tension, so that it comes out in brief but searing bursts of language.

Cynthia Cruz: broken world, broken self

Cruz is a poet who deserves to be better known: her oblique portraits of cracked and fragmented people trying to survive in a damaged world are haunting.

Cruz often uses short lines to evoke her protagonists—both their fractured psyches and the tenderness of their internal dreams.

Here’s a passage (slightly abbreviated) from “Erstling” that does both of those:

            What I want is to become

            What I was
            Before the accident.

            I move from one world
            to the next […]

            God’s child-
            Like voice

            Singing quietly
            Inside me.

I think those first three lines express brokenness: the speaker is at first unable to string together what she wants into a single line: “What I want is to become what I was before the accident.” Instead her wish fractures over three lines, showing how jerky and separated her desires are, and maybe the parts of herself too.

Then at the end, the short lines do something entirely different, bringing a crystal-clear simplicity and sincerity to the “child-like” and gentle vision of the speaker’s inner life, hearing the divine in herself.

Cruz again: short lines change and add meanings

Another thing Cruz does supremely well in that extract from “Erstling” is to use the short lines to bring additional meanings into play, that a longer line would simply crush.

For example, when she writes

            God’s child-
            Like voice

the first line allows us to see how the speaker views herself as blessed, as “God’s child.”

If she had written

            God’s child-like voice

that meaning would be lost.

Or, in the first three lines I quoted:

            What I want is to become

            What I was
            Before the accident.

the first line also works by itself—for a moment, what she wants is just to become something, anything. Then we learn that she wants to become “What I was,” and so for another moment, we imagine her as desiring just to return to the past—any past.

It isn’t until the third line that the meaning finally narrows down to “What I was / Before the accident.”

But we as readers now have three slightly different meanings in play at once—all because of the short lines!

I could go on…

Really, I feel this survey of short lines has barely begun! But I hope it has been enough to give you some inspiring ideas for how you can use short lines.

Before I stop, I will just mention William Carlos Williams, and how he uses short lines in poems like “Winter” or “To Waken an Old Lady” to give weight and importance to small things in the world that we might otherwise easily overlook.

I find Williams an inexhaustible source of learning about lines and line breaks, so I hope you’ll go read him.

Next Steps: Writing short lines

In all the examples I gave above, matching short lines to a suitable topic was key. So this writing activity gives you a chance to practice that.

What is something in your life at the moment where you feel more than you can easily say?
This could be all sorts of things: from the beauty of nature, to horror at some piece of wrongdoing in the world; from love or grief for someone special, to perplexity over a problem you face.
Find some topic like this that’s active for you right now.
Get some words and ideas down on paper or on screen about this topic.
As this is a topic that it’s hard for you to express, it’s fine if these notes don’t seem to capture everything. But write down what you can.
Freewriting, Clustering, and even Listing may be good tools for this.
Put some of your notes together as a poem draft—using short lines.
Don’t think too hard at this stage: just select what seem to be the most useful images or phrases and put them in an order.
Cut and edit your short lines so that they suggest more than they say.
The key here is to try to take out most of what you’ve written, leaving behind fragments and pieces that seem to hint at this things you feel, but can’t say..
If in doubt, take more out!

Have fun with this! It’s a great feeling, discovering how the lines and line breaks can say so much for you—so much more than you could put into words. I hope you enjoy it.