The Outerview Series: Part XV - Crossword Poetry

      While doing your crossword puzzle you come upon the clue for 13-down:  "a Welsh doggy".  Looking at the grid you see it is five letters long.  Perhaps some of the crossing text has provided another clue:  the first letter is "c" and the fourth is "g".  Voilà!  The answer must be "corgi"!

     Crafting poetry is the same search for the perfect word.  Suppose you are writing a children's poem in iambic tetrameter.  You come to this acephalous line:

Said | the scar|y la|dy there.

     "'Acephalous'?"

      Headless.  Missing an unstressed syllable at the beginning.  We need to replace the flat word, "said", preferably with an iamb.

      Among many alternatives an online thesaurus provides we see:  pronounced, declared, announced, remarked, observed, affirmed, revealed, disclosed, implied, and proposed.  Which of these is best?  And why?

     "The 'why" is sonics.  Once we've nailed the cadence it's always sonics."

      Very good!  So what are we looking for here?

      "A word that has the same sounds in its stressed syllable as those in the rest of the line."

      Excellent!  Assonance and consonance.  So which word is your choice?  Pronounced, declared, announced, remarked, observed, affirmed, revealed, disclosed, implied, or proposed?

      "Declared."

      Precisely!  It repeats the "ar" in "scary", the "r" in "there", and long "a" in "lady".  Your meter might be a little shaky but your ear for sound is superb!

      "Thanks."

      Now let's try another crossword clue.  Your character is standing outside a crematorium, sensing the smoke and ash "falling earthward".  Can we see the problem with that phrasing?

      "Duh, gravity.  On this planet everything falls earthward."

       Exactly.  Completely redundant.  So what is a more dramatic, evisceral, trochaic or spondaic word instead of "earthward" here?

      "'Fleshward.'  Falling fleshward."

      Brilliant.