Line and rhythm

Abstract

One of the things I have noticed about thoughtless students is that when they are quoting poetry, they write it out as if it were prose; in other words, they ignore the fact that in all poetry the line is fixed. When Christina Rossetti wrote ‘A Birthday’ she made the first line end with ‘bird’ and the next line begin with ‘whose’:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot

And that is fixed; whenever her poem is printed, it must be printed in that way.