White eager Cessnas

RJ: from "Midsummer" by Derek Walcott

Certain things here are quietly American -
that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars
of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes
muttering the word umpire instead of empire;
the gray, metal light where an early pelican
coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire
of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine's.

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Perhaps I've been reading too much of The Odyssey - as rendered into gorgeous iambic pentameter by Robert Fagles - but these lines of Walcott's strike me first & foremost as highly metrical. Each line, five beats. But in the absence of a common metrical foot, Walcott constantly keeps his reader's ear imbalanced. Extra beats abound. Spondees - stress / stress - pile up ("the WORD UMPire" / "PINK FIRE"). I enjoy these effects more and more these days.

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True confession time: when I was in high school I thought Emerson's poetry was top-notch.

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Say Walt Whitman and his long rambling "breath unit" settled down with a metrical fellow such as, oh, say, off the top of my head James Merrill or even for an older & weirder case Emily Dickinson. What would their children's cries sound like?