With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner Mary Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work-and enables readers, as only she can, to \"enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas\""PART ONE: THE RULES 1. Breath 2. Patterns 3. More About Patterns 4. Design: Line Length 5. Release of Energy Along the Line 6. Design: Rhyme 7. Design: Traditional Forms 8. Words on a String 9. Mutes and Other Sounds 10. The Use of Meter in Non-Metric Verse 11. The Ohs and the Ahs 12. Image-MakingPART TWO: THE DANCERS ONE BY ONE 13. StylePART THREE: SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK 14. Scansion: Reading the Metrical Poem 15. Scansion: Writing the Metrical Poem 16. Yourself Dancing: The Actual WorkPART FOUR: A UNIVERSAL MUSIC 17. Then and Now EnvoiPART FIVE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS Permissions Index | Rules for the Dance, Paperback | Indigo Chapters