“Made to Measure”

[Note written for Jordie Albiston’s poetry class]

“Made to Measure” is a much more recent poem than “Destiny”, and was written in 2007. Nevertheless, despite the recent date, I have almost no recollection of what gave rise to it. I keep a notebook in which I jot down ideas for poems, and I have a feeling that this was a case where, while looking at a note to see if it had any possibilities for a poem, my imagination took off at a tangent and came up with something quite different. I think I have tracked down the note in question and it certainly bears little resemblance to the poem I eventually came up with. But the key concept is “experience”, learning about the world, and how children learn to cope with it.

The “brilliant” new image from which the poem took off was the notion of experience as a cape slung from the shoulders. To the young child this cape is far too big and unwieldy: the world is too big to deal with. As the child grows the cape becomes more manageable, even though, as the third stanza details, some of the experience on the cape is cruel and wounding. Eventually, as he ages, he grows into the cape, as it were, his experience and himself are one and the same, a perfect fit. You ultimately make your own world, even as you are made by it.

Writing the poem, as I recall, was rather analogous to its subject, because I remember feeling after I had written the first stanza that the poem was beyond me and I had no idea how to manage it, how to yank it in. But by the time I was finished I was quite pleased with it; it is one of my favourites among my own poems.

This is a metrical poem, like virtually all my poems now, though with considerable flexibility. Each stanza is written in the pattern of trimeter (three beats) for lines one and five, and pentameter (five beats) for the other lines. It also uses full rhyme in the pattern of abacdcdb.

“Made to Measure” appears in History of the Day.

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