The Nerve (Style)

Style

Cadence

Maxwell's poem "The Nerve" is written in iambic feet, each foot containing first an unstressed syllable and then a stressed syllable. Note the word "perhaps" in the first stanza. The first syllable (per-) is unstressed, with the second syllable (-haps) receiving the stress. For people who speak English, iambic meter in poetry is the most natural rhythm. It is a rhythm most similar to the spoken language.

"The Nerve" is composed of twelve stanzas. Each stanza is a quatrain; that is, it contains four lines. The pattern of the rhythm is (with some exceptions) basically a first line of five iambic feet (a pentameter), a second line of three iambic feet (a trimeter), a third line of two iambic feet (a dimeter), and a last line of one iambic foot (a monometer).The use of iambic meter, because it most closely reflects natural speech, could have been chosen by Maxwell to project the overall conversational tone of his poem.

Tone

The tone of a poem is the perceived attitude that the author has toward his audience. With "The Nerve," at times the tone is that of a friend, as if the speaker were talking to someone he cared about. He offers a personal experience to back up his beliefs of how one should confront life. There is no sense of his knowing more than the reader knows but rather that he would like to share something he has learned with a peer. He uses down-to-earth language and images, even to the point of explaining his ideas as those that a child naturally encounters. He also speaks of dusty stores, fields, and bars — commonplace environments.

The speaker's tone is also at times that of a teacher, encouraging and nurturing. This is evident in the phrases such as "you ought to recognize it" and "treasure the nerve." The shortness of the stanzas is easily digested in a relaxed manner, as if the speaker were talking in a quiet, but reassuring voice. The vocabulary is simple, and there is only one allusion — to Judas — which is almost universally understood.

Enjambment

Enjambment is the continuation of the sense of a particular line (that is, the grammatical sense) beyond the end of the line. This might be done for a variety of reasons. One is for dramatic effect, creating a pause for the reader to reflect for a few seconds before continuing. Sometimes enjambment merely breaks the monotony of continually reading the same patterned meters of each stanza. In the first stanza of "The Nerve," a slight enjambment occurs at the end of the first line. "Somewhere at the side of the rough shape" reads as if that were a complete thought. However, as readers go on to the second line, they realize that it is not just some random "rough shape" that the speaker is discussing but rather the rough shape that "your life makes in your town." Then, at the end of the first stanza, there is another, more dramatic enjambment that causes a fairly abrupt change in perspective. The last two lines of stanza 1 are these: "you cross a line, / perhaps." That leaves the impression that the reader may or may not cross a line. That is one interpretation of what the speaker is saying. But continuing to the second stanza, the reader realizes that the speaker is really referring to the idea that the reader might cross this line, perhaps "in a dusty shop." That changes the sense of where the speaker is going. Rather than questioning whether the reader is going to cross the line at all, the speaker emphasizes, in the second stanza, more or less that the reader will eventually cross that line and the only question is where this will occur.

A second dramatic enjambment occurs in the eighth stanza, between the third and fourth lines. Here the poet hyphenates the word disbelief. Although readers may never be certain why an author does one thing or another, one can make intelligent or intuitive guesses. Here, the reason might be that Maxwell wanted to stress the word belief rather than its opposite, disbelief. Of course, one can argue that the metric beat of the poem demanded this hyphenation, but someone else can argue that Maxwell could have chosen another word. It is easier to assume that he hyphenated this one on purpose. He used the hyphen to cause a brief stop, to throw the reader off just a little, to make an emphatic point.

Shape

The shape of Maxwell's poem is not based on grammatical construction. The first two stanzas, plus the first line in stanza 3, complete the first sentence. The second sentence ends in the middle of line 1 of stanza 8. And the third sentence continues to the end of the poem. The shape is determined by the cadence, that is, the rhythm of the stressed and unstressed syllables, and the poet's choice of how many metered feet will be contained in each line. By ignoring grammatical construction — in other words, not allowing a period at the end of a sentence to dictate the end of a line — the author has created a sense of flow, like a small creek making its way downstream around boulders and fallen trees. The shape reflects, in some way, the theme of the poem, as it provides a sense of pattern but takes the reader outside that pattern at the same time. The definitive shape is the quatrain, with its patterned lines. Still, the meaning of the poem lies past the quatrains, as it pushes through the empty spaces between the stanzas and continues beyond the normal boundaries.