Pope and Tennyson both put moonlight on a building where someone is inside. But Pope's moonbeam "tips with silver all the walls" and then stops — the description is a dare he declines. He knows the scene is decorative. Tennyson's moon gleams "by fits" on chalk while a man lies on a slope listening for a voice. One poet sees the surface. The other uses the surface to not be able to see through it.

The friction: Pope's couplet admits the poet could "shine in description" here and chooses not to — difficulty as refusal to perform. Tennyson performs fully and still can't get inside. The shadow crosses the blind. The lips move but don't speak. Description at maximum intensity producing maximum obstruction. Pope withholds; Tennyson discovers withholding is what happens even when you try.

The line breaks do the work the content won't admit. "Shriek with pleasure if we show" — that enjambment holds you for one beat in pure delight before the object arrives. The weasel's twist. The pleasure is real. The poem knows it is performing exactly what it denounces.

"Come let us mock at the great / That had such burdens on the mind" — Yeats

W. B. Yeats, “NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

The stanza announces seriousness and the rhyme scheme eats it alive. "Serious" / "deleterious" — the ear catches the joke before the mind registers the argument. Ottava rima is a machine for making sincerity impossible: the couplet always knows what the sestet was pretending.

"shall my lay soar high and solemn, / As an old temple dwindled to a column" — Byron

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto XIII”

Rossetti's Eve sits with the corpse and the whole animal kingdom responds — grief becomes catalogue, becomes taxonomy, becomes a kind of finished architecture. Milton's Eve falls at Adam's feet mid-sentence, unfinished, syntactically broken. One poet knows mourning is a completed form. The other knows it isn't yet anything.

The friction: Rossetti's animals "forgot" and "forbore" — grief as organised cessation. Milton's Eve is "not so repulst" — grief as refused ending. Rossetti inherits Milton's scene and resolves it. That resolution is the loss. Milton's Eve is still falling. Rossetti's has landed, and landing is what makes it elegy.

The bad reader swears the poems are good precisely because he can't understand them. The poet rages not at the praise but at being read worse than he was written. The difficulty isn't in the text. It's in the performance of the text. And Marvell catches it mid-transfer.

"Sir you read false. That any one but you / Should know the contrary" — Marvell

Andrew Marvell

Hardy's wife jokes that he looks like a widower, and then she dies, and then he sits in the same chair remembering the joke. Barbara Allan's lover dies and she orders her own deathbed made. Both poems turn a spoken line into a prophecy. But Hardy needs twenty-four lines and a supernatural apparatus to do what the ballad does in four.

The difference is who gets to be changed by the words. Barbara Allan speaks and then acts — her language costs her everything. Hardy's wife speaks and is simply collected on. She becomes raw material; he becomes the poem. The ballad lets the woman finish what she started. Hardy lets the Spirits finish it for her.

Finch catalogues every method of spiritual recovery — prayer, ecstasy, retirement, monasticism — then declares them all insufficient. The poem's difficulty is that it means this sincerely. Not despair, not irony: a calm inventory of tools that work only at a distance from their purpose.

"These, but at distance, towards that purpose tend, / The lowly Means to an exalted End; / Which He must perfect, who allots her Stay" — Finch. The couplet hands agency to God and the poem just stops. Not resolution. Abandonment dressed as faith.

Anne Finch, “FRAGMENT.”

Cowley describes sitting for a portrait and finding only the painter's mind looking back. The model disappears into the technique. This is what difficulty does in the comic register — you went in as the subject and came out as the occasion.

"Not as a cause, but an occasion to his wit" — Cowley

Abraham Cowley, “ODE. Upon occasion of a Coppy of Verses of my Lord”

Every beat filled. Boy tricks dog, dog dives, dog quits, boy finds wasps, wasps chase boy, boy finds squirrel, squirrel flees. The couplets never pause because the boy never pauses. The cattle stand still in the last line like a punchline the poem earned by refusing to breathe.

"feeds on busy meddling joys" — Clare. Six words doing the work of an essay on childhood. Feeds: it nourishes him. Busy: it looks like purpose. Meddling: it isn't. Joys: it doesn't matter.

John Clare, “JULY”