Much of my poetry is in free verse - I wear my concerns on my sleeve, or at least of the page’s sleeve. I have a love of alliteration, often of short phrases, and rhythm, although often that rhythm is irregular and complex. 

However, I also have a great love for the work of the great poets who worked in a more controlled environment - Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, and their colleagues, who understood the power of rhyme and meter. Rhyme we know well - it’s in most catchy songs, it’s in hymns and anthems. The rhyme helps us remember. Most people hear the rhythm and the meter, it catches their soul, but are usually pressed to explain why

If you ever want to feel the depth of the power of meter, read “The Destruction of Sennacherib”, by Byron, and read it aloud. Here’s the first verse - the bold type shows the beat.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The technical details: Rhyming pattern A-A-B-B. You can’t get much easier to remember. It’s in Anapestic Tetrameter, and no, that’s not a curse from Harry Potter, although it probably should be. An anapest is a measure (foot) that is made up of 2 short syllables and one long one, and I’ve done the first line with the long, emphatic syllable in bold. Tetrameter means 4 feet per line. The practical thing is that you don’t analyse this, it goes straight into your brain like any good earworm. In the beat of the poem you can hear the thunder of the horses as they ride down, the tramp of the army on the path of destruction. Turn that beat around and it doesn’t work: Long-short-short: One two three is waltz time, and I can’t see them just waltzing in.

There are other disciplines - Japanese haiku, tanka and naga-uta relies on a set number of syllables per line. So does a Welsh form (the englyn) and a form called the cinquain, invented by American Adelaide Crapsey (what a name!)

In my opinion, to be good at your craft or art, you need to be able to master the basics. You need to understand and feel the rules before you can successfully break them. Schoenberg, who developed 12-tone technique, was probably one of the world's best orchestrators. Picasso painted pictures like Three Musicians and Nude Descending A Staircase, but was also a painter with great skills in realism. So I will regularly write in traditional forms like sonnets, with fixed rhyme and meter. Often these are just practice pieces, what I call 5 finger exercises. They demand discipline, but often have not a lot of passion behind them. But I do them so I have the tools of my craft.

The Hunter is one that challenged me  in both ways - how to get into what I consider a warped mind, someone who kills for pleasure. What do they feel? But the title and the concept of the hunter is something that seems to call for a formal treatment. In a longer form it would be an epic, a tale of brave Ulysses, or Roland or Arthur. But this is no hero, so he gets just 4 verses. Each verse is 7 lines long, with 3 long lines, 2 short and another 2 long. Very irregular. 

The traditional beat of an epic is dactylic hexameter (six beats of long-short-shot). Our anti-hero hear gets short shrift - most of the feet are iambic (short-long). But I went with the feel of iambic, and didn’t panic if there was an odd foot here or there, because the discipline I was after here was more akin to the haiku. So I made up a pattern of my own: the lines have a set number of syllables that is the same for each verse: 9-10-9-5-5-10-7. In addition, I went for a a fixed rhyming pattern: A-B-C-C-C-A-B. It has a bit of a feel of a limerick about it - another dig at the subject.

So the task at hand was to keep all these technical balls in the air, and try to write a poem that was worthy of the name. How well I succeeded in that last is not for me to judge. But at least I managed not to drop any of the balls!

On editing, I changed a few words and lines, as highlighted - including moving around monster, shadow, demon & horror, all similar words, to increase the alliterative effects in verse 4, and to put the ultimate (demon) back on the subject. And finally, I shortened the title to just "Hunter"