that in the middle

Last week someone asked a few of us to read a poem she'd written, so we did. It went -- well I don't have any kind of permission to copy it out here, but the ideas went like this:

A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
Did you think this wasn't going to affect you?
It will. The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
Or else everything will get worse.

She had variety in there, you understand: she didn't write, "A thing has happened" three times: that was me. But it was the part in the middle I picked up on, the direct address. It wasn't something I'd noticed before. I've never studied poetry, or not since high school, and for all I know they might point this out in the first tertiary-level poetry lesson right after they ask you what your name is, and the name of your favourite colour, and your cat, but for the first time it occurred to me that a line like this in the middle of a poem could act like a clip to the reader's face, saying, "You thought you knew where this was going, didn't you -- you were starting to feel complacent. But now we're about to expand this idea further, so focus your attention."

The next night I was reading Czesław Miłosz's essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry" when I came across this paragraph,

Nothing, perhaps, is simpler and more obvious than what supplied the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummon de Andrade with the theme for his poem [In the Middle of the Road]. When a thing is truly seen, seen intensely, it remains with us forever and astonishes us, even though it would appear that there is nothing astonishing about it.

followed by this translation of the poem by Elizabeth Bishop:

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

"It's the same thing again," I thought. "That belt around the middle of the poem, giving it a wasp-waist …" then I amended myself "… but of course you don't read a poem in a single glance, the way that you see the silhouette of wasp-waist, from a distance, no, you travel through it over time, and the fastening at the centre arrives like a surprise, catching hold of your brain and giving it a flick, or sharpening it for a moment: long enough to reach the end of the poem. I wonder if the conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the one in which he lets her know that, "My feelings will not be repressed," and she advises him to begin the repressing process immediately because she has no intention of marrying him -- I wonder if that works in the same way?" It was a long time since I'd read the book, and I wasn't sure, but in my mind I saw Pride and Prejudice rearranged like this -- in an instant, reshaped -- like an hourglass, with that scene pinching in the middle, drawing your attention to a point there, a pivot.