Here’s an example of what I’m trying to understand:
1 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
2 Bird thou never wert,
3 That from Heaven, or near it,
4 Pourest thy full heart
5 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
6 Higher still and higher
7 From the earth thou springest
8 Like a cloud of fire;
9 The blue deep thou wingest,
10 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
11 In the golden lightning
12 Of the sunken sun,
13 O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
14 Thou dost float and run;
15 Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
There are three different line indents. I assume their purpose is to guide the “beat”, or the speaker’s briefest of pauses, or perhaps the flow of one line into another. Is this correct? Is there a standard way to interpret these?
I think the idea is that line 2 is more of a continuation of line 1, so it’s sort of under it, whereas line 3 is a brand new line unconnected with lines 1 and 2, so it’s back out where 1 was. But I could be wrong.
Yes to both answers. There is no universal rule; they are just one of alternative ways ways to organize thoughts and establish rhythym when the poet doesn’t want to use punctuation.
It has always been my suspicion that a poet will resort to kooky spacing and indenting and such to distract the reader from the fact that it’s not a very interesting poem.
Although poetry is traditionally a verbal art, some experimentation in visual poetry notwithstanding, in the written transmission the theoretically arbitrary arrangement of words on the page cannot help but have some effect on the reader. Typography thus becomes a part, however small, of the medium. The choice then is not whether it exists, but whether you want to be in control of it. Although no general theory exists that I know of as to the aesthetic value of indentation, poets will often choose to work with it rather than leave it alone. It can’t be completely value neutral, since traditional indentations are generally kept, and sometimes are intentionally played with by editors, which can ignite controversy (or, what counts as igniting controversy on the scale of the rather small universe of people who argue about these sorts of things).
Pretty much everyone who makes these decisions about visual presentation of verse is in the same boat as people interpreting them. There is a tradition that guides us, but that emerges out of a lot of individuals pretty much just feeling it out for themselves.
The indentation of rhymed poetry was to set apart lines with the same rhyme. The OP’s example fits this category.
Another unrelated use is to line up a line that finishes another line of iambic pentameter, as in a play (i.e., one character finishes talking in the middle of a line and another character finishes out that line; the second line fragment begins right below where the first line fragment ends).
The same principle applies in narrative and epic poetry, where the first line of one section may finish out the pentameter of the section before it. Also, the beginning of a section is indented in epic poetry if it starts out a new line of pentameter.
Indentations, line breaks, etc., are not strictly regulated in free verse. In modern rhymed verse, indenting lines to set off rhymes is not in style.