[Tim Murphy]

A.E. Stallings has graciously agreed to join us as the first returning Lariat (Lariata?). Too often, people here engage in self-exculpation for their metrical clangers by saying "Well, Alicia does it." Or worse, "Murphy does it." It is my position that you must learn to obey the rules of meter before you enjoy the liberty of bending them. And that is what Alicia and I do.

Frost told us there were two meters, Iambic, and Loose Iambic. I take the latter to mean Accentual Verse, where the syllable counts vary from line to line, but the accents are consistent and the rhythms are varied but driving. Accentual Verse is far more ancient in English than our present Accentual-Syllabic verse. Start with Beowulf, look at Middle English, and sit at your Grandmother's knee listening to Mother Goose. Warning: it takes a fine ear to distinguish fair from foul.

I'll begin the discussion by posting three poems in dimeter, in all of which there is variance in syllable count. All are eight line poems, rhymed abab, cdcd.

The Wound

I climbed to the crest,
Fog-festooned,
Where the sun lay west
Like a crimson wound:

Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I'd given no sign
It had pierced me through.

--Hardy

The Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And changed some part
Of a day I had rued.

--Frost

The Expulsion

Six weeks of drought--
the corn undone
and wheat burned out
by the brazen sun--

over that land
an angel stands
with an iron brand
singeing his hands.

--Murphy

All these poems are a single sentence, and all rely on anapestic substitution to vary rhythm and give the poet breathing space from the strict 4 syllable requirements of accentual-syllabic verse. Let us begin with these, and then move on to longer lines. And let us full-throatedly welcome Alicia back to our board!

PS. I've typed these three little poems without recourse to text, and I apologize for any mistakes.

[nyctom]

Me confused. What is it you are asking? Or trying to discuss? Could you clarify please.

Thanks!

Tom

[Carol Taylor]

Me confused too. Tim, it sounds as though you (and Frost?) are saying that accentual-syllabic is synonymous with iambic meter and that loose iambic is anything other than regular iambic, including accentual. I consider dactyllic, trochaic, and anapestic meters to be accentual-syllabic just as surely as iambic meters are, but they are not iambic by any sense of the word. I think of loose iambic as iambic meter with heavier than normal substitution. It doesn't get loose enough for me to call it accentual until there isn't an identifiable accentual-syllabic pattern to be found. While the examples you give are certainly loose, the substitutions are all standard accentual-syllabic substitutions which could easily be absorbed into iambic meter if the lines were longer and there were more unsubstituted lines. There aren't any extra unaccented syllables. Would like Alicia's slant on this, and yours, too, Tim.

Carol

[Tim Murphy]

Carol, in accentual syllabic dimeter, every line would have four syllables, as in my lttle poem To A Trout:


I whet my hook
beneath a pine.
Then with a swish
I loft my line
over a brook
of sparkling wine.
Come, little fish,
and we will dine.

In the first-mentioned poems above syllable counts vary from as few as three (Fog-festooned) to as many as six (Of a day I had rued.) However there are two stresses per line, so they're all clearly accentual. Of course I agree with you and disagree with Frost. There are dactylic, anapestic, and trochaic meters. I would even argue that if you scan Swinburne (or Murphy), it's possible to concede that there is amphibrachic meter in English.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of The Canon is strict accentual syllabic verse, and I think this impoverishes our metrics. One of the things I love about Alicia is her use of hypermetric lines. Alicia, could you post your bat sonnet for us again? It's a poem where the metrical liberties are marvelously expressive of the subject. This evening I'll type in some hypermetric trimeters and tetrameters from Frost.

[A. E. Stallings]

Am honored to be doing a second Lariat stint...

Although I know what Tim means about knowing rules before breaking/bending them, I should add that I certainly don't think a person has to "know" them in any sort of intellectual sense. A well-trained ear will tell you how it works, even if you have no idea what an iamb or a trochee is. Actually, sometimes that might even be an advantage... Your average third-grader would probably have less trouble "scanning" the above poems than would someone obsessed with acceptable substitutions.

Before anyone gets on my case, I use both "accent" and "stress" interchangeably--read "ictus" or "beat" for these if that bothers you.

"Loose iambics" or whatever we are calling this (and I do have a bit of a problem with the application of Greek terms to English verse) seems to me more natural/native to English than strict accentual/syllabics, by which we mostly mean iambic pentameter, which almost has its own set of "rules", that don't necessarily apply to shorter meters.

Most nursery rimes work in this loose way. As, for instance:

One, two ONE TWO
Buckle my shoe BUCK le my SHOE
Three, four THREE FOUR
Shut the door SHUT the DOOR
Five, six FIVE SIX
Pick up sticks. PICK up STICKS

Each of these lines has two "beats"--where you might clap your hands. But a varying number of syllables. To scan this as feet would be total nonsense.

Let's say there are three kinds of variations within something loosely iambic (that is, we are not in anapestic, dactyllic, trochaic)--here I am winging it--"initial" and "medial" and "final".

INITIAL:

A "headless" line (starting right on the beat, or a trochee, if you will) is a common "variation"

An "anacrusis" --a grace note, an extra unaccented beat at the beginning of a line, making for two unaccented initial syllables, or, if you like, an anapest-- is another.

These are both common/natural--certainly NOT a breaking of any rule.

MEDIAL:

having two unaccented syllables back to back.

having two accented syllables back to back.

VERY VERY RARELY: having three unaccented syllabes back to back to back.

FINAL:

extra final unaccented syllable (feminine ending)

two accented syllables back to back


All any of this means is that sometimes, instead of unaccented, accented, you are going to have two unaccented or two accented syllables back to back. This happens even within strict rules of IP, as an initial trochee. But whatever you CALL it, it still means that you HEAR two unaccented syllables back to back. The aural precedent is there, even in strict IP. And for all that Timothy Steele has soundly demonstrated that so many metrical variations you might see in earlier IP were actually elisions, unless the elision is spelled out (heav'n) we still HEAR them as variations--two light syllables back to back. Again, the precedent is there, even in formal, strict accentual/syllabic verse.

If one only looked at words in English, you would think that this is basically a trochaic language. Most two-syllable words in English are trochees. Including trochee. And English. Father, mother, sister, brother. After, tiger, doodle, bingo, running, roses, nostril... And so on. Of course there are plenty of exceptions. Exceptions include some prepositions (before, against, around, about) and words of foreign (often French) origin (garage, finesse). But the majority of disyllabic words in English are still trochees.

So why does English fall so often into iambic meters instead?

The definite and the indefinite article.

When are you going to start a poem with "tiger"? Pretty much only if it is an apostrophe:

Tyger, tyger burning bright

Otherwise, it is going to be

The/a tiger, burning bright

In theory, all monosyllabic words in English are common--that is, they may be stressed or unstressed depending on their position. The main exceptions to the rule are "the" and "a". While very occasionally they may receive a stress for emphasis (as Sherlock Holmes' "THE woman"), they are pretty much guaranteed not to. So if they occur, for instance, in a position where a stress ought to be, that stress tends to get shunted over yet again.

As

Fear no more the heat o' the sun

FEAR no MORE the HEAT o' the SUN

"O'" is clearly not stressed, being so slight and coming after the stressed "heat". But then, neither can "the" be stressed, so the stress is shunted further over to "sun." (It is almost as though "o'the" is one elided syllable, metrically speaking, but the aural effect is still of two skipping light syllables).

Of course, one element in any metrical exercise is how well a rhythm is established. Once you know to listen for three stresses, of course, or two, or four, they are easier to pick out. And visual length of line on a page also plays a part. If the line looks short, you know there aren't going to be a lot of extra unaccented syllables lying
around, and you apply stress accordingly. On other hand, if a line looks long, you are a bit charier of applying stress to every other syllable that comes your way.

In the Hardy dimeter:

I climbed to the crest,

Starts "iambic"--alternating stress & unstress--but "the" cannot be stressed, so we skip to cres, resulting in a nice anapestic skip.

Fog-festooned,

short-looking line, that ends up being "headless," if one uses that term in loose iambic dimeter.

Where the sun lay west

Longer looking line--probably not headless--so "where" not likely to receive stress. "The" certainly will not, so we end up with two light skipping syllables before we end on "sun"

Like that wound of mine

Almost same situation with "like" and "that"

Of which none knew,

regularly alternating nonstress/stress

For I'd given no sign

We're used to that anapestic opening now. "Given" is almost one syllable, but still provides that anapestic skip.

It had pierced me through.

Same initial anapestic swing (anacrusis again).

Now a quick look at the Frost. Here, the "loose"ness of the iambics is entirely created by the "article" rule:

The way a crow

regular

Shook down on me

regular

The dust of snow

regular

From a hemlock tree

"a" in position of stress, but cannot receive it, so two light initial syllables--anacrusis/anapestic opening.

Has given my heart

"given" is almost metrically one word here, but still gives a nice little skip

A change of mood

regular

And changed some part

regular

Of a day I had rued.

Again, "a" in position to receive stress, but cannot.

Same thing holds true in Murphy's rhythmically syncopated lines:

by the brazen sun--

"the" in position of stress, but cannot receive it.

over that land

standard initial trochee--starting on a disyllabic word so there is no ambiguity.

an angel stands

regular

with an iron brand

Alicia's Rule of the Article...

singeing his hands.

standard initial trochee, starting on a disyllabic word so there is no ambiguity.


So actually, in loose iambics, I would say it is principally the article that gives English the flexibility to break out of the rule of alternating stress.

Well, enough of a diatribe on that! Hope I haven't hopelessly confused folks on what is a pretty natural and straightforward phenomenon, and in fact a commonplace of the schoolyard.

[Anthony Lombardy]

I was struck by Alicia's comment that " "Loose iambics"... seems to me more natural/native to English than strict accentual/syllabics, by which we mostly mean iambic pentameter, which almost has its own set of "rules", that don't necessarily apply to shorter meters."

I think this is right, if it implies that there is a special connection between accentual verse and the shorter line. Because accentual verse admits a varied number of unaccented syllables, it relies on a rhythm of strongly marked, heavy beats. Without such a strong rhythm, all sense of rhythm risks being lost in lines with varying numbers of unaccented syllables. But what is it that makes a rhythm or succession of beats stronger or weaker? I think it is the association of accentual verse with physical movement, and with song and dance. An underlying musical rhythm, re-enforcing the rhythm of the language, is effective at bringing out the rhythm in a line, as is bodily movement, (or clapping) when lines are sung or chanted in a dance or march. In fact, aren't most hymn lyrics, contemporary song lyrics, and even the songs that drill instructors call out to their recruits as they march, accentual verse?
Clive was recently discussing on another thread Derek Attridge (Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction), who has pointed out that in most accentual verse the poet is either writing in or resisting a four beat line. In the traditional ballad stanza, which alternates four and three beat lines, lines two and four, with their three beats, are natural places at which to pause. This pause corresponds to the fourth beat of lines one and two. Certainly the poems Tim has posted could be written with four beat lines.
Why should there be any special connection between accentual verse and the four beat line? Why shouldn’t poets also write accentual verse in five beat lines? They may and have, of course, but I would guess that the reason to be cautious about doing so ultimately seems related to the fact that we have two feet. To march in a straight line, to dance, we seem to generate patterns that are multiples of two. Even the five foot line, iambic pentameter, produces such a pattern in its couplets and in stanzas of four lines.
If this is mostly right, any meter that evokes bodily movement will tend to have a stronger rhythm, a rhythm able to incorporate greater variations in the number of unstressed syllables, and one would expect apparent counter-examples like "Break, break, break/On thy cold, grey stones, O Sea!" to have a strong pause every other line.

[Carol Taylor]

Alicia, thanks for the lucid explanation. I believe the problem is a matter of semantics. You are calling all three examples loose iambics, which I see as a function of accentual-syllabic meter rather than of accentual meter. Tim, on the other hand, is calling them accentual because the syllable count varies:

Carol, in accentual syllabic dimeter, every line would have four syllables, as in my lttle poem To A Trout.

I understand that substitution, even fairly heavy or "loose" substitution, is normal in longer iambic lines, so here is my question: Does the fact that these poems are in dimeter mean that they may have little or no substitution in order to be classified accentual-syllabic because as the number of feet decreases, the ratio of substitution to regular feet goes up past what is a reasonable ratio? In other words, if a line has only two feet, one substitution per line would put the percentage of substitution at a whopping 50%, whereas one substitution in a line of IP would be only 20%.

I'm belaboring this point because we mix the terms so much, though it makes little difference to the rhythm of the poem whether we call it accentual or accentual-syllabic.

Carol

[robert mezey]

A few scattered comments. I think Frost was just
simplifying matters and meant merely that most
metrical poems are somewhere along what you might
call the iambic contiuum, from very strict iambic
(Pope) to pure accentual (Bridges' wonderful poem
"London Snow") He knew very well about the other
meters and occasionally wrote in them. Carol is
right in her reluctance to call those dimeter poems
accentual--in the Frost, for instance, there are
only two extra syllables and each opens the last line
of the quatrain. Very regular, I'd say.
Alicia, Ransom and others (including me) would call
the meter of that nursery rhyme dipodic (for the
uninitiated, a dipod is a foot with two accents;
usually one accent is strong and the other weak).
And I must confess that I have often wondered why
many poets and prosodists, including Alicia, are
bothered by applying the Greek terminology to verse
in English. One knows immediately that we have
accents where the ancients had quantities. I can
recognize the iambic in Latin and the iambic in
English and never have the sense of a misnomer.
(You can invent new names for English measures and
if they come into general use, fine, but until
then we are stuck with the classical names and I
don't see it as a big problem. The most obvious
difference is all in our favor: accentual-syllabic
is much more flexible than the quantitative meters
and capable of greater subtlety of expression. I
would hazard the claim that the invention of the
accentual-syllabic meters is one of the great
glories of Western civilization. It would be
good to know if Chaucer invented it by himself or,
more likely, a number of poets advanced together,
thinking to pair the syllabic Norman meter with
the accentual native meter.)
Finally, one small disagreement, Alicia. I think
the articles easily receive the metrical accent
and it happens more often than we might think.
By metrical accent, I mean only that the ear hears
the ghost of the accent where it expects to hear
one and is satisfied. I have a lot of examples in
a notebook I can't find at the moments, examples
from several centuries, so I'll compose a couple
of unexceptional lines that exhibit an accented
article:

I gathered an intrepid troop of soldiers

and

Seen from the hilltop, a beleaguered city

That second line is especially interesting because
in the third foot, though iambic, I'd insist, the
unaccented syllable has a longer vowel, much more
lexical force, in short, more stress than the article,
but the article gets the accent. I call it an in-
verted iamb, and you hear it all the time. Here are
two examples that come to mind:

Like stormclouds in a troubled sky

and

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

The second line is more ambiguous, perhaps---one
could plausibly read the second foot as trochaic,
though I wouldn't. Both lines are iambic, I feel,
and both have feet (the second in each case) in
which the preposition wrests, so to speak, the
metrical accent from the stronger first syllable.

[Roger Slater]

In a line like "I gathered an intrepid troop of soldiers," I think the only reason that "an" may be heard as slightly stressed is that otherwise there would be three unstressed syllables in a row, so we are faced with conflicting "rules", i.e., the article doesn't take a stress, but we also don't generally have three unstressed syllables in a row (the "rule of three"). Substantively, though, we don't really want to stress "an." We'd have no trouble finding the IP if we made the line "I gathered six intrepid troops of soldiers," but the purely functional little word "an" doesn't seem to want to be stressed but for the "rule of three."

Still, I'd think that maybe this sample line would be regarded as tetrameter if it were found among lines that were more clearly tetrameter (whereas the line with "six" would not).

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Well, Aicia, Tim, and Mr. Mezey--Lariats all!--and other interested souls:

This seems like a good place to introduce a certain poem by Auden which has always, until recently, bothered me. (But only bothered me whenever I tried to scan it; not, when I only read it for enjoyment.)

The discussion so far has concerned lines of shorter length, but our dear Auden enjoyed using accentual meter in his longer lines--or so it seems to me. I have read that the following poem is "accentual," and that seems to be the best way of describing his meter. I have settled on "accentual tetrameter"--or, a four-beat line of strong-stress meter--but I confess that many of the lines could be read as 5-beat lines of accentual meter, or even as "loose accentual-syllabic" meter, if one wishes. First, the poem; then, some possible scansions of some of the lines:

<dir>PETITION

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward's stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.</dir>

One of the lines could easily be "scanned" as 4-beat accentual:

<dir>the exHAUStion of WEANing, the LIar's QUINsy</dir>

Many could be scanned as both, 4-beat accentual or IP:

<dir>or COUNtry HOUSes at the END of DRIVES BANNED POST(4-BEAT)

or COUNtry HOUSes AT the END of DRIVES BANNED POST(IP)

*

sir, NO man's ENemy, forGIVing ALL BANNED POST(4-BEAT)

sir, NO man's ENeMY, forGIVing ALL BANNED POST(IP)</dir>


I think that he was playing loose with the meter, on both counts; i.e., this poem hovers between accentual 4-Beat and IP, and, apropos to the current discussion, those pesky articles and prepositions (not to mention, the secondary stresses of some words) will make all the difference in how this is read. Most problematic, imo, for a purely IP reading (loose or otherwise) would be the aforementioned line: BANNED POSTthe exHAUStion of WEANing, the LIar's QUINsy. Most problematic for a 4-beat reading would be the following line:

<dir>Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch</dir>

I have commented elsewhere that it is my opinion that he meant no beat for the opening word, "send." However, I might be wrong. His beats in this poem follow an alliterative pattern; so, is it SEND and SOV(ereign), or is it POWer and the preceding line's PROD(igal)? Well, he wanted to make us think, I think--consider the final statement of the poem; consider the aweful desire to stress the final syllable of "prodigal" for the rhyme with L1's "all." (Though note: he used alliteration across the lines, too, not just within lines, for his beats.)

I have been thinking--a theory only, so far--that Auden often tread right in the middle of accentual and accentual-syllabic meters...so that either reading might be possible for many of his poems; and, to make it work for such poems, he generally made each line of four strong stresses and one promotion on a normally (in speech) unstressed word or syllable.

Whaddya think?

Curtis.