Yes! It's a great line!

Alicia,

Another problematic line, if Auden's poem is to be read as loose IP:

<dir>and THE disTORtions OF inGROWN virGINiTY. or

And THE disTORtions of INgrown virGINiTY. </dir>

The off-rhyme with "quinsy" doesn't require a stress on the last syllable of this line; however, I can't help but hear a slight stress on that syllable which compares with the stress on "the" and "of" in the first example, if that's how it's to be stressed.

This might be hypermetric, too, and aligned with the content of this line--"distortions." But this goes back to the "rule" you made about articles in loose accentual-syllabic constructions. The problem with reading this poem as IP only is in the fact that it is so irregular with its lines. Well, I think Auden did put an accentual-syllabic spin on the poem--I think he knew that many lines of this could be read as IP with substitutions--but that he made it just as much accentual as IP. The line could also be 4-beats of accentual meter:

<dir>and the disTORtions of INGROWN virGINity.</dir>

--Here, the stresses of "ingrown" and "virginity" follow an alliterative pattern within the line and with the preceding line's "weaning" and "quinsy"; the "t" in "distortions" harks back to the "t's" in L's 3&4 and signals the alliteration with L8's "correct" and "stance."--another kind of distortion.

I'll guess a major difference between interpretations, one I mentioned before: If we come to this poem with a predisposition to "count" normally unstressed words or syllables, or those with lesser stresses, in our meter, we'll see this as being primarily IP with substitutions. A strong-stress meter, however, does not rely on such stresses for its count. Yes, of course we might still "hear" those lesser stresses, either way; but for an accentual meter of this kind, they are far less important and audible than they would be for an accentual-syllabic reading.

The examples Tim provided at the beginning of this thread, like Henry Quince's poem which he has since provided, cause disagreement over nomenclature for the very fact that they are not the same kind of strong-stress meter--accentual meter--found in Auden's poem. They are in fact a step closer to A-S meters. I do think that the naming "accentual" to poems which have a regular beat-count but not a regular syllabic count is only circumstantially important. What is happening in Henry Quince's poem is not too different from what would be occurring in a strictly anapestic or dactyllic meter. What is happening in Auden's poem, from a strong-stress reading, is something else altogether.

Something you mentioned in your last post seems related to this kind of reading of Auden's poem. In the way I am reading it, the beats are held for a much longer duration than the non-beats. I have very little experience with the idea of "quantitative" meter, so I don't know how it relates to this. Isochrony might be a closer approximation, if it refers to the duration of beats in opposition to the duration of non-beats.


Curtis.

Let me type in one of my favorite Frost poems. Whether we call it hypermetric or accentual verse, nobody does it better than he.

They Were Welcome To Their Belief

Grief may have thought it was grief.
Care may have thought it was care.
They were welcome to their belief,
The overimportant pair.

No, it took all the snows that clung
To the low roof over his bed,
Beginning when he was young,
To induce the one snow on his head.

But whenever the roof came white
The head in the dark below
Was a shade less the color of night,
A shade more the color of snow.

Grief may have thought it was grief.
Care may have thought it was care.
But neither one was the thief
Of his raven color of hair.

After we have dissected this, I'll type in more Frost.

I agree (and taught) that one should at least know the rules before venturing beyond, but who or what decides when one has earned the right, so to speak, to bend them? One can too easily assume that poets with whom one is unfamiliar have not "mastered the rules." Since critical assumptions and perspectives are so varied and even contradictory, judgments are often based less on anything inherent in the language itself than on how much credit or leeway one is willing to allow a given writer. A line by an unknown might be judged metrically weak or inept; the same line penned by one whose work one admires might be seen as "a brilliant use of pyrrhic in English." A metrical inversion in the second foot can as easily be judged "an effective dramatic variation" as "a barbarous and ignorant breaking of the rules."

Cheers,
Jan


[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited August 30, 2002).]

I'm not disagreeing, but might it be theory as much as practice that is impoverishing our metrics? It seems to me that theory can and frequently does cripple a perfectly viable poem. E.g.: assuming that there is no "true" spondee in English can prevent one from reading a line in a way that would make perfect dramatic (and rhythmic) sense. Likewise, one might try to read other meters as if they were (or somehow ought to be) IP or "loose iambics" or accentual verse and conclude that they are incompetent, or respond to alliterative verse as if the rules of Anglo-Saxon prosody were the only acceptable way of writing it, and then fault such poems for not being what they were never meant to be. [Like Carol and Alicia, I read "Adjustable Wench" as anapest, but do not mean to imply that you, Tim, are faulting the poem in your description of it. Then again, you are less dogmatic about such things than some others.]

Theory is usually more successful when it follows practice rather than dictating it. That's why I tend to sympathize with Alicia's preference for developing an ear rather than studying theory, though hearing is also highly subjective (as we are reminded here daily). It takes practice to listen to the rhythm which arises from a poem rather than imposing a rhythm (or a theory) on it, and as you aptly put it, "it takes a fine ear to distinguish fair from foul."

Cheers,
Jan

Alicia, you're absolutely right of course than no poet
thinks in feet while composing---you simply have the
"tune" in your head---but they're indispensable, I think,
for analysis.
I'd agree that the Henry poem is largely anapestic, with
a few scattered iambs. An excellent example of real
accentual pentameter is Bridges' lovely LONDON SNOW (too
long to type in here but easily found)---5-beaters all
the way, only a few iambic.
AND the disTORtions OF inGROWN virGINity ---now, there
is a line where the article definitely does not get the
accent: it must be an initial trochee. I take this line
as a perfectly normal iambic pentameter, with two hyper-
metrical syllables at the end. The accent on OF is very
light of course, and there is some lovely play on the
word "INgrown"---the meter makes you distort the normal
pronunciation. Very odd poem: almost all iambic lines,
but a couple that can't be.
Very vexed question about spondees in English. I tend to
think that Winters is right, that they're found regularly
in early 16th century verse, as in Googe's line, "Fair
face show friends," and rarely thereafter. (One reads
them as iambs, of course, but it is hard to distinguish
among the four stresses.) Wouldn't you say there are
spondees in Frost's line, "But the child's mound--- Don't,
don't, don't, don't, she cried"---? But in general one
can do without spondees or pyrrhics, except in what is
called the ionic foot, where it's hard to hear anything
else but a pyrrhic followed by a spondee, e.g. "To a
GREEN THOUGHT / In a GREEN SHADE." Outside of ionic
feet, I don't think there are true pyrrhics in English.
Ah, well, back to work.

I've written a couple of short (thank God unpublished) essays on meter, and some friends like Tim Steele who are serious theorists have gently suggested that I confine myself to the practice of writing metrically, and leave the theory to others. Excellent advice. But I'm pleased to be stirring the pot here, delighted to have Alicia here, and even more delighted to have Professor Mezey weigh in, who needs yield to nobody in either practise or theory.

Jan, you're dead right. It's all a matter of ear, and if you heard Bob or Tim recite from the canon, you'd find no difference. My ear was trained by my great tutor who had me memorize 30 thousand lines or so, to the point that I had every rhythm pounding in me head. And I still think there's no short cut to that. As Professor Hecht told us during his short stint as Lariat, "There is no poet I deeply admire who does not have a great deal, and I stress A Great Deal of poetry committed to memory."

Two of the best days of my life were spent at Pomona where Mezey and Murphy recited poetry to each other. I think we only took a book down from the shelf once, when I was forcefully arguing the case for A.D. Hope, whom I hadn't enough of by heart.

Our most brilliant young poets, Alicia, Catherine Tufariello, Greg Williamson, etc., have committed vast swatches of the canon to memory. One of the funniest scenes I ever saw was sitting beside Greg. A famous formalista, who had abandoned IP, which she could not write, and started sprinkling in triple feet willy nilly, gave a reading. Explaining the "metrical principles" of every poem ad nauseam. Greg turned to me and said "It's a good thing she's explaining this, 'cause these meters are WAY over my head."

I think that compared to our Victorian and Edwardian forbears, we're a bunch of Neanderthals. A depressing amount of our verse IP with no medial substitutions.

Henry wrote: Formalists have it harder now than the Victorians did. We have to manage without all the inversions and archaisms.

I half agree. Archaisms are a definite no no. But some of us still risk the inversions, even in the face of the savaging they inevitably take on the Sphere. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Jan

Alicia, seconding a request that was made earlier in this thread, I wonder if you could re-post your lovely bat sonnet, or perhaps "The Mistake" or "A Postcard from Greece," which are two of my favorites.

Best regards.