A question about meter and scansion
 

I understand meter pretty well, but there is still one situation which I am unclear on.

This line ...

and a German soldier directing him

... has ten syllables, but there is no way to make it iambic pentameter, is there? In my opinion, it is wrong to do this:

and a / GER man / SOL dier/ di RECT / ing HIM

That first foot (a pyrrhic) is "illegal" because neither syllable can take a theoretical stress. Indeed, the line has only four syllables that can take a stress, so the line has to be counted as tetrameter, doesn't it?

In my view, the only way to scan that line is like this:

and a GER / man SOL / dier di RECT / ing HIM

... with two anapests as substutions for iambs.

(If anyone answers this, I'll respond this evening. Did I post it in the right forum?)

A lot of meter depends on the surrounding lines. I agree that on its own, the line you cite can't effectively be scanned as IP, but it could be a trochaic pentameter line with substitution if you put a stress on the AND:

AND a GER / man SOL / dier di RECT / ing HIM


Whether AND can effectively be emphasized depends largely on the line that came before it, however.



I see nothing wrong with

and a / GER man / SOL dier/ di RECT / ing HIM

but it will be anapestic tetrameter with iambic substitutions (or iambic tetrameter with anapestic substitutions -- take your pick).

Again, though, context matters. Would you call Wordsworth's "London, 1802" trochaic pentameter or iambic? The first two lines start with trochees and there's an initial spondee a few lines down as well, but most of the poem is in perfect IP.

I have to turn off my computer in a moment, but before I do, let me say that the line above ends with a stressed syllable, so the "and" can't take a stress.

You said things in your post that don't make sense to me. You said:

"I see nothing wrong with

"and a / GER man / SOL dier/ di RECT / ing HIM

but it will be anapestic tetrameter with iambic substitutions (or iambic tetrameter with anapestic substitutions -- take your pick)."

But that scansion shows five feet, not four.

Further up you said:

"I agree that on its own, the line you cite can't effectively be scanned as IP, but it could be a trochaic pentameter line with substitution if you put a stress on the AND:

"AND a GER / man SOL / dier di RECT / ing HIM"

But that scansion is tetrameter, not pentameter.

I think that first foot is a dactyl. I consider dactyls to be illegal in IP always.

I'll be back later.

"Illegal"?!?!
We are not lawyers, Perry, we are poets.

Nemo

You won't like Dryden's Aeneid, then. It's in iambic pentameter and it starts with a dactyl.

Rhythm
 

Hello, and welcome to the Sphere.

Climbing (combing) through the words and lines of a work to determine the exactness (inexactness) of meters used, is not my line.... there are many here who can properly address your questions.

The rhythm in the reading of the poem, is
so verily verily verily, important
There fore this is a good ly quer y made

and, in the right place, I think
Sincerely,
Stephen

I don't mean to cast any aspersions, but any word can take a stress. Literally any word. Scansion is a tool, applied retroactively to figure out where stresses are, but the art of poetry itself means that anything goes. If it makes more sense for one line to end in a stressed foot, and the next line to begin with a stressed foot, so be it. Hopkins does it all the time.


I think you might be mixing up terms here. Feet can have multiple stresses.

What Nemo said. As a metrical poet, I can do whatever the heck I want, metrically, if it serves my purpose.

What Nemo said. If you want to be a lawyer, be a lawyer. If you want to be a poet then develop enough confidence in your internal sense of rhythm and meter, and what works in what content, to write without wringing your fingers over it. Alternately, take a few courses in tort law.

And keep this in mind. It all depends on context. What comes before - and sometimes what comes after - has a huge effect in determining whether meter or a substitution works. Is it a humorous poem? A tragedy about a young man who worries too much about meter? Sometimes a metric excursion makes more sense when viewed within the broader body of a poet's work. It's context, and what you're doing with the poem that matters - not some rule.

Perry, I have an explanation for you but, since it is written in verse, I am forbidden by the rules of this forum to post it here. I have instead added it to a thread (Private vs Public...) started by Aaron Poochigian on Drills and Amusements.

I wrote it some time ago when the pejorative phrase "metre wanker" cropped up hereabouts and it is still the best way I have found to express what I do to achieve a formal poem. I don't know what lawyers do so am unable to compare the techniques.

Perhaps

a German soldier, too, directing him

or

a German soldier also, as his guide

or various other rephrasings, depending on the context. It mostly depends on what "and" is actually linking.

Well, I'm surprised by the answers. I am not a pedant; I am simply trying to improve my own meter. That is a line from a poem I am working on. On the Metrical board, there is constant criticism of people's meter, and I was hoping to improve my meter to avoid that.

My theory is that a line of iambic pentameter has to have at least five evenly spaced syllables that can take a stress when spoken normally, and the line I posted cannot (given that the line before ends with a stressed syllable). I wanted to find out if most formalist poets would agree with that.

I used the wrong term. "DUM da DUM" is an amphimacer. If Amphimacers and amphibrachs (da DUM da) can be used in iambic pentameter, then that allows ANY line up to about 15 syllables to be scanned as iambic pentameter. In my mind, that it simply chaos. My use of the word "illegal" was appropriate here, and it disappoints me that it merely triggered a bunch of scolds. Yes, there have to be rules when writing in meter, or when scanning other people's poetry.

A dactyl is "DUM da da", and I agree that they can be used in iambic pentameter as occasional substitutions. The most common substitute is the trochee, and Frost showed us that anapests make good substitutes too.

It's good of you to take the dismissive comments so good-naturedly. We can get very worked up about poetic matters, which I think you'll find is a good thing.

It's also promising that you're eager to polish your poem as well as possible before posting it for comment.

It sounds like you're uncomfortable with the line, in which case you should revise. (Julie's made some suggestions.) If you're comfortable with it, but wonder how others will react, we'll be able to tell you more easily when you've posted the poem. I look forward to it.

Welcome.

I'm strictly fv, but Julie's first alternative struck me as a pretty fine example. Like everything else in poetry, context rules.

If I'm sensing that you are surprised to find a ten-syllable line that cannot be readily scanned as pentameter, let me just add that you shouldn't be surprised. Using ten syllables is no guarantee of pentameter, though I do know a poet or two who mistaken believe otherwise. Still, I agree that context is all and that you might be so bold as to keep the line regardless of its scansion if it sounds good to you.

I should have thanked Julie for her suggestions, although neither of them work very well. I apologize for having such a defensive reaction to the comments, but I was looking for guidance, not criticism for being a pedant.

I do believe that what I said is true: A line of iambic pentameter must have at least five syllables, evenly spaced, that can either be stressed or take what I call a "theoretical" stress. If there are only four syllables which can reasonably be stressed, then that is tetrameter. The problem, of course, is that satisfying the meter in all of the lines can make a poem sound odd or stilted.

I'll be posting the poem on Saturday on the Metrical board. It will be interesting to see people's reactions.

Perry, I scan it as you did in the first line: a tet line with two anapests and two iambs.

Whether you feel that that's a comfortable substitution in a generally IP poem depends on (a) the context of the poem that we're not given, so I can't comment on it, and (b) your ear.

For my part, I think the two-anapests-for-three-iambs substitution can work quite well, if used judiciously. The key of meter is finding some kind of equality: there's equality of stresses and equality of syllables. The ear can hear both, so you can use both—you've just got to sound it out and see if it works.

Without knowing the rest of your poem, I of course can't say whether it's judicious in this context or not.

In a nutshell, that's beautifully put, Aaron.

Perry,
I've always used this rule of thumb:

Don't be too prescriptive about it. If it sounds OK, then it probably is, regardless of the actual construction. If it doesn't... pay another visit to that drawing board! :) Good luck with the poem.

Jayne

Aaron, you said what you said in a way very similar to the way I would have said it. I am glad there is a little flexibility on meter because I don't want my mostly metrical poems to be kicked over to the Free Verse board. The poem in question is 15 lines but five of those lines are not strictly IP, so I wonder how people will feel about them. I tend to count syllables while I write, and then try to hammer the poem into meter after it is substantially written.

Thank you, Aaron, Jayne, Julie, Max and everyone else.

Hi Perry,
All kinds of good responses here. I just wanted to put my two cents in in response to your comment that an IP line should have five evenly spaced stresses. That is only half true. You can think of the Platonic IP line as a sort of accompaniment that you play your instrument both with and against. Some poets hew very close to it and can achieve great charm that way, creating an atmosphere of steadiness and meditation -- at one with the invisible companion. (Sphereans will recognize the poet.) Since there are infinite degrees of stress and unstress (poets frequently use a 4-point scale instead of the binary on-off) and in syllable length, even verse close to the Platonic form can be rich and uniquely flavored if it avoids crude monotony. Some poets freely substitute. Well-recognized substitutions include initial trochees, initial headless iambs, initial or medial double iambs, medial trochees and spondees, and anapests. There are traditional rules regarding substitutions that you can read about. You generally do not want to lead the reader out of a double meter and into a triple meter by using too many triple meter substitutions, if you want to write recognizable IP. As the poets here have said, you can do what you like, but as Wallace Stevens said, It Should Give Pleasure, so the approach should be consistent for the poem as a whole.

Since you asked this question, you would surely enjoy Tim Steele's "All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing," a delightful treatise on meter in poetry. Bill

PS. I guess I should add that the accompanist is only there if you summon him/her with a sufficient invocation in the first couple of lines.
PPS. Following up on Aaron N.'s comment, we not only hear different kinds of equality but we often try to search it out or solicit it, compressing one line and stretching another to give lines approximate equality in length, isochrony.

Perry,


You might enjoy this article. Frost "misbehaved" ;) all the time. It's OK to loosen up. Julie has provided some fine alternatives, though.


Best of luck!


Cathy

Interesting and exhausting analysis! I'd add to the references Steele's All The Fun's How You Say a Thing .

Bill, I didn't mean to suggest that I don't understand meter, or the variety of exceptions that can be made. It was just this one point that I always wondered about.

When I spoke of the stresses being evenly spaced out, I meant evenly enough so that five feet can be found in the line. That's why I posted the line that I did -- there is no way to find five feet in that line unless you accept the first two unstressed (and unstressable) syllables as a foot. However, situations like this are completely acceptable:

da DUM / da DUM / DUM da / da DUM / DUM da (iamb/iamb/trochee/iamb/trochee)

In that line there is a clustering of the beats, but they are still spread out enough that you can define five feet. I was actually asking about a very specific circumstance, and I agree with Aaron's answer.

I don't care for Timothy's book. His view of meter is more rigid than mine, and his four-tiered meter system is, in my opinion, unnecessarily complicated.

Pentameter is defined by how many feet it has, not stresses. Your line has five feet and since the primary foot is the iamb I would call it iambic pentameter. A pyrrhic is a legitmate foot—why wouldn't it be? And anyway by itself that line has an ever so soft stress on "and."

Hey - we agree on something!

Michael, have there been other things we disagreed on? I haven't been keeping track.

The idea I am getting at is this: Pyrrhics are fine as long as the pyrrhic includes a syllable which CAN be stressed. But if a line has only four syllables which can be stressed, it has to be considered a line of tetrameter. Aaron seems to be the only person who gets this distinction.

You haven't been keeping track? How in hell do you expect me to pick a fight with you if you're not even keeping track? (Don't take it seriously, but I was referring to the fact that you appear to be taking the letter of the law of scansion far more seriously than I do - than almost anybody here does - and far more reluctant to let your ear be the judge. So your comments about Tim Steele were refreshing. He's a thoroughly charming human being as long as you keep him away from a blackboard and a line of poetry.)

Sorry, Perry, I wasn't underestimating you or implying you don't understand meter. Just expatiating on a favorite subject. As you can gather, metrical poets generally compose by ear, not by counting syllables. Metrical science provides after-the-fact diagnostic tools to help figure out why something works, or doesn't.

Pyrrhic substitutions work fine in a couple of contexts. In conjunction with a spondee substitution, they create a dip without shorting the number of stresses. It is also common for a line to end with two unstressed syllables where the final word ends in two unstressed syllables. There is a kind of promotion by syllable count that nonetheless does not result in a stress, e.g., "Not waiting for my death or bankruptcy..."

Actually, what you describe is what I've always done. To keep my lines to a uniform length, I usually count syllables and I let the stresses fall where they may -- but I got the impression that that wouldn't pass muster on this forum. I have noticed that when I try to be more metrical, my poems flow more smoothly.

I don't actually believe that poets who write in meter don't scan their own poems. I'm sure that there is a lot of counting going on -- counting of syllables, stresses and feet.

I don't understand what you are saying in the sentence in which you use the word "promotion".

By promotion I meant that the final syllable fills the space of a stress without being stressed. Usually the term refers to adding stress because of the meaning, as in, You want to what? I didn't think I heard. I look forward to the poem!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There's a lot of double vs. triple metrical variation going on throughout the whole poem, but most native speakers of English don't have think twice to navigate any of it, except for the last line, which requires the promotion of an unstressed syllable.

(Okay, I admit that reading the first line of that stanza as "I shall be TEL-ling this WITH a SIGH" probably happens more often than Frost's preferred "I shall be TEL-ling THIS with a SIGH" happens, but as far as I'm concerned that's not a big deal.)

As you can hear by the way Frost himself read that stanza, promotion doesn't mean that the reader is obliged to punch the final unstressed syllable in an unnatural way, i.e. "DIF-fer-ENCE." Frost says "DIF-fer-ence." But one is obliged to resist the contraction that most of us would use when pronouncing that word in conversation: "DIF-rence". It has to be enunciated as three syllables, in order for that final syllable to bear the weight of rhyming with "HENCE."

It is a testament to Frost's skill that he forces the reader to enunciate "difference" as three syllables. I have seen other poets try to do that, and they always fail.

Here is the opening line from "The Last Duchess", with scansion:

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
THAT'S my / LAST DUCH / ess PAINT / ed on / the WALL

The fourth-foot pyrrhic has a promotable syllable in it -- "on" -- which makes it a proper pyrrhic, in my view. The very fine point that I have been trying to raise in this thread is, "Can a pyrrhic which has no promotable syllable be considered a proper foot in iambic pentameter?" My opinion is "no", but I wanted to see what other people would say.

As for my own line of poetry, the line above it ends with a stressed syllable, so neither of the first two unstressed syllables can be promoted, meaning that those two syllables can't be seen as a proper pyrrhic foot.

This is the kind of thing that Tim Murphy would have had an answer for.

I've always parsed this line completely differently:

That's MY / LAST DUCH / ess PAINT / ed ON / the WALL

Is my pronunciation wrong? Nope. Is yours? Nope. What matters is how it works for the reading. Simply put, as myself and others have been saying repeatedly throughout this thread, you can't just look at line level to determine meter -- you have to look at context.


My opinion is a resounding "of course!" Not always, and perhaps not very often, but can it be? Certainly. Why couldn't it?

Perry —

A pyrrhic followed by a spondee can be counted as a "double iamb". The discussion of double iambs here (down a ways, number 3.) seems to me to be pretty standard.

Sometimes the spondee is so strong that it's a stretch to read anything in the pyrrhic as promotable. I'm a fan of double iambs myself, for use where the meaning demands forceful emphasis.

— Woody

I don't have time (or the will) to argue right now, but the Browning is fairly regular IP.

Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a shit. Stop arguing in the abstract. Post a poem, and we can crit within the context of the poem.

Michael Cantor cuts to the heart of the matter.

Concerning sculpture, Michelangelo said: “It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.”

And so with the poet. Let the ear judge.

Richard

Shaun and RCL, I can't speak that line of Browning's the way you say you speak it. I'd be very curious to hear you do it.

Woody, what you call a "double iamb" I have been calling an "ionic", although I don't remember where I got that term. There isn't a double-iamb in the line I've been analyzing in this thread.

Michael and Richard, your comments aren't helpful. Scansion has rules, and I started this thread to analyze one aspect of it, and perhaps thereby to improve my writing. If you don't want to participate, then don't.

I agree with RCL that Browning's line is a standard variant of traditional IP, opening with a trochee not an iamb. To my ear, the metrical beats fall as follows: “Thát’s my last Dúchess páinted ón the wáll.” Rhetorically, “last” will attract a slight emphasis in any reading aloud, but that is not the same as awarding it a metrical beat. This slight dissonance between metre and rhetorical weight is one of the expressive delights of accentual syllabic metres.

As other have said, post your poem!

Clive Watkins