Timothy, welcome to Eratosphere.

I've become something of a dissenting voice on the metrical boards because I feel that the practice of metered poetry has become too narrowly focussed on rules, and that there are rhythms in the English language which can't be captured within those rules. As an example, I posted Hopkins's "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" a while back. Although the syllable counts of the lines are fairly consistent (ranging from 6 to 8), the number of beats varies. In addition, some of Hopkins's accents require pronunciations that don't seem to fit any meter. Yet, this poem is nearly my favorite poem, and I consider it eminently successful. I should also say that I <u>don't</u> consider it to be free verse, as it has too many formal elements.

Some Eratospherians consider the poem to be poorly written, but that explanation is unacceptable to me -- it's simply too beautiful. Others apply the term "sprung rhythm" and leave it at that.

Where does this poem fit in the scope of formal verse?

Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

(If the accented letters show up as boxes, please let me know and I will replace them.)

------------------
Caleb
www.poemtree.com



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 05, 2001).]

Dear Caleb,

I, too, have always admired "Spring and Fall." Hopkins, however, evidently wished the poem to be read as a Sprung-Rhythm piece with four beats per lines. Hence the accent marks, designed to encourage us to read lines that seem ambiguous or short as having four stresses. (Lines one and three, for instance, we would almost certainly read as three-beaters, but for the guiding accent marks. Ditto, for "Ah, as the heart grows older" and "Sorrows springs are the same": take away the accent marks, and it's hard to hear four beats, at least immediately.)

Since it's sprung rhythm, the third-to-the-last line takes beats on the heavy and alliterated syllables--heart, heard, ghost, guessed. Hopkins assumed (reasonably, I think) that people familiar with accentual verse in general would understand the structure of that line.

One thing about Hopkins--some see this as a glory, some as a defect--is that we can't trust our own "natural" accentuation to lead us to his rhythmical intentions. We have to follow his diacritical markings--his accents, loops, pauses, and twirls--even when these appear to violate the testimony of our ears.

I hope this is helpful. The poem is a beauty.

Best wishes,

Tim Steele

Caleb, I recently heard a terrific tale involving this poem. Michael Donaghy, an American poet who resides in England, worked as a doorman on the upper east side of Manhattan, hailing cabs for the likes of Pavarotti, or in his own phrase, "finding a vehicle for the tenor." Doormen were prohibited to read on the job, so he hid his Hopkins in his hat. One day he doffed it to a swank lady who spied the contraband and recited this poem. She then took him up to her apartment and dialed the 92nd St. Y, from whom she bought him a season's subscription. This was in the early 70's, and Michael became a poet, one of our best.

Timothy, thank you for your response -- I am glad that I am not the only one who likes the poem!

Despite the accent marks and your explanation, I find myself reading some lines with 3 beats and some with 5, but frankly that doesn't matter to me.

A follow-up question, if I may: has "sprung rhythm" become a recognized category of meter, or is that simply another way of saying "accentual meter"? Or should we use that term only to describe Hopkins's verse? If it is an actual category, how would you define sprung rhythm?

Tim, what a delightful story!

I think it does matter if you read some
lines as having three or five beats---it ruins
the rhythm of the poem. As Tim explained, every
line has four beats, although obviously Hopkins
makes you say some of the words oddly so that you
hear the four beats: Margaret, for example,
which no one would normally pronounce with two
accents. And by the way, the tetrameters are
mostly trochaic---I think only three lines are
not (I'd argue that the penultimate line is marked
to begin iambically but soon returns to trochees,
and the last line, though it begins with the same
two words, is firmly trochaic.) Once you accept
Hopkins' directions, it all sounds just fine, and
it is a gorgeous little thing.
Hey, Tim, greetings.

Robert, it indeed doesn't matter to me that I hear a range of 3 to 5 beats. In fact, that makes me like the poem all the more, because I like the variety from line to line. Assuming that we speak the language a little differently from Hopkins, the question then becomes, can this poem still be considered metered even though it doesn't have a consistent number of beats, feet or syllables per line? I think it can. It does have one thing which is more-or-less consistent: the length of time it takes to say each line. You will notice that the two lines which have 6 syllables -- the 11th and 13th -- both contain words which take longer to enunciate.

Timothy, I have a bunch of pet theories that I am hesitant to burden you with, but let me tell you at least one of them:

I believe that the human ear loves the sound of variety within a context of regularity. A line can be measured in many ways: the length of time it takes to speak it, the number of syllables, the number of feet, the number of beats, the relative width and narrowness of the syllables -- even the number of pauses. Lines which are entirely regular in every respect tend to be boring. The secret to exciting poetry, I believe, is to establish some kind of regularity, and then vary the other elements (according to the meaning). When the elements are made to play against each other, tension is created -- and tension is exciting! This poem contains a great deal of tension, which is perhaps why I love it so much.

Yes, yes, Caleb, all true; truisms in fact.
Of course the lines are varied---that's
almost always true of good verse in strict
meter. But if you're hearing 3-beat and
5-beat lines, you're mishearing the poem.
Hopkins clearly intends four beats a line
and expects your ear to hear that.
And, although unusual, it is possible to
write great poetry in unvaried lines---or
very little varied. One example is Chidiock
Tichborne's beautiful elegy for himself on
the eve of his execution, in which just about
every line sounds the same, straight iambic,
most of the phrasing exactly parallel, even the
caesuras falling in the same place in every
line.

Robert

Thank you for mentioning Tichburne's beautiful<u>Elegy on the Eve of His Execution</u>.

For those who wish to (re)read it, it may be found here: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/144.html

It's nice to know that I'm thinking at a level of truisms.

I read Tichborne's elegy not long ago and remember thinking that it wasn't sonically interesting. To each his own. When it comes to rhythm, I'm like a cokehead who can't get excited by just a joint.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 09, 2001).]

Bob, good to hear from you--and to share thoughts with you and others about Hopkins.

And, Caleb, yes, "sprung rhythm" has made it into dictionaries, though even there, the association is with Hopkins. For instance, the current unabridged Random House Dictionary says of the term: "a poetic rhythm characterized by the use of strongly accented syllables, often in juxtaposition, accompanied by an indefinite number of unaccented syllables in each foot, of which the accented syllable is the essential component [term introduced by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)]."

Hopkins himself, it bears repeating, wanted to make his metrical intentions as clear as he could, and employed accent marks, even in his more conventional poems, to insure that readers would not be confused as to the number of beats per line. For instance, in the (by his standards) relatively conventional sonnet, "As kingfishers catch fire," he places an accent over "I" in line 9 and "grace" and "grace" and "that" in line ten to make absolutely clear that line 9 is a headless pentameter and line 10 a brokenbacked one (i.e., a metrically unaccented syllable is dropped after a grammatical pause within the line). I can't both capitalize the "I" and give the accent, so pardon the lower case cummingesque first-person pronoun.

í say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

One thing we forget (or I sometimes do) is that Hopkins himself put many more diacritical marks in his mss. than are in the published texts. Editors from Bridges forward have (rightly, I think) believed that reproducing all his marks would make his texts unreadable. The downside of this, however, has been that we don't always remember how very exacting--for better or for worse, ingeniously or fanatically--Hopkins was.

Timothy, thank you for the additional feedback. I feel like I have now gotten some support for my poetic tastes.

From what I've been reading, I'm getting the message that a famous poet like Hopkins (shudder), having decided what meter he wants, may then so radically depart from that meter as to artificially stress whichever word falls in the operative position, regardless of the natural rhythm of the language or the ordinary usage and meaning of the words themselves.

He may further expect the reader to read his poem according to his intended meter because he's the one who wrote it, by golly. If it is apparent that 100% of readers would not and could not stress the words he wanted stressed without signposts, then he may use accents to stress the wrong syllables. That seems lazy if not outright inept to me.

A poet owns his poem and can write it as badly as he wants to. But how in the world could he ever sell anybody else on it? What am I missing here? When I've read this poem before I haven't seen the accents, and liked it infinitely better without them, even though some of the lines were a little short.

Carol

Good point Carol. The emperor has no clothes. I read Hopkins as I would read any other poet aloud, ignoring his silly diacritical accents. And I often find him glorious. Allbeit only loosely metrical, his verse is so musical, his vocabulary so rich, that there's really nobody that sounds like him. A worse model for a young poet I can't imagine, and fool that I was, I made him my model ages since.

Carol, you raise serious questions about the relation of poetic convention to individual practice--but please don’t imagine that Hopkins is a “typical” technician in the sense that Shakespeare, Keats, or Frost are. Nor would anyone, I think, suggest we can extrapolate, from Hopkins’ practice, observations applicable to the ways that most other poets approach their art.

Hopkins is intelligent, but eccentric. (I use that latter adjective in the neutral and literal sense of “away from or out of the center.”) And his “sprung rhythm” prosody, though related to the old accentual-alliterative tradition, is largely self-devised and unique to his work. He used it--and here and there (e.g. in “God’s Grandeur”) he showed how elements of it might be adapted to accentual-syllabic measure--but no one else has followed, systematically, his principles.

As Frost notes in a letter to his daughter Lesley (Frost, Complete Poems, Prose, and Plays, p. 736), Robert Bridges, in his intro to the 1st edition of Hopkins’ Poems, sympathetically and judiciously assessed the strengths and limitations of Hopkins prosody.

A word should be said in defense of Hopkins’ as a technician. He may well be crazy, but he isn’t lazy and he isn’t ever a “cheater.” He attempts conscientiously--indeed obsessively and neurotically at points--to keep to his rules. And if he initially baffles us, it’s that some of his regulations and procedures are so unlike what we’re used to and so removed from the way that most of us experience English-language poetry and speech.

These remarks remind me that I didn’t entirely answer Caleb’s recent question about sprung rhythm vis-à-vis accentual verse. Sprung rhythm is a specific type of accentual verse. Accentual verse is characterized by its having a certain number of accents per line. But the accents may be (and, because this happens naturally in English speech, are often) separated by one or more unaccented syllables, as in

In a sómer séson whan sóft was the sónne

In contrast, in sprung rhythm, at least some of the time, the accents are cheek by jowl, so as to produce a plosive effect, as in

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed

Carol, there is a point of view, which I subscribe to, that a poem's manuscript is like a musical score. The poet is telling the reader how it should be read. If the poet doesn't want to give the reader room to improvise, so be it -- we can only hope that the poet's rhythmic instincts are better than the reader's. My own experience with Hopkins's diacritical marks is that they add a wonderful dimension to the poems. In some cases, I would have stressed those syllables anyway, though not always. Putting two accents on "Margaret" at the beginning of the first line (MAR gar ET) adds, to my ear, a fascinating sound, especially when it is contrasted with the unaccented "Margaret" in the last line.

About "sprung rhythm" in general, the line that Timothy just quoted:

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed
(I think those are Tim's accents, not Hopkins's)

is a good example of why I like the genre so much. Who can deny that the rhythms of that line are marvelous? Yet, that line does not fit any of the usual meters that poets write in. Without sprung rhythm, such a line could never be written (except in free verse, where it would lose its impact).

Of course, there ARE times when I like to add my own stresses. Jerome did a long analysis of "Pied Beauty", explaining why the reader is compelled to read the final line "praise HIM". The only problem was, I always read it "PRAISE him". If Hopkins had put an accent on "him", I would have been robbed of the freedom to say it the way I like.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 13, 2001).]

Timothy, I appreciate your explanation and insight, thanks.

In order to read the line with any satisfaction, I am planting a caesura between ghost and guessed, drawing out the two words, so that my ear may still hear tetrameter. Otherwise the lack of resolution irritates me out of all proportion.

What héart/ héard of,/ ghóst ^/ guéssed

Is that the way you are meant to read it, or is it supposed to not be metrical at all but read as free verse?

Carol

Carol, your interpretation is exactly right: Hopkins meant all four of those syllables to count as metrical beats (hence the reinforcing alliteration). He didn't ever, at least far as we know, write vers libre.

Yes, Hopkins certainly meant us to hear four
accents, but there's no way you can put a
caesura between the subject and the verb,
"ghost / guessed"---well, you can put one
there if you like, but it makes no sense.
It's purely arbitrary and violates the
natural rhythm.
And Caleb, are you saying that "Margaret"
in the last line doesn't have two
accents, as in the first line? If so, you
are misreading the line. Maybe that's
why you say you hear some 3-beat lines in
the poem. But there are no 3-beat lines in
the poem, and Margaret has two accents in
both lines.

Robert, in the copies of "Spring and Fall" that I've seen, I've never seen accents on "Margaret" in the last line, but there are always accents present in the first line. I pronounced the first "Margaret" differently from the second (last) one, and I like that contrast. If someone were to show me a manuscript which is true to the original, and if it had accents on the second Margaret, I would pronounce them, though I would be disappointed.

Believe me, I truly don't care if the number of beats changes from line to line.

My understanding is that accents are printed only on syllables the reader would otherwise have failed to stress. Margaret, even without the written stress, reads with 3 syllables in the final line, at least to this metrical ear.

Carol

In the first line, it is pronounced MAR-gar-ET. In the final line, without accents, it would be pronounced MAR-gar-et or MAR-gret.

No, it ain't. But if you have to read it that
way and enjoy ruining the line, go right ahead.
Free country, more or less.

In the manuscript, there is an accent on the first A and the E -- so how else would it be pronounced? With those two syllables taking a stress, you must pronounce the middle syllable without a stress.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 17, 2001).]