I have a lot of questions pertaining to meter. I will start by asking how the meter of the different lines fit in with each other. Let me quote from my contribution to http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/000007.html :

I am software master tick-tock
fiddling with a database lock.

If I had read it out loud, I would have read it like this:

I am SOFTware MASter TICK-tock
FIDDling WITH a DAtaBASE lock.

I assume I have done L1 right according to English pronunciation. L2, on its own, would have been read

FIDDling with a DAtabase LOCK.

The difference in meter is glaring. My question is if the meter of L1 imparts - or can be assumed to impart - its meter on L2 the way I stated I would read it. If not in this poem, would such an effect be permissible or even possible in any poem?

= = = =

My second question concerns the mixing of meters on different lines. I have no example here, but say you want the poem to be a dialogue between two or more voices. One voice is brash, and would probably have his lines in a meter like

DA dum DA dum DA dum DA dum

Another voice may be gentler, and go with the iambic pentameter (which is the only meter I know by name yet)

da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH

... and maybe a third voice along some playful meter, like the child of the family.

la la BOM la la BOM la la BOM

What rules or rules-of-thumb apply to mixing such meters?

--

Svein Olav http://nonserviam.com/solan/

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited August 01, 2001).]

Solan,
I haven't answered the question about your own poem - let's hope someone does.

To the second question then: I think if you're looking for a rule of thumb, then that rule will probably say that your meter should be consistent at all times. The example you have given may be a reason to bend such a rule. Such reasons are as manifold as the stars in the Milky Way and, similarly, depend a great deal on ambient (light) conditions for the extent to which they are apparent. That was a metaphor.

DA dum DA dum DA dum DA dum is trochaic tetrameter. From pentameter on up, the prefixes (penta- hexa- dodeca-) are the same as plane geometry. (I could be wrong about that.)

If you stick around for a long, long time, you may witness some truly arcane discussion of metric variation. The moderators here certainly impress me. I think it's best to start with basics, though. The more complicated stuff may be more easily understood if it is encountered as part of a revision and critique process, rather than isolated prescriptive rules.

Peter



[This message has been edited by peter richards (edited June 28, 2001).]

Solan, until the Lariat arrives I'll jump in with a quick point or two. You said:

"If I had read it out loud, I would have read it like this:

I am SOFTware MASter TICK-tock
FIDDling WITH a DAtaBASE lock."

I wouldn't. I would read it like this, making a spondee out of tick-tock, with about the same amount of stress on tock as on tick:

I am SOFT/ware MAS/ter TICK-TOCK/
FIDDling/ with a DAT/abase LOCK/.

What you have (to my ear) is anapestic trimeter with a reversed first foot in the second line. The second foot of the first line is an iamb, which is a conventional substitution. But with the lines coming early in the poem (or being taken out of context), I've had little opportunity to determine what the meter is supposed to be, so will read it as I'd read the same lines in prose. If you want this to be tetrameter, you would do well to start off with words whose stress matches that beat. Begin simple and get fancier as you develop an ear for the rhythm.

Regarding changing meter from line to line, some variation (substitution) in feet within lines is desirable to keep from having a rigid, sing-song sound. And for dramatic effect, sometimes line length and meter will change. But before you can deviate successfully you have to establish a pattern, and that means you have to do the same thing more than once. This is why they call it metrical poetry instead of free verse or prose.

As you get farther into meter you'll notice a curious thing. Often the same line can be scanned in more than one way, depending on where you start counting off. For example, the following line could be scanned either as iambic tetrameter with a headless first foot:

DUM/ da DUM/ da DUM/ da DUM/

or as trochaic tetrameter with a cropped fourth foot:

DUM da/ DUM da/ DUM da/ DUM

In this case, you'd read them both the same, but that's not always the case. You want to set up the reader for what is coming next. Once a pattern is established, a reader can reasonably be expected to withstand a little substitution and still keep the beat. I have heard a rule of thumb to the effect that there is a maximum desirable percentage of substitution, but I don't remember the percentage, and anyway it was only somebody's opinion, as are most rules of thumb.

Carol

Hi Solan,

I asked exactly the same question myself recently, and AE Stallings kindly gave a full and extremely useful answer on these boards. If you do a search for the thread - Questions the books don't answer - you'll find her explanation. Recommended.

Best wishes and welcome,

Nigel

I will wait a bit before summing up a reply; thanks to those who have replied so far.

Nigel: What search words would you use? "meter" would give too many hits. You wouldn't just happen to have the URL for that discussion available by any chance?


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Svein Olav
http://nonserviam.com/solan/

Solan,

Go to General Talk on this forum, and then choose at the top of the page view topics in the last 60 days. When the page reloads you will see the thread "Questions the books don't answer" - everything is there.

Also I have attached a little program I got free on the net, which is an introduction to prosody I found very useful - please anyone who wants it make a copy - I forget the address from where I got it. It is allowed to distribute it non-commercially. It is a DOS program.

Best


Nigel

Solan, Tim Steele himself is going to be the next guest Poet Lariat, so you'll have a chance to get direct answers to your questions from the man who wrote the book on meter. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Carol

Hello, Solan. I would urge you to take Tim Murphy's suggestion on an adjacent thread and visit Dr. Steele's personal site so you have some idea what you're getting into before you question him.

In your example I think Carol may have missed reading the word "fiddling" as three syllables, which I believe is your intent when you ask a reader to stress "with." But I agree with her that you cannot demote the end-stress in either line. After all, you are rhyming here, and rhyme always accentuates stress. This is one of the reasons why it is inadvisable to rhyme syllables that are normally unstressed with those that normally bear stress (e.g. "crying" with "sing").

Metrical analysis gives us tools to describe and understand rhythm in language. English is a language that relies primarily on stress for its rhythm. But unless there is some reasonably constant rhythm, analytical tools will not give us meaningful results. Your example is arhythmic. No one type of metrical foot predominates to establish a rhythm. Perhaps with a few more lines, a discernable pattern would emerge. Perhaps not.

One line cannot impose a metrical pattern on the next, if that pattern clashes with the ordinary pronunciation of words in the second line. You could precede your "database" line with six metrically identical lines, but you still could not strip "lock" of its stress.

Alternating meters for different characters speaking in sequence might be a workable strategy. I would advise you to try writing whole poems consistently in various meters before you attempt such fancy tricks.

Alan Sullivan

To clarify my point about establishing the meter early and then expecting the reader to make some adjustment to accommodate it, I don't disagree with what Alan said. You can't push stress onto the wrong syllable. But there are times when a line can be read two ways. For example,

I am software master tick-tock

This first line could have been read as either tetrameter or trimeter, depending on whether "I" were given its own beat. Because of the rhyme on tock/lock, I demoted the "I" and read the line as trimeter. If "I" were stressed, you'd have tetrameter, but then you'd need the second line to rhyme with TICK-tock, not TOCK.

Carol

Yes, the first line is ambiguous, though I would pick trochaic tetrameter as the more likely candidate. If the next line starts with a dactyl followed by trochees, as the author would wish, then the trochee would indeed be the dominant foot, and initial stress the rhythmic principle. But Solan is asking readers to go against the grain of the language in that second line, and it just won't happen. Meter cannot be arbitrarily designated; it is inherent in English pronunciation.

A.S.

Thank you for your thoughtful replies.

"Meter cannot be arbitrarily designated; it is inherent in English pronunciation" sums up the answer to my first question. I must blame modern pop songwriters for misleading me previously, to this, and to believe that "go" is a two-syllable word.

"Alternating meters for different characters speaking in sequence might be a workable strategy. I would advise you to try writing whole poems consistently in various meters before you attempt such fancy tricks" sums up for question number two. Good advice, too.



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Svein Olav
http://nonserviam.com/solan/

Hello again, Solan. Glad to help clarify matters for you, in advance of Professor Steele.

Who had "go" as a two syllable word?

A.S.

I've done my darndest to forget. It was one of those boys bands where they like the sound of "o" - especially at the end of a line. I said it a bit tongue-in-cheek, since - in that world - there are just too many examples of words ending up with a heap more syllables than they originally had, just to fit some kind of musical rhythm. In don't think such lyrics are written by poets.


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Svein Olav
http://nonserviam.com/solan/

Interesting stuff. But I'd have to disagree,
politely, with---was it Carol?---who said that
you can't push stress onto the wrong syllable.
You can. The meter affects the speech rhythms
just as the speech rhythms affect the meter, as
in a kind of dance. There are a million or
more examples---here's one.

And will any say when my bell of quittance is
********heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things."

Normally you would not put any accent on the last syllable
of outrollings, but the meter forces you to, and so
does the rhyme. (That's from Hardy's "Afterwards.")
Or look at another Hardy poem, "Channel Firing," where
there's a gorgeous and subtle effect in the last line,
because you're made to elevate the second, normally unstressed, syllable of Stonehenge---the rhyme
enforces it, and the quantity of the syllable helps
you to do it. But the accent rather hovers, so that
in a sense you hear both STONEhenge and Stone-
HENGE. And it does something of the same to the
preceding word, StarLIT.



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 01, 2001).]

Lovely exceptions. But it's hard to restrain metrical beginners from trying to do such things and walking straight into the stonewalls of Stonehenge. I prefer to emphasize the basic principles first while holding the ambiguities and exceptions for later.

In general I am not willing to recognize more than a slight promotion or demotion of stress to suit the pressure of metrical expectation. I'm always thinking what a piece of verse will sound like if it's read aloud by someone who knows nothing of meter. Reading Hardy, who is fearlessly irregular anyway, I would not be willing to stress "henge" harder than "Stone," or "-ings" equally with "things." But I agree about the hovering. It's a beautiful effect.

Endless are the debates of metricians. See, Solan, what you're getting into!

Alan Sullivan

That is the way I will learn, Alan. For my own writing, I'll start at the simple end, and progress, while listening to what happens at the other end. I promised not to post my own stuff for a while, but I can't resist showing you and Robert this limerick I co-wrote with another mathematician. Almost no beer was involved.

Limerick to dog

Taxidermic phenomenon Spot
is a load of post-modernist rot
Atonal musician,
and no math'matician,
he is better than many I've taught.

[Hope I didn't miss out on the meter here.]

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Svein Olav
http://nonserviam.com/solan/

Hi, Robert. Yes, it was I who said you can't force stress onto unstressed syllables, and I see your point. But many English words have secondary and tertiary stresses, which we sometimes elevate even in conversation, and certainly we do it in verse. Even monosyllables such as "in" and "or" can serve as place-holders in metrical poetry, being promoted slightly without becoming dominant. But I draw the line at rhyming a stressed with an unstressed syllable, no matter who got away with it. In the case of Stonehenge, the spondee effect works well; however, had Stone been swallowed while Henge was elevated, the rhyme would have seemed forced.

Carol

Svein, your meter's fine, but here's an anonymous one for the mathematician:

A mathematician named Hall
had a hexehedronical ball,
and the cube of its weight
times his pecker, plus eight
is his phone number. Give him a call.

Note how the alteration of trisyllabic feet with disyllabic ones give this a lilt.

I'm not really qualified to answer your question about metrics in other languages (Mastery Board, Stallings Thread), except to generalize. In French (and I presume other Romance languages) stress plays a far lesser role than it does in English, not to mention our unadulterated Germanic cousins, where the victory of accentual/syllabic verse is less complete than it is in English (try counting syllables in the wonderful Goethe poem you posted.) In classical Latin and Greek, we get to quantitative verse, where duration of syllable, not stress, is the governing principle. So the Iliad begins: MEnin aiEde theA. Here each capitalized syllable has the duration of a musical half note, each lower-case, a quarter note. Our verse is overwhelmingly qualitative, that is, stress rules. But interestingly, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and OHG seem to have it both ways; they are a hybrid between qual and quant. In heroic Germanic Tetrameter stress is overwhelming, reinforced by triple alliteration, yet unstressed syllables can be crammed into tiny durations. Well, except for English and its ancient antecedents, all this is far over my head; and the poets to ask are Steele and Mezey, our future guests in this space. How, though, do you hear meter in modern Norwegian? As a little boy I heard your language spoken round the farm, and I've always kicked myself for never having learned it, ESPECIALLY when Alan and I were translating the Beowulf.

That really IS an anonymous limerick and NOT by Tim.

Murphy, you'll get in trouble with Steele et al if you start confusing musical notation and syllable duration again. Just say "twice the length," and leave the notes out of it. Half and quarter notes have durations arbitrarily fixed by metronome. A quarter note in one piece of music might be longer in duration than a half note in another.

Even "twice the length" might vex some, since I gather the scholars argue about the respective durations of longer and shorter of syllables in classical languages, which are not spoken today. Living languages are hard enough to analyze.

Alan Sullivan

Though I agree with Robert Mezey that the accents in the last line of Hardy’s "Channel Firing" hover so as to create "a gorgeous and subtle effect", to my English ear this effect is slightly different and arises from different causes.

"Stonehenge", a proper noun as Hardy uses it, I stress in ordinary speech on the final syllable, as do the English friends with whom I have checked. The OED also gives this pattern - and only this pattern. I suggest that stressing the first syllable serves to draw attention to the material from which this famous ancient monument is built - that is, in implicit contradistinction to a henge built of wood, a so-called "woodhenge" ("The monument known as "StoneHENGE" is a STONEhenge, not a WOODhenge"), though oddly this is not a usage recognised by the OED. (Traces of such woodhenges have survived from prehistoric times, including one near Stonehenge itself.) Perhaps the inclination to stress the first syllable of the proper noun is an instance of the "recessive accent" allegedly a feature of American English ("LAB’rat’ry" for "labORatory", for instance.)
Since "starlit" must, I think, be stressed on the first syllable, the line, to my mind, runs thus: "And CAMeLOT, and STARlit StoneHENGE". Of course, it is hard to resist the pull of such a meaning-bearing and elemental word-part as "stone", so that I, too, hear a "hovering" accent (a "ghost-stress") here, but it hangs over "stone-", not "-henge".

To my ear, as well, this marvellous effect is underpinned by the phonic parallelism in the final words of the previous line, and in the generally rich alliterative context. The whole verse goes as follows:

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

It may even be that case that Hardy’s punctuation of the final line, encouraging a more than ordinary pause after "Camelot" by the insertion of an arguably unnecessary comma, contributes to this wonderful effect.

Clive Watkins

Tim, I would say meter is pretty audible in Norwegian, and my uneducated view is that stresses and de-stresses are far stronger in Norwegian than in English. English-speakers often call our language "sing-song".

But that leave me wondering what to do in the cases where stress is very weak.

Jeg er ik<u>ke</u> potet. Jeg er poet. (I am not a potato. I am a poet.)

The and stress on "ikke" is extremely weak compared to the the other stresses. Is it then a weak iamb, or is it a (was spondee the name of weak-weak?)

--

Svein Olav

.. another life

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited August 01, 2001).]

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

I can see that this is a very old thread, but I'll put my two cents in:

Where does Hardy put the stress in "inland"? Could his pronunciation put it on the second (which is metrically more regular)?

"Stonehenge" has hovering stress, but the emphasis is primarily on the first syllable. A true rhyme for it would be something like "bone tinge." I've always thought that Hardy pulled off a marvelous effect here, rhyming a stressed syllable ("-venge") with one that is relatively weaker. This has the effect of weakening the poem's closure, almost like putting a set of ellipses after the final word. In other words, it could go further back than even Stonehenge, this history of violence.

I'm not sure of the geographical location of Stourton Tower. The three places move us progressively further back in time. Are we moving progressively inland too?

Carol, I would agree in general that accented
syllables should not be rhymed with unaccented
ones---but one mustn't be too doctrinaire. Such
rhymes have been done beautifully. Some very
fine poets find it permissible, or make it so.
And it is certainly permissible in translation,
where it is important to rhyme if the original is
rhymed---finding a rhyme in English is often very
difficult and an imperfect rhyme is better than
none at all (and better than changing the sense.)
And you must remember that the meter may have
already changed the accent of the word, as in
Hardy's word "outrollings" which must be pronounced
with accents on the first and third syllables (and
the third syllable is a rhyme). The meter alters
the pronunciation of words more than we think.
The example Sam raised is a good one. We pronounce
"inland" with an accent on the first syllable (and
so do the English, I believe), but Hardy makes you
shift a little. You don't say inLAND of course,
but the strict iambic drive of the poem (and to some
extent the quantity of the second syllable) makes us
hear it as an iamb---that is to say, we put the
speech stress on the first syllable but the metrical
accent on the second. Now you may say, how can there
be an iamb where the stress is mostly on the first
syllable? and I'd answer, it happens quite often
("Although they do not talk of it at school--"). I
have never seen it discussed in the prosody books,
but it exists nevertheless. For example, the line
from a Justice poem, "Like storm clouds in a troubled
sky"--clouds has more stress than in but
we still read the line iambically---the ear hears the
slight accent on in and is satisfied. I call
it a kind of inverted iamb, and it's fairly common.
(I've raised the question with several friends who are learned in matters of prosody, Justice for one, Edgar
Bowers and others, and they agreed that there is such
a phenomenon, an "inverted" iamb.

To answer Sam's other question, about Stourton Tower,
here is my note on the poem in my edition of Hardy's
SELECTED POEMS: "Hardy would certainly have heard the
roar of the guns from English battleships in the spring
of 1914: Dorchester is only seven miles north of the
coast. Each of the monuments named in the last stanza
moves progressively farther back in time and space.
Stourton Tower commemorates the great victory of the
Saxon King Alfred over the invading Danes in 879 [CE]
and praises him for the establishment of the monarchy,
the navy, trial by jury, liberty, and other things.
Camelot is sometimes imagined to be the citadel of the
much earlier and legendary King Arthur, who is supposed
to have led the Britons against the Saxons. Stonehenge
is the famous prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain.
It is something of a hyperbole to extend the sound of
the guns to these ancient sacred places---Stonehenge
is some fifty miles away...."

Robert,

The sound of the guns travelling so far may not be hyperbole. During the major major battles on the Western Front in 1915 and 1916, the sound of the guns could be clearly heard by residents of coastal towns in East Anglia - particularly in Norfolk. The naval guns mentioned tend to be of a calibre, if anything higher than those used on the battlefield. Most English Super Dreadnoughts had 21 inch guns - larger than all but the biggest field artillery.
With the wind in the right direction the sound of naval gunfire would have carried a long way - especially as East Anglia and Dorset share the same flatness of terrain.

Nigel

Nigel, thanks for the information on British
naval guns; I stand corrected. And I'll make
the correction in my note to the poem (if the
Hardy book ever goes into a second edition,
which I doubt). And of course it must have
been very quiet (supernaturally so, by our
wretched standards) on Salisbury Plain in 1914,
especially at night.

'Inland', like 'Stonehenge', is naturally stressed on the second syllable in British English. If your sensitivity to meter is enough to force the natural American stress on the first syllable over onto the second, then I suppose that's a good thing. When making a study of meter in this way though, it's probably worth taking a peek at the OED. (Just as I should Webster's).


Having thought about it, there are variations with 'inland', as in 'Inland Revenue', where the stress is on syllable #1. The use of the word is arguably adjectival in the case of the IR, but it becomes a compound noun phrase as in 'inland waterways', which also stresses the first syllable. Second syllable when used a post-moderator, perhaps? - Make sure it's one of the really big, fat copies of the OED.

Peter

Peter

I, too, noticed this thread and thought of posting a comment about the UK pronunciation of "inland", which, like you, I sometimes naturally stress on the second syllable in ordinary speech. I have checked this out with several friends here, and we all agree that, in some constructions, it is the second syllable that takes the stress, though none of us felt that stressing the first syllable in such cases was wrong. I am thinking particularly of expressions which state or imply motion - for example, these: "Once you are through the village, the road turns inland…", "Further inland, the country is more rugged…", and so on.

In fact, the full OED shows the stress as falling in all usages only on the first syllable, though it does give alternative pronunciations, one using the schwa and one with a short "a" ("æ"). It is the fuller vowel, rather than the schwa, which my friends and I employ in the constructions referred to above and in which, in addition, we also stress the second syllable. The OED is a great resource, but it is not infallible. Perhaps we should write to the editors!

In the Hardy line, I would naturally stress the second syllable and not regard this as an effect of metre.

Clive Watkins

I also would say inLAND if it is being used as an adv., though as an adj., I suppose might stress first syllable. Maybe this is a Southern pronunciation in my case? (And Southern American English can have some similarities to British English.) On the other hand, southerners usually want to stress initial syllables where others wouldn't (umbrella, insurance, etc.). Hmmm.

My husband, who speaks British English, also says inLAND tho. But my dictionary here (not a very good one, admittedly) only has INlend.

I did originally check the OED and, as has been
noted, it does have the accent on the first syllable
of inland, and so does my Webster (in all
uses of the word), and so do all my other books.
Maybe the Brit usage is contemporary. (I have a
friend who is my private authority on the Dorset
accent and he says he thinks it is always INland
there.) But it's of no real importance; what does
matter is the metrical phenomenon, the inverted iamb,
that I was trying (and will try again, soon) to
describe and account for.