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.

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

Thanks!

Tom

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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).

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.

I think free verse (in spite of the off-rhymes), but I'll have to leave it to the experts to pronounce the verdict.

Carol

Carol, for my money, the accentual vs. accentual-syllabic distinction does rest on something like a percentage: For me, the question would be whether scanning it in feet tells you anything useful about the poem's rhythm. In the Hardy example Tim posted, about half the feet (if you scan it in feet) are iambic and half not. So "iambic" doesn't seem to be a very accurate overall description of the poem, and might as well be dispensed with. But every line does have a pattern of two strong beats, so calling it "dimeter" does seem accurate. If it's dimeter but it's not iambic, it must be accentual.

But I think you have a point about the line lengths. There are some lines in IP which have spondaic-sounding feet; they might be read as having six stresses (or more, as in Milton's "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death"), but they're still pentameter lines. But with short lines, the principle of isochrony -- the tendency to hear equal time between beats -- seems to exert a stronger pull. So maybe, with short lines, it's easier to drop or insert extra unstressed syllables -- they don't disrupt the basic pattern we're hearing, which is two (or three or four) equally spaced beats, as in a nursery rhyme:

STAR -- LIGHT -- STAR -- BRIGHT
FIRST -- STAR i SEE toNIGHT

Or a rap song:

i am a NIGHTmare WALKing PSYCHopath TALKing

In a five-beat line (has anyone here tried to write accentual pentameter?) my guess is that it's hard to hear a pattern without a more-or-less regular iambic (or anapestic or dactylic) rhythm to keep things bumping along. Which may be why the Auden example reads like free verse (as it does to me, too).

Perhaps it's that the four-beat line is so fundamental and so persistent in English poetry that we can't perceive a pattern in a line with more than four beats unless there's some extra regularity in the stresses. Or perhaps it's just that a five-beat accentual line is too darn long.

Gloria

[This message has been edited by Gloria Mitchell (edited August 29, 2002).]

Gloria,

The problem, IMO, is in thinking that all types of meter rely on a pacing which is somewhat regular--That's an accentual-syllabic sensibility: the concern with how many unaccented syllables can lie between beats and still maintain a pacing of beats which isn't greatly violated anywhere in the poem. Although some accentual poems do, indeed, have a somewhat regularized ratio of beats to non-beats--4 beats/line, 2 on either side of a caesura, with only one or two unaccented syllables between beats (or none), for instance--this doesn't describe all accentual poems; nor should we forget that the beats themselves, in accentual meter, draw the ear into expectation. I.e., there is an expectation of a certain number of beats per line or half-line, but not of where they should lie in relation to each other or to non-beats.

Curtis.

Let me just chime in here to say that actually I agree with Mr. Mezey--all monosyllabic words, including articles, are common--that even articles can become stressed by position, as his and other examples show--but position is principally a feature of strict accentual/syllabic verse. (Position meaning a stressed syllable is followed by unstressed and vice versa; i.e., the higher "rule" in accentual/syllabica that you don't have three unaccented syllable in a row).

My article rule holds true only in a looser context (song-like meters, as the Shakespeare line I quote), which is what I was trying to discuss. Sorry if that was not clear.

I also absolutely agree that small prepositions QUITE OFTEN get the stress, as in Mezey's examples. Yet I have come across the idea frequently in prosodic explanations, even in respected textbooks (which I shall not name here), that "to" "of" "in" etc., are little words that are usually unstressed. Not so at all. Prepositions are very important little words.

As for Greek terminology--some of it works OK--iambs for ta DUM, trochees for DUM ta, etc. But it becomes confusing if folks buy into the whole thing--starting with spondees, pyrrhics, etc. Basically, my problem is with feet, a concept I don't find terribly useful as a practioner of English verse, however convenient they are for discussion, as here.

Actually, in regard to Tony's comments--I think there is an element--a hint--in these extra light syllables of a sort of quantitative meter working within the accentual. The short light syllables would not disrupt the rhythm of the poem if we were, say, swimming or walking or jumping rope to it--they are a function of time.

Curtis, I may well be wrong on this, but actually I find the "Petition" fairly regular IP, though it pushes the envelope in a couple of lines. I don't think I would go so far as to call it accentual.

A few lines (as the penultimate) start on initial trochees. Some have slight syllables promoted, as a case of Mezey's article promotion:

Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response.

What confuses, I think, is that right away, the second line appears to be hypermetric. I can still read it as a pentameter, though it could well just be a hexameter thrown in the mix--an old "acceptable substitution" in ip. It of course makes sense that this line is hypermetric--it is itself prodigal--a spendthrift of syllables:

But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:

The only other "problem" line in regular IP would be this:

The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,

And I think here he may be eking out four-syllables from "exhaustion"

Aside from those two slightly problematic lines, this seems like fairly straightforward IP to me, with only occasional extra syllables. (And I am not a syllable counter, myself.)

Certainly from Beowulf on down, the four stress has been the main accentual line. But accentual pentameter can be written. Here is a perfectly competent example by new member Henry Quince which we discusseed not long ago over at Deep End:

Adjustable Wench

A flibbertigibbet of little account, I thought her;
She’d do for a time, though young for this old grizzled beard.
It little deterred me that people might think her my daughter —
just so long as she gave me my oats, though I boozed and I leered.

A dancer she was, so she told me; I asked her no more,
and assumed from her coquettish looks that she’d rather not spell
out in detail the dancing she did, or what costume she wore
or discarded at work; but if cynics can fall, then I fell.

It wasn’t her bedcraft alone, though that was a marvel.
(I’d call it an effing one, aiming at literal fact,
but that would fall short: for this was sublimely ineffable,
the ultimate premier cru of the physical act.)

But that magic of hers! While I happily left it as mystery,
Her body’s quicksilver enacted an ageing man’s dream
And I shared little else of myself or my life; in our history,
As short as it was, that never was part of my scheme.

It was always at my place we met, a long afternoon;
and we never discussed why this was the pattern, not that.
But one day, one morning, I answered a whim, none too soon,
and strolled to the street where she lived, and called at her flat.

She came to the door in a robe, and missed not a beat.
She welcomed me in, to strains of Saint-Saëns, and I took
it all in with a glance, and turned on my heel in some heat —
The man in her bed, and the wine, and the poetry book.

So I left in a furious temper, slamming the door.
The old story, yes; but what cut my heart to the core
Was the man — some years older than I, a wreck on the shore
Of old age — and her red and black ballet shoes ranged on the floor.

Now this illustrates what I think is a gap in terminology between us as critics. We would both undoubtedly read the lines exactly the same way, stressing the same syllables, but where you describe it as accentual pentameter, I read Henry's poem as anapestic pentameter with alternating feminine endings and just enough iambic substitution and occasional caesura to avoid a sing-song effect and make a wonderful rhythm. If this is not anapestic pentameter, what is?

A FLIB/ bertiGIB/ bet of LIT/ tle acCOUNT/, ^ I THOUGH/ her;
She’d DO/ for a TIME,/ ^ though YOUNG/ for this OLD/ grizzled BEARD./
It LIT/ tle deTERred/ me that PEO/ ple might THINK/ her my DAUGH/ter —
just so LONG/ as she GAVE/ me my OATS,/ though I BOOZED/ and I LEERED./


Carol

I'd agree with Carol on this one. Though this is only an issue of terminology (I agree we'd all read it more or less the same), I wouldn't call the above accentual, but triple-rhythmed (anapestic or amphibrachic or what have you). And a two-syllable foot is a fairly common substitution in such meters, occurring anywhere, but particularly at the end of a line.

Here's another example of anapestic/triple rhythm with such substitutions:


"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."

It is surely just a difference in terminology. Dick Davis once asked me "What are the pagan poets arguing about in the outer circle of hell?" Answer: "The rules of prosody, of course!"

Henry has a fabulous ear, and it's a delight when folks like him appear out of the blue at the Sphere. I'll ask him to tell us how he'd label this.

With one of my painfully obvious, non-sequiturish asides:


Yes, that's the market that I'm coming FROM.

Oh, tell me where she's going TO.

Then are you out or are you IN?

Too obvious for words, isn't it, that bit about prepositions working just fine with hard accents (especially in rhyming position)? I actually repeated this hideous obviousness as an excuse to ask everyone to read the first poem in Greg Williamson's first book, "Silent Partner." It's the funniest ending to a line I've read in a long time, and, well...
no point in spoiling the fun for everyone, but let's just say it involves grammar.

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.

Oh dear--I was hoping to avoid discussing any of my poems--but I will post one. (Bruce, thanks for your kind words.)

First, though, an example of how "loose iambics" if you will (basically the insertion of anapests into iambic lines) can work in a stricter ip context. Here again, it is often the article that makes this work. While an article can, as shown, occasionally be made to take a stress (usually mid-line), if a stressed syllable follows directly after an article, it will tend to shirk the accent--particularly in constructions such as "and a", "of the", etc. (as the Shakespeare example, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun"). It is almost as if the syllables are so slight, and the construction perceived as such a unit, that they count as an elision.

Consider this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Teh blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Strictly standard IP--the beginning initial trochee (Turning and turning) is a standard substitution. Otherwise, the variation is subtlely rhythmic rather than metric--promotions, elision, secondary stresses, demotions of heavy unaccented syllables (rhythmic spondee), etc.

It continues or a few lines in regular ip (with more metrical substitions, but still standard ones--initial trochees, a medial trochee, etc.):

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

And then starts to "come apart" (almost as if the centrifugal are widening the gaps between accented syllables by the insertion of extra unaccented syllables):

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man

or a syllable drops out:

a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Then back to more or less regular ip.

I find these hypermetric (and hypometric) rhythms quite pleasing, and am probably more liberal in anapestic substitutions in IP than many formalists would approve of. But I consider myself as working within the tradition--as exemplified in this Yeats poem--rather than breaking any rules.

OK--I realize you folks have seen the bat poem before--here it is again.

(Actually, though this was discussed as being metrically quirky in another thread, there is nothing all THAT metrically exotic here, in my opinion):

Explaining an Affinity for Bats


That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,
And seem something else at first—a swallow—
And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,
Staggering towards an obstacle they yet
Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,
Somehow telling solid things from hollow,
Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,
Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

I don't think there's anything terribly exotic here. The Yeats, which I was thinking of posting for discussion, is much kinkier. In your poem, Alicia, the substitutions are wonderfully expressive of the flittering subject. For instance the back to back trochaic lines lend the poem a wonderful velocity we wouldn't get from two back to back IP's.

I think it was Davis who thought this pretty outre. But there is a school of Formalism, call them the Wintersians for want of a better term, who are very conservative metrists. With Edgar Bowers and Jim Cunningham deceased, the best practitioners of this school are Davis and Steele and Gwynn, all of whom are just marvelous metrists. Tim reads most of my poems and about twice a year he objects to something and proposes a change. I ALWAYS take his suggestions.

Alicia's bat poem is less metrically "quirky" than I remember it for some reason. Apropos the discussion about stressing articles, it seems that L5 may locate a metrical stress on "a", or perhaps the article resists the metrical pull somehow and the second and third feet are one of those phyric-spondee pairings we hear about sometimes.

Also, L2 seems to be pentameter only if one gives a stress to the initial "And," which is plausible but not the first impulse a reader might have on first reading.

I'd be curious, if Alicia is willing to say, how Alicia goes about evaluating the metrical suitability of her own lines when she writes them and whether there's a "standard" that she shoots for in terms of following the "rules" as she understands them. Not just Alicia, but anyone. Does it ever happen that you write a line or two that please your ear but you go back and try to scan the line and find it breaks some rule or principle that you subscribe to as a general matter? Do you "fix" the line or do you honor your ear and just go with the line, carping metrists be damned?

Roger, I think line 5 in Alicia's poem is a
very good example of an ionic foot, two very
weak syllables followed by two very strong ones.
There are times when one can read such a sequence
in more than one way, but in this case, I think
that putting an accent on the article would be
just wrong.
As for composing a line that sounds good but
doesn't scan, I should say that that's not an
uncommon phenomenon. I have somewhere in a
notebook a dozen or so examples of such lines
from Frost. Another good example that springs
to mind is the last four lines of "Dockery and
Son"--after many lines of more or less regular
pentameter, you get

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes

(and then back to the pentameter)

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

I suppose one could argue that you could read
"Life is first boredom, then fear" with five
stresses, but it is not an iambic pentameter;
nor is the following line. But what a marvelous
effect.

In a strict iambic poem, I wrote the line,
"Who could be left to smile at the sound,"
which to my ear sounds like a pentameter,
though Don Justice pointed out, justly, that
"smile" has not traditionally been allowed two
syllables, as "fire" or "power" can be. But
still, I hear it as two, or at least one and
a half, and in the end decided to keep the
line as it was, liking the sound, even if it's
not strictly metrical. But in general I think
it's a good idea, for us who don't have the
easy command of Larkin or Justice or Frost etc,
to stick to the meter.

Cher maitre, I agree. The meters are so infinite in their variety that we mortals can do worse than abide by their rules.

Dear Robert

About your line "Who could be left to smile at the sound", from "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)"…

I am pleased to learn how you read and hear this. As I pointed out to Tim a few months ago, when my UK ear, which took "smile" as a monosyllable, heard something different and irregular, my regard for your writing led me to credit you with a wonderful rhythmical finesse at this point in the poem. This is how I hear the verse (beats are in bold):

But they danced here sixty-five years ago! -
Almost all of them must be underground.
Who could be left to smile at the sound
Of the old-fangled dance tunes and each pair
Of youthful lovers swaying to and fro?

There is a progressive breakdown in the regularity of these lines after the sonorous exactness of the last line of the previous stanza ("And nothing further from their thoughts than death"). According to my ear, in lines 3 and 4, the prevailing iambic pulse is temporarily abandoned for triple rhythms suggestive of the rhythms of the long-silent dance music itself - an eerie but moving metrical effect, it seemed to me. In the fifth line, the iambic pulse is restored. So subjective can these matters be!

I am reminded of an incident reported in a British national newspaper perhaps forty years ago now. It seemed that Hollywood critics at a premier applauded what they thought was far-out, avant-garde technique for the title credits of a new Peter Sellers film. Then they realized a gaping ten-foot hole had accidentally been torn in the screen.

Thank you for your fine poem.

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

Clive,
I don't myself hear any breakdown of metrical regularity, though I don't mind a reader's taking the 3rd line of that
stanza as short a foot---it still sounds ok to me (though,
as I say, I hear "smile" as at least a syllable-and-a-half).
The first line has a trochee in the middle of the line, but
after a brief caesura---nothing very daring there. As for
line 4, it opens with an ionic, a common substitution, but
I don't think it ends with one---the fourth foot is what I
call an inverted iamb, the first syllable heavier than the
second but not enough to get the accent: because of the
falling rhythm of "DANCE tune," I hear a slight accent on
afticle. Thus:

Of the OLD-FANGled DANCE tunes AND each PAIR

I can't at all hear it the way you scanned it. And I'd
say that whole stanza, in fact the whole poem, is regular pentameter except perhaps for that "smile" business. (And
that's an anomaly---normally, I wouldn't permit that sort
of monkey-business.)
The most interesting line, to my ear, is

And some then dance off in the late sunlight

where the meter and speech rhythm dance a comlicated few
steps together. The middle foot is rather ambiguous.
And I like the way the rhetoric in line 10 enforces a
trochee not right after the caesura, but in the next foot.

SOME of them SINGle, SOME HUSbands and WIVES


say the stanza is quite regular except for that "smile"
business.

Dear Robert

Thank you for your fascinating account of this verse. In fact, I believe we are saying much the same thing.

Pace your remarks, however, I do think the first two lines of the verse are less regular than the line which ends the previous verse, which is paradigmatically exact ("And nothing further from their thoughts than death"). What I mean is that the trochee to which you refer in the middle of the first line and the two trochees which open the second line are, as I think of it, variations - entirely common variations, of course - from the normative paradigm and to that degree are not rhythmiocally regular. They enact a slight disturbance against the underlying iambic pulse. As we agree, line 4 is unorthodox - I think delightfully so. This is what I mean by saying that at the start of the verse, there is "a progressive breakdown in the regularity of these lines after the sonorous exactness of the last line of the previous stanza". The hint of triple rhythms in lines 4 and 5, which I heard as a lovely finesse, take their lead, as it were, from the increasing incidence of metrical variation in the previous two lines. To one who finds it quite unnatural to hear "smile" as a disyllable, the whole effect - the perhaps inadvertent effect - seems very fine indeed. Indeed, it is the subtle and dynamic relationships of rhythm from phrase to phrase and line to line that is so enchanting.

About the ending of line 4, I suspect this is one of those cases to which Alicia has drawn attention on other occasions where the rhythms of the words seem to float lightly on the reading voice over the words themselves. The limited forms of notation available from a word-processor barely allow the delicate balance of stresses and the pace of the words in "and each pair" to be marked.

Thank you again for your illuminating comments.

Clive Watkins

Another nice example of true "loose iambics" (I feel another term would be more useful, but can't seem to come up with one), this one by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

[b]Winter Night[/B}

Pile high the hickory and the light
Log of chestnut struck by the blight.
Welcome-in the winter night.

The day has gone in hewing and felling,
Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling
For the night of talk and story-telling.

These are the hours that give the edge
To the blunted axe and the bent wedge,
Straighten the saw and lighten the sledge.

Here are question and reply,
And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.
So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.

A lot of refreshing rhythmic variety here--from straight iambic (as the last line) and trochaic (line 3) to sprinklings of anapests, or two heavy stressed syllables back to back (bent wedge). She makes good use of the skipping ability of light little (anceps) monosyllabic words, also in combination with the light syllables of trochaic words. We even get a relatively rare three-light-syllables-in-a-row (a firey flickering, as it were) in the penultimate line.