English metric poetry is usually called accentual-syllabic. Still, I notice that the poets here scan primarily in terms of stress. Steele's 1234 system is a pure stress-system, for instance.

Bob Mezey's osOS system differentiates between accent and stress, as far as I understand, but it is a system I don't quite get for that precise reason: What is the difference between accent and stress in poetry?

Also: Do English poets in general really write accentual-syllabic, or would it be truer to call most English metric poetry stressual-syllabic?


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

Dear Svein:

Your posts on technical matters always make me feel incredibly ignorant. It does make me curious about one thing: which poets are your favorites?

I know it is not relevant to the particular topic, but I would be curious to know.

Thanks.
nyctom

Tom: I am the ignorant one here, which is why I need to ask all these questions. I wrote my first verse in June, so I am quite the newbie. I have an academic / cerebral approach to things, which is why you find me tossing all these concepts around.

Favourites ... well, have I read enough to proclaim any true favourites? In general, I go for content first and take the form as an extra bonus. The form is best when it stands selflessly in the background and promotes the content. IMHO.

I truly like Borges, especially after I found Bob's translation. Aside from him, I like a lot from Goethe and the few poems I have seen by Nietzsche. I have a friend who knows most of Blake by heart, and so many of his poems have become dear to me. I haven't read much by Frost, but like what I have seen. The same goes for Bob Mezey on this board, btw.

I respect a lot of others without necessarily liking them. Dante, for instance. I read his Inferno, but failed to relate to the culture and political intrigues. Milton's Paradise Lost is a frustrating-good book. I quit halfway through, though I thought many speeches there were very well made. I guess I sided with the losing faction there. I generally get frustrated by long poetic pieces, though there are obvious exceptions. (I even decided to quit the Odyssey and the Iliad halfway through.)

But I am from Norway, and relate to the local poetry here as well. I have enjoyed reading Jan-Erik Vold, a very, very experimental poet. Bjørneboe is very good - and also an interesting political rebel. Halldis Moren Vesaas - the little I have read of her - has a very appealing voice. Åse-Marie Næsse, whose poems a this Blake-interested friend of mine is trying to translate, also has some interesting ones. And of course André Bjerke, who read poems on the TV when I was a kid. (I know I should say "Wildenwey", but I haven't read any of his after high school.)
Aside from that, others too. But just like in English poetry, there's a lot of Norwegian poetry that should never have seen the light of day.

But finally: Let's not forget Håvamål, our national treasure.

No better burden on your back
than the memory of many men's wit

(freely translated by yours truly)

---

Svein Olav

.. another life



[This message has been edited by Solan (edited September 10, 2001).]

Svein, it would make life easier if everyone writing or
speaking about prosody used the same terminology, but---
The most common meter in English poetry is accentual-
syllabic, which means simply that there is a fixed number
of accents and a fixed number of syllables. E.g. in a
pentameter, five accents and ten syllables (though of
course there are many exceptions to that count). The
difference between stress and accent, as I use the terms
(and others as well) is that accent has to do only with
the meter, and it is determined almost entirely by its
position in the line. It may be heavy or very light.
Stress has to do with how we speak the language, the
sound of the sentence, inflection of phrases etc. It
often coincides with accent, but far from always. The
beauty and subtlety of accentual-syllabic meter lies
largely in the continuous conflict between stress and
accent. To quote Frost again,

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTRegular verse springs from the strain of rhythm
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTUpon a metre, strict or loose iambic.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTFrom that strain comes the expression strains of music
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe tune is not that metre, not that rhythm,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBut a resultant that arises from them.

Is that clear? The whole secret is right there, and what
we call the music of verse is just that, the play between
meter, which is a completely fixed and abstract paradigm,
and speech rhythms, which vary a great deal depending on
meaning, tone etc. (what Frost called "the sound of sense").
That play sometimes looks like a dance, sometimes like a
wrestling-match, but as in those activities, one partner
needs the other. (Oh, I guess one could dance alone, but
it's not nearly as interesting or exciting as with a
partner.)




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited September 10, 2001).]

Dear Solan:

Thank you for your response. When you are done with your translations, please post them on here. I would love to see YOUR work AND the poets. Good introduction to Norweigan poetry.

nyctom

Bob,

I agree that the dance with the meter is what makes it interesting. But I feel I am dancing blindfolded some of the time; I don't know if my partner follows me or not.

The difference between stress and accent, as I use the terms (and others as well) is that accent has to do only with the meter, and it is determined <u>almost</u> entirely by its position in the line.

It is this <u>almost</u> that I am trying to grasp. In your notation, an inverted iamb is Os. I don't know if there's such a thing as an inverted trochee, or sO.

What I wonder about is what makes the difference between an inverted iamb and a trochee. If there is no difference except in the abstact - in the metrical structure - then a trochee and and inverted iamb would be the same. I could end an IP line on a trochee and just call it inverted iamb, appealing to the overlaying meter. Yet, that is precisely what cannot be done, if I understand you right.

Knowing when a heavy syllable followed by a light syllable is an inverted iamb is a matter of skill. And skill can, IMHO, be taught and learned.

So I wonder about that residual difference outside of position in the line which determines something as inverted iamb rather than trochee.

I asked a linguist at the company where I worked, and he explained accents as a change in tone rather than stress. Often, the tone and the stress vary together, but sometimes they part ways. An accent would then be if you went down in tone. I'll try to illustrate, with the line from your poem:

And some then dance off in the late sunlight,

Here, we go down in tone on the light. Let me rewrite this to

Do some, then, dance off in the late sunlight?

Here, we go up in tone on the light. I would gather that in this case, sunlight would be counted as a trochee rather than as an inverted iamb. But it is a guess. Am I right?

Given this, is the lowering of the tone on syllable 2 the general criterion for when a foot is an inverted iamb rather than a trochee in an iambic meter?


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

Tom, I'll be translating from English to Norwegian. I'll none the less post my translations on Alan's board, with original, translation, scansion, literal re-translation and possibly a sound file of me reading it.

The poems I am going to translate are ones at http://www.pair.com/solan/scotty/joy...tersVoice.html

My own sorry attempts at poetry are to be found at http://www.pair.com/solan/scotty/joy/joy.html - some of it has been through a critique process here.

---

Svein Olav

.. another life

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited September 11, 2001).]

Solan, there is no difference between an inverted iamb and a trochee except the name, or an inverted trochee and an iamb. They are opposite sides of the same coin. While a trochee is very common at the beginning of an iambic line and may occur elsewhere in the iambic line, it doesn't work so very well at the end. What you'd use instead is an iamb with a hyper syllable or feminine ending.

Carol

Carol, I'm sorry to disagree, but you are quite wrong
on both counts. An inverted iamb is not a trochee;
if it were, wouldn't it be dumb to invent another name for
it? The point of calling it that is to distinguish it
from a trochee, because it isn't the same thing. I have
already given several examples, but I'll repeat one:

Like storm clouds in a troubled sky

Because of the contour of storm clouds, the
word clouds is not accented; the preposition
in is. To read the second foot as a trochee is
to destroy the beautiful movement of the line, a wholly
iambic line. There are many other examples, some even
more dramatic, but I was not merely inventing another
quite useless term.
Also, a trochee in the last foot of an iambic line is
indeed very rare (or used to be), but not on that account necessarily to be avoided. It is found in a good many
poems and sometimes to thrilling effect. (It has nothing
to do with a feminine ending.) Here, for instance, are a few lines from Stevens' great poem "Sunday Morning"---
the trochee is in the last foot of the second of these
three lines (it is generally called a scazon):

Grievings in loneliness, and unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights...

Surely you wouldn't lose that lovely scazon by adding
a syllable (e.g. "and gusty") and making it nothing more
than a garden variety feminine ending?

Like storm clouds in a troubled sky

That's a very interesting line, because it can be pronounced in three ways, two of which are very similar:

x X / x X / x X / x X

x X / X x / x X / x X

x X X / x x X / x X

How it would be pronounced depends on the line leading up to it and the overall meter of the poem. (The 3rd of those three scansions would be different from the 2nd in that there would be more of a pause between the first and second foot, as I read it.)

So what you're saying, Robert, is that "clouds in" is the inverted iamb, because it really wants to be a trochee, right?

I find that line particularly interesting because it reminds me of the kind of syllabic poetry I write myself, and which I've noticed that I tend to speak in clusters. I might say that line more like this:

x X X / x x / X x X

Of course, that's not any kind of reasonable scansion, but that's how I often read poetry, in clumps of rhythmic sounds.

Bob, if I take your meaning from the example, what you are calling an inverted iamb is just an iamb with the vocal stress in the usual place but the metrical stress promoted onto a normally unstressed syllable, and not a trochee at all. I can go along with that.

And yes, that is a good example of a final trochee in iambic lines working, and of course I wouldn't change it, but is there really much difference in function between the caesura that sets the trochee up and a syllable like "and" inserted there? The full stop obviates the need for an extra syllable before the accented syllable and makes the "y" of the trochee function rather like a hypersyllable.

Carol

My reading of that line would be:

like STORM clouds in a TROU bled SKY

I couldn't make myself put any stress on "in" at all, unless the preceding line suggests that clouds may occur OUTSIDE "a troubled sky," in which case I'd want the stress for contrast! I'd have a pyrrhic in that second position.

The Justice line with its preceding line:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTFor hours the convoys had rolled by
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTLike storm clouds in a troubled sky

The lines are strict tetrameter---in must
get the metrical accent, though of course it's a
very light one. You might say the line the
way Rhina scanned it, but your ear should be satis-
fied it has the expected four accents and each in
its expected place. Caleb, I really don't
know what clouds wants---for all I know,
every iamb dreams of becoming a trochee---but
because of its lowered stress in relation to
storm, it is just not quite strong enough
to get the metrical accent. Another example of
this very common phenomenon:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTHe burned his house down for the fire insurance

---for gets the (very light) metrical accent, not
down.

And Carol, that late caesura in Stevens' line, right
before the final trochee, is lovely, yes, but it's
not necessary to have one. Here are two lines that
end with scazons, trochees in the final foot---one
is my rendering of a Borges line, and the other is
Dick Barnes' rendering of a Borges line:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTWould lose his senses and his rash eyesight

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd who can tell me if the dark archive

And one could easily find many more examples of scazons
with no preceding caesura.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited September 13, 2001).]

So I suppose you could call this the "ambiguous iamb". I noticed it a while ago when reading a book of Mark Jarman's poems (he does this quite a lot-- it seems characteristic of his style). At the time I called it a "half-demotion" or "half-promotion". Normally when you promote a syllable it's bracketed with two syllables of distinctly lower dynamic stress, and similarly when you demote a syllable you surround it with two syllables of distinctly greater stress. But here "clouds" is adjacent to "in", with "in" in the position where you would expect the accent to fall, and "clouds" preceded by "storm" in the previous position where an accent would fall.

I can't get myself to say the Justice line with an inverted second foot. It is neat how the promoted "in" doesn't sound so artificial, as it might with a cleaner promotion.

Bob, both of those trochees could almost qualify as "inverted iambs," with the second syllable metrically promoted, because the second syllables of both archive and eyesight already get stress almost (though not quite) equal to the primary stress of the first syllables. Compare them to strong trochees like orchid and eider.

We had a similar case on another thread, and I read the line as iambic with a promoted last foot, almost spondaic.

Carol

I grant that archive and eyesight have
stronger than usual second syllables, mainly because
of quantity. But neither could ever really be pro-
nounced as an iamb. The difference between a trochee
and what I call an inverted iamb is subtle, but no
less real for being subtle. (If anyone can come up
with a clearer or better term than inverted iamb, I'd
be glad to adopt it.) Here for example is a line
with a sudden trochee, a clear trochee (and not following
a caesura)---my rendering of a Borges line:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTHis work finished, he slipped away unseen

No question that the second foot is a trochee. Now, here's
an ambiguous line, where the the second foot could be
read either as a trochee or an inverted iamb:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe new day, and the shape of his own hand

And here's one that is an inverted iamb and nothing
else---reading it as a trochee would make for a less
delicate and interesting reading:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTTo fleeting forms, a bonfire, a tornado

Strange as it may seem at first, the fourth foot is
not a trochee but an inverted iamb. The second
syllable of bonfire is clearly subdued to
the first, and because of that, the article, yes,
the little article a gets the metrical accent
(though it's barely audible---it's as if the ear is
merely satisfied that there's an accent in there
somewhere and that the line goes on its iambic way,
all iambic). I hope that's clear.
As for what may account for accent other than the
position of the syllable, Solan, a tough question,
but offhand I'd say other things that might impinge
are quantity (rarely) and rhyme and the inflection
of the sentence. As I understand it, the three main
components of stress are intensity (volume), duration,
and pitch. Anyone of those might help determine
stress and yet not interfere with the accentual order.
For example, if you read in isolation the line

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd offer to put me gently out of my pain

you'd read it as a loosely iambic line, with a clear
accent and a coinciding stress on pain,
especially since it happens to be a rhyme word. But
the whole passage goes:

I can't help owning the great relief it would be
To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.
But then next day as I come back into the sane,
I wonder how I should like you to come to me
And offer to me gently out of my pain.

You see, pain still gets the accent by virtue
of position and rhyme, but the stress is really on
my (in contrast to their), the stress
being mostly a matter of pitch. I'd call it, yup, an
inverted iamb. Now if all this seems complicated
and obscure, don't worry about it---time and reflection
and reading a lot of poetry with close attention to the
movement of the lines will teach you most if not all of
what you need to know. As for these theoretical bits,
they're only important as a way of explaining how best
to read some lines. And they're not always clear-cut.
Once we get away from the abstract simplicity of the
meter, we get into an area where we are at a loss to
explain; we don't really understand the inner laws of
verse. Again, that wonderful Frost passage:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTRegular verse springs from the strain of rhythm
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTUpon a metre, loose or strict iambic.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTFrom that strain comes the expression
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTstrains of music.
The tune is not that metre, not that rhythm,
But a resultant that arises from them.


Yes, the resultant---the real sound of the line,
where all the fun is, and all the mystery.



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited September 14, 2001).]

This thread is going faster than I can keep up with it.

Rhina, I agree with you about the pronunciation of that line. However, some people on the board feel uncomfortable with three unstressed syllables in a row, so I throw in what I call a "theoretical" stress when I'm scanning such lines.

Robert, this line:

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

is like the other line -- it takes a somewhat artifical pronunciation to promote "for" over "down". I find myself inserting a pause after "down", where a missing stressed syllable would go, as if the line were pronounced:

he BURNED / his HOUSE / down [pause] / for the FIRE / in SUR / ance

Pauses sometimes take the place of syllables, and that immeasurably complicates scansion and meter altogether. Some poets, I think, expect too much of their readers when they think the reader should be educated enough to promote a syllable which ordinarily would take no stress. It would be wonderful if all readers were so educated, but they aren't.

P.S. I just went back and re-read those posts, and I find this line the most troubling of all:

For hours the convoys had rolled by

There is no way I can give any stress to "had", which is a verbal "business word" that modifies "rolled" and has no meaning of its own. If this is iambic tetrameter, it isn't very carefully written. Since "by" must take a stress at the end of the line, this is yet another line with three unstressed syllables in a row.


[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 14, 2001).]

Bob, a few thoughts in response to the examples you used. In the first example, the second foot is clearly a trochee, but since it doesn't come at the end of the line it doesn't address the question about final trochees.

His work/ finished,/ he slipped/ away/ unseen/

In the second example, I would have called the second foot monosyllabic and the third foot an anapest, rather than reading the second foot as either a trochee or an inverted iamb:

The new/ day ^,/ and the shape/ of his/ own hand/

It seems to me that the caesura which is forced by both the sense and the punctuation breaks the foot between day and and. Can you have a foot with a forced caesura right in the middle? Well, perhaps you can, but would you?

I read the third example as you do, iambic with promotion on a.

To fleet/ing forms,/ a bon/fire, a/ tornado/

But the fourth example I read entirely differently, with the second and fifth feet as anapests and the rest as iambs, thus:

And of/fer to put/ me gent/ly out/ of my pain/

I know, I know, you're going to say that I have to stress me, and vocally I do, but the beat seems to be steady under the fancy footwork.

Caleb, it's sort of like dancing or playing hopscotch. The words you stress verbally may skip over the metrical beat and land on either side. Sometimes you actually lower your voice in order to stress a word. There doesn't have to be a vocal promotion of a word just because it holds metrical prominence. All that is necessary is that you be able to read the line to a rhythm of off-beat-on-beat. I'm trying to find three vocally unstressed syllables in the line you mention and I can only find two vocally unstressed words in the whole line:

For HOURS the CONVOYS HAD ROLLED BY

In a linguistics class you might diagram it something like this, with the voice beginning lower on the preposition and dropping on the article, then raised and held steady on convoys had rolled and then decending onto by, yet by is stressed as much or more than any other word in the line:

___/---\___/ --- --- --- ---\___

Metrically, it sounds like iambic pentameter to me.

For hours/ the con/ voys had/ rolled by/

Let me give you a line of regular iambic tetrameter here and invite you to stess each word in it in turn. Regardless of which word you emphasize, the line itself will still have four feet.

How long/ have you/ been drink/ing gin?/ 4 iambs
HOW long have you been drinking gin? 1 trochee, 3 iambs
How LONG have you been drinking gin? 4 iambs
How long HAVE you been drinking gin? iamb, trochee, iamb, iamb or 2 trochees, 2 iambs
How long have YOU been drinking gin? 4 iambs
How long have you BEEN drinking gin? iamb, iamb, trochee, iamb
How long have you been DRINKing gin? 4 iambs
How long have you been drinking GIN? 4 iambs

The metrical count of a line doesn't change simply because the reader performs it with more or less vocal stress on given words. But if a count is dropped, the metrical value changes.

The above line is all two-syllable feet. But with an added phrase the meter could be either 4 or 5 feet, and the reader, whether sophisticated or not, must depend on the metrical climate to tell him how to read it.

How long/ did you say/ you've been drink/ing gin?/ 4
How long/ did you/ say you've/ been drink/ ing gin?/ 5


Carol

At least 40 years, and after this exercise, I'm having another!

Cheers!

------------------
Ralph

Caleb, you're wrong on both counts. You scan the
Frost line with only four accents, which should
suggest that you've made a mistake somewhere. In
fact, you're sort of close to the truth without
quite recognizing it. for does get the
metrical accent, BUT it is very very light, so
that you might say the line just as you scanned
it, but your ear should be satisfied that the
number of accents has been fulfilled. However,
there is no caesura, none, not one, zip, nada.
As for the tetrameter, it is perfectly iambic and
it is excellent verse. voys had is similar
to clouds in---both inverted iambs. Carol's
account of it is pretty sound, so a word to the
wise etc.
Carol, why complicate a scansion that isn't really
all that complicated?---no need for the monosyllabic
foot and anapest. Of course a caesura can divide
a foot, it happens all the time. The foot is completely
abstract and mustn't be confused with the phrase, which
is something else altogether (although once in a while
they coincide). For example,

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

Wonderful line, especially the phrasing: a single
syllable, a trochaic phrase, and a dactyllic phrase---
but the meter is iambic. And there is a clear caesura
in the middle of the first foot and the second.

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTO / S o / S o s / S o o S

or you could mark the first foot S / O---it
doesn't really matter, the two syllables are just
about equal in stress. But if you look at just about
any line, and look just at the feet, not the phrasing,
you'll see that the foot often ends in the middle of
a word or is often split by a caesura. Sometimes the
caesura is huge, as in this line, which begins with a
trochaic foot.

So. But the hand was gone already. S // o o S...



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited September 15, 2001).]

Thank you for your explanation, Bob. I think you have helped me wrap my mind around it. It will still be some time before I can succesfully wrap my ear around it as well, and actually be able to produce an inverted iamb in a poem (except by accidentally believing I have committed a trochaic substitution).

I can almost grasp it at
The new day, and the shape of his own hand
and
To fleeting forms, a bonfire, a tornado
I had some more trouble with
And offer to me gently out of my pain
but I'll leave that job to - as you say - time and reflection.
I ask such theoretical questions because they help me read. I read all of Dante's Inferno without hearing a single iamb - simply because I wasn't looking for any. I would probably have discovered them had I read it aloud. But I didn't.

I have a very good ear for metric rhythm in song - despite being tone deaf - but I think meter in written language eluded me for a long time simply because writing means visual; you can't see an iamb. So much to catch up.

------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

I think I'm ready for a gin with Ralph.

Robert, your explanations just prove my point that the reader's interpretation can't be controlled when the line is in any way vague. Your explanations don't change the way that I read the lines, so for you to say that I'm wrong is just silly. People wouldn't debate these issues if there weren't legitimate reason for disagreement. Scansion isn't a monolithic theory in which there are clear rights and wrongs.

When I read this line:

For hours the convoys had rolled by (for HOURS / the CON / voys had / rolled BY)

I put no emphasis on "had", and that's that. I certainly don't read it the way Carol does, with all those stressed syllables.

I submit that there is no such thing as an "inverted iamb". There are iambs and there are trochees, and there are trochees that substitute for iambs, and vice versa, and that's it. If you say it like this -- x X -- it's an iamb; if you say it like this -- X x -- it's a trochee. If a syllable gets promoted by the meter, why confuse things with a special term? Besides, there will always be people who don't make the promotion, and that's their prerogative.

Carol, your explanations strike me as so much hand magic. I can tell when I'm stressing or not stressing a syllable, and to pretend that I'm stressing it in some subtle way, when I'm not, makes no sense to me. People seem determined to confuse matters much more than they need to be.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 19, 2001).]

Caleb, Carol,

those convoys have a steady iambic rhythm:

for hours / the con / voys had / rolled by
is perhaps best analysed in stress levels:

1 4 / 1 3 / 1 2 / 2 3

The third foot is a light iamb. If it had been 2 1 you would have needed to excuse it as trochaic substitution.

As for the inverted iamb, even this foreigner could hear it in two of Bob's examples.

Caleb, you analyse in terms of stress. So when you write, you truly write in stressual-syllabic meter. But the English (and German) standard is accentual-syllabic meter, and it is within that standard that inverted iambs and comparable beasts exist. Stress and accent follow each other quite close, but sometimes they part. Then you must make a choice.
It's perfectly legitimate to write in something other than the standard - like stressual-syllabic meter - as long as you remember that it is not identical to the accentual-syllabic standard.

------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

For hours the convoys had rolled by

Svein, now that I've said it 50 times, I find that I can give a little emphasis to "had" without any awkwardness, but in the beginning I couldn't say it that way. The problem with the line is that, on first reading, I expected "rolled" to take a stress, so I suppressed "had"; but then I saw that "by" followed "rolled", so I suppressed "rolled" also, resulting in 3 syllables in a row with no emphasis. I just don't think this is a well-written line, not if the author was writing in meter. In an accentual poem, it would be acceptable.

However, my natural inclination is still to say it like this:

for HOURS / the CON /voys [slight pause] / had rolled BY

as if the pause were substituting for a syllable.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 20, 2001).]

Caleb, I find it close to impossible to read two consecutive syllables as having the same stress. In English, that is. To do that, you have to take on a robot voice for those three syllables. In the previous example, the "had" does not receive great stress. But greater than "voys". If we go with the linguistic petimeters, I'd say

convoys had rolled by = 4 1 2- 2+ 3

That is: Rising all the way. Someone else's reading might switch the + and the -. The key is that "had" can't be read with as little stress as "-voys". Just try doing it!

As for how well written the sentence is, the grammarians would insist that a preposition just ain't the right thing to end a sentence with.


------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

We don't all speak English with the same inflection and we don't all read or speak poetry equally well. When I was a kid in school and we had to memorize and recite poetry or read aloud, in any class there were far more inept readers than good ones, and I imagine those tin-eared kids became tin-eared adults.

Carol

End sentences with prepositions, Solan? Auden exploded that prohibition as Latinate nonsense decades ago. A story goes: The boy from Texas arrived at the Old Campus at Yale and asked an upperclassman, "'Scuse me, sir. Can you tell me where the library is at?" The New Englander snootily replied "At Yale, we don't end our sentences with prepositions." Texas replied "Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?"

Sigh. For the last time, Caleb, you cannot
scan that line that way or read it that way
without messing up the line, which is a fine
line. The accent, however light, is on
had, period. And there is no pause
after convoys, none---if there were
any pause at all, it would be a very slight
one after hours, but even that is
completely unnecessary. As Carol says, you
hear lines read in all kinds of ways, well
and badly. But of all the possible ways of
saying a line of well-made verse, only one
or two can be the right way. Sorry---strait
is the gate.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/biggrin.gif

Good one, Tim. I think the prohibition against split infinitive is criticized for being nothing but an import from latin as well. I can't think of any good non Star Trek example, though.

------------------
Svein Olav

.. another life

You're not the only one who's sighing, Robert. If you teach your students the same way you explain things to me, you have a lot of students who don't listen to you.

Tim, thanks for a belly-laugh. I'd forgotten that one.

Latinate nonsense? Vergil was known to do it.

Well, Caleb, I guess my students find these things
easier to understand. I don't know how else to
explain them to you. I've tried to make clear a
few important points, and wrote as clearly as I
could, and more than once. If you don't get it,
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's my fault. You
are very stubborn and dogmatic in matters that you
really don't know a great deal about. Not that
it's essential for you to know---one can write good
poems without knowing exactly what one is doing---
but I don't see how you could possibly hear lines
of verse as they should be heard if you insist on
bringing such weird and mistaken preconceptions to
the reading.

Part of the problem may be that we are examining lines out of context, although even in context, I find some promotions to be unacceptable. If the promotion is so slight that you can't hear it, it isn't there.

On an intellectual level, I see our language as too complex to be so easily quantified by any metrical theory. And I object to this notion that there is an absolute right or wrong to the pronunciation of any line. For you to say that a certain line has no caesura, when I naturally speak it with a caesura, is just meaningless. If a reader has to be educated in a particular theory to read a line properly, then the line isn't well written, or the reader's unique reading has its own validity. Even the best poets can't control what the reader will do.

On a personal level, I'm tired of being told that I am wrong when in fact I just have a different point of view. Generally speaking, my views arise from my direct experience with poetry, and not from books, and I would have it no other way.

To forestall the inevitable joke, I hasten to add that I do read books and try to acquaint myself with various theories, but I disagree with many of them. A good metrical theory will apply to poetry as spoken, not to poetry as it "should" be spoken. Language in general has to have standards, but those standards need to be flexible enough for the language to breath. When you tell me that my pronunciation of a line is wrong, when it varies from yours by only a slight amount, you are being inflexible and even dogmatic.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 30, 2001).]

4 years ago. There's a different crowd here these days, and I wonder if anybody has anything of interest to add.

<FONT >(I, for my own part, would like to subtract rather than add, from the list of Norwegian poets, a certain Mr Vold.)</FONT c>

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Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

Yes, an interesting read, Svein - what has changed in four years? The arguments on metrics go round and round like the eternal seasons.

But I am glad I read the thread, if for nothing other than Tim's story on prepositions at Yale.

And there is the now famous rejoinder from Churchill, when he was pulled up for a preposition at the end of a sentence: "that is a nonsense up with which I will not put."




------------------
Mark Allinson

Interesting thread. "inverted iamb" is I think a valid metrical idea -- & Steele discusses it (in "All's the Fun"), not using that name, in terms of compound words crossing metrical foot boundaries, as I recall, so it's not like Mezey was making it up. Mezey's example:

Like stormclouds in a troubled sky

has a compound word crossing between the 1st & 2nd feet. Disyllabic compounds are idiomatically stressed on the first syllable, forcing the second syllable into an unstressed position, hence the "inverted iamb" in the 2nd foot. Compare:

Like dark clouds in a troubled sky.

Adjective-noun combinations do not have the idiomatic stress pattern of compounds (& that is precisely how compounds are differentiated, verbally, from adjective-noun combinations), & so the 2nd foot here is a trochee.

As Mezey says, it's the distinction between "stress" and "accent" or however you want to put it that confuses people -- because, while they usually more or less coincide, they don't always, & then it's hard to explain what exactly the difference is. An obvious application of the distinction is to the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a spondee in English poetry -- as came up recently in Albert Geiser's thread in DE. Here's an IP line from Shakespeare:

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Certainly the 3 syllables "age, ache, pen" receive equally strong speech stress. It would not make much sense to "save the iamb" in the second foot by claiming that "ache" is stressed ever so slightly less than "pen." So you have a choice: either treat the second foot as a spondee, or differentiate between speech stress & metrical accent. Either there are 6 accents in this pentameter line, or the second foot is an iamb, not a spondee, in that it falls into the iambic rhythm of the line.

Metrical theory seems simple at first but it can get very subtle very quickly, & Mezey was wonderful with the subtleties. He knew what he was talking about. I think he's sworn off Eratosphere, though, because of some political thread some time ago -- too bad!

I'm intrigued to see the heated arguments that metrical theory could arouse throughout September 2001 (beginning in the small hours of September 11).

I thought I'd just add a follow-up to the Murphy and Churchill preposition stories, though I can't remember where I heard it; it concerns a small boy in bed who asks his mother to fetch a book about Austria from downstairs and to read a chapter of it to him; unfortunately his mother brings him one about Australia. At which point the boy asks:

"What did you bring that book to read out of about Down Under up for?"

"For all I know, every iamb dreams of becoming a trochee" breaks me up. Congrats to Bob Mezey for managing to retain a sense of humor here!

Gregory, yes, I'm kind of astounded the discussion continued in the midst of 9-11. I certainly wasn't aware of this thread at all, and there's good information in it.

In view of the telescoping of time in these threads, why not:

for HOURS the CONvoys had ROLLED BY

Sigh. Not that I have trouble pronouncing it with a stress on "had." But ROLLED BY seems to have more pathos.

With Terese, I read (and hear) it:

for HOURS the CONvoys had ROLLED BY

x X x X x x X X (iamb, iamb, double iamb*)
.....................*also called "ionic a minore"

Four stresses, consistent with tetrameter, and with a common substitution. Am I "wrong" too?

Cheers,
Jan

[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited July 01, 2005).]