Interesting discussion. The concensus seems to be that the "ear" doesn't hear syllabic regularity except in short line-lengths. I disagree.

I've written poems that seem to organize themselves into long syllbic lines. I don't really know what happens, but there is a quality about the regular line-lengths that comes through to me, not as strongly as accentual meter, but recognizable from stanza to stanza all the same.

What sort of reaction would one of these get on the metrical board? Let's see.

Porridginal

I doubt that you could write true syllabic verse, Po, especially in long lines. You would put in some sort of rhythmic pulse by instinct. If Tchaikovsky had written with a tone row, how would the music sound?

But the lines in your posted poem were so long that I didn't even try to count them. The chopped-up display was too annoying.

Alan

Bumping this up, as we're discussing this topic on GT.

Counting of any kind is a substitute for hearing. Nobody in the world ever spoke in imabic pentameter (consistently at least).

If it sounds good it will fly right.

Tim, I count myself as a great lover of Dylan Thomas, especially Fern Hill, and I don't care how many syllables or stresses there are to a line. I think that means I agree with you.

Prosody has to do with analysis, not synthesis. Nobody can make a great poem simply out of rules.

Philip

A good bump, Maryann!

I don't like syllabics unless they persuade me by other means. This comes, in part, from my counting tens of thousands of syllables, one by one, for some graduate work on a projective test in psychology*. They are too easy to write, for me at least. But Michael Hulse, the editor of a magazine that published me (among other oblate Spheroids), the lamented Leviathan Quarterly, wrote some things that positively stank of skill, and when I praised them as somehow near to what I was attempting with ancient meters, he shrugged it off and replied that they were syllabics only. Previous posters here have identified other syllabic successes. There is another slightly parallel thread going( Successful Syllabics? ) that picks out other examples.

Forums. On the question of what the Forums of the Eratosphere should contain, my views, as a relatively new mongoose among top predators here, mightn't carry much freight. For one thing, I don't know enough of the history of TDE and my own recent readings have probably not been wide enough. But from day one-and-a-half it seemed to me that some sort of allowance for S T R U C T U R E , as such, ought to be available for the deepest consideration, as in TDE.

The great wolves drink there in TDE. Even if not in TDE, shouldn't they flash their eyes over syllabics, etc., somewhere? A Serious Syllabics Forum?

Also, a Forum for "structured verse" might be founded at some future date, parameters and limits to be defined.


*

Abject apologies for a change-of-heart boink. See above.

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