Mark, I was trying to stay out of this , but you sucked me in with The Listeners.
I oversimplified or summarised incorrectly on that other thread when I said The Listeners was pretty well 4/3 throughout. Though the poem is through-printed (and I assume that’s how de la Mare wanted it), syntactically and structurally it consists of quatrains with the second and fourth lines rhymed. I'll set it out in that way below.
In each quatrain the first and third lines look and sound longer — this is because, whatever the number of speech stresses, the author packed more words into those lines. It’s so consistently done that it must have been intentional. The shorter, rhymed lines seem to rely less on a dramatic, rhetorical delivery — and they are all quite clearly trimeter. I read some of the longer lines as trimeter too, but some as tet.
Anyway, here’s my shot at marking the number of stresses line by line. Some of the longer lines (L1 and L3) could go either way, and I’ve indicated my reading for a few of them by way of example. 3343 3343 3343BANNED POST 4333 4333BANNED POST 3343 3343 3343BANNED POST 4333. (Did he originally write ten stanzas and cut out the penultimate one?) But really, if the poem works despite different readers’ stress perceptions, that’s to its credit, surely.
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, 3 --^---^--^--
Knocking on the moonlit door; 3
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 4 --^--^-^-^-
Of the forest's ferny floor: 3
And a bird flew up out of the turret, 3
Above the Traveller's head 3
And he smote upon the door again a second time; 4 --^---^---^-^
'Is there anybody there?' he said. 3
But no one descended to the Traveller; 3
No head from the leaf-fringed sill 3
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, 4 -^--^---^^
Where he stood perplexed and still. 3
But only a host of phantom listeners 4 -^--^-^-^--
That dwelt in the lone house then 3
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 3
To that voice from the world of men: 3
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, 4 -^---^---^^
That goes down to the empty hall, 3
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken 3
By the lonely Traveller's call.3
And he felt in his heart their strangeness, 3
Their stillness answering his cry, 3
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 4
'Neath the starred and leafy sky; 3
For he suddenly smote on the door, even 3 --^--^--^--
Louder, and lifted his head:- 3
'Tell them I came, and no one answered, 4
That I kept my word,' he said.3
Never the least stir made the listeners, 3
Though every word he spake 3
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house 4 -^----^-----^^
From the one man left awake: 3
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, 4
And the sound of iron on stone, 3
And how the silence surged softly backward, 3
When the plunging hoofs were gone.3
Carol, you start with the theory that it’s all trimeter, which makes you want to rewrite (disastrously, in my view) a line like :
....fell ECHoing through the SHADowiness of the STILL HOUSE
to make it fit your theory. Some of those longer lines are admittedly open to different readings, but I can't see a trimeter intent in the “shadowiness” line, nor in “Tell them I came, and no one answered” or a number of others.
My theory is a looser one. I think de la Mare used the clearer-cut “shorter” rhymed lines as a sort of rhythmic grounding for the accentual flights and variety in the longer lines — which feel and look longer even where they probably only have three stresses. I say “probably” because at this distance we can’t always be sure of the author’s intentions or how most of his readers might have spoken the lines. There’s an example in the first line: most educated British English speakers of his day probably said ANybody, not ANyBODy, hence I think that line is meant to be 'is there ANybody THERE? said the TRAVeller.
Words with three trailing unstressed syllables are still relatively common in British and Australian, but much less so in American speech. Consider words like exPLANatory (Brit) v exPLANaTORy (American). It’s this sort of difference that leads me to wonder if some accentual lines, especially where they require longer leaps between stresses, might be more troublesome to American ears.
Mark, notice that where we need to “skip over” a run of syllables, de la Mare seldom asks us to do that on content words that would be stressed in speech. The longest such run here is on SHADow-i-ness of the STILL HOUSE. On examination that isn’t really difficult: SHADowiness is a natural peonic dactyl — in a clearly accentual-syllabic context we would give the ness a light beat, but not here. And there’s no reason to stress the of or the the. This is different from some of the lines where you have been arguing that we should somehow know to skim over content words. The poem will be read the way it strikes the reader, and that will depend on how the author sets the context and chooses and arranges the words.
Henry
[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited August 20, 2005).]
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