Never consecutive substitutions? I think Auden was talking through his hat when he wrote that. Such rules are made to be broken!
We’ve discussed elsewhere Shakespeare’s line “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, which I (and I think Tim and Carol likewise) scan as:
LET me | NOT to | the MARR| iage of TRUE MINDS|
Trochee, trochee, iamb, double-iamb. Only one regular iamb in the line. How many substitutions is that?
Still, it’s probably true that 99% of the time, more than two substitutions might wreck the line. I just don’t like to see absolute rules. And so what, after all, if the occasional line in a BV piece or sonnet falls out of IP? If the content is rendered effectively, why worry? An example from the fine BV (with occasional rhyme) of Conrad Aiken’s
A Letter from Li Po:
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
looking for friendship or an old love’s sleeve
or writing letters to his children, lost,
and to his children’s children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or for worse,
sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
a slant of witch-light; on the pure text
a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
for winecups and more winecups and more words.
Surely none of us could doubt that the “sifted...” line here has 6 beats, but which of us would want to change it?
The last line here has an unusual and interesting pattern — I read
for WINEcups and MORE WINEcups and MORE WORDS, (oS|ooSS|ooSS|) and this is indeed the way Aiken himself reads it on a recording I possess. Consecutive double iambs.
Btw, you don’t need an oscilloscope to see the shape and volumes of sounds graphically. Digital recording/editing software shows it all on the screen, and you can change the viewing scale (zoom in, etc). I use something called Goldwave — free version available for download from
http://www.goldwave.com . When you use a program like that to open a sound file (.mp3 or .wav, say) you see the graph of the sounds.
Henry
[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited May 28, 2005).]