[Solan]

A discussion over a poem at the Met board prompted me to ask this question:

The most common meter in English is IP, which is iamb-iamb-iamb-iamb-iamb. Anapests, trochees and maybe some other feet may occur in the line only as substitutions.

But what about baselines for the meter where not every foot is the same? Non-uniform baselines, or what the technical concept may be.

I have noticed that Norwegian poetry often features iamb-anapest-anapest-iamb as a metrical baseline - as the meter which all lines relate to either by following it strictly or by being variations by substitution.

Which baselines of varied feet have been found to be succesful, and which have generally bellyflopped? Are there any general rules (of thumb) concerning which mixes work and which don't?

The baseline of the poem in question was iamb-iamb-iamb-anapest. It doesn't ring too well in my ears, but then again, my ears are not known for a fluent grasp of meter.

What say you, O Lariat?

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

.. another life

[Tim Murphy]

There are no rules of thumb, Solan. It's magic. There are trolls under the mountain if only you can hear them. As Frost taught us, we have strict iambic and loose iambic. For the latter, let me suggest you read "There are Roughly Zones," or "They Were Welcome to their Belief," or "The Road Not Taken." You can find the same sort of supple substitution in Ransom and Hardy. Nowhere however will you find anything like the programmatic metrical alternation of iamb and anapest you describe in Norwegian. I heard Swedish and Norwegian verse spoken in childhood, and I believe there is a strong quantitative element lost to English in those languages. But you teach us!

[Solan]

Thank you, Tim. I looked for the three poems on the web, and found two (appended below for everyone's reading pleasure). I wonder if it would be possible to translate a Norwegian poem in iamb-anapest-anapest-iamb to English while keeping that meter. After my two current translations I might give just that a try.

Svein Olav

<u>There are Roughly Zones</u>

We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.
And every gust that gathers strength and heaves
Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.
We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,
We'll know, we say, that this was the night it died.
It is very far north, we admit, to have brought the peach.
What comes over a man, is it soul or mind--
That to no limits or bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line beween wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?
There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight,
But we can't help feel more than a little betrayed
That the northwest wind should rise to such a height
Just when the cold went down so many below.
The tree has no leaves and may never have them again.
We must wait till some months hence in the spring to know.
But if it is destined never again to grow,
It can blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men.

<u>The Road Not Taken</u>

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

[Tim Murphy]

Great poems. The first hypermetric pentameter, the second, tetrameter. The magic is how he moves the triple feet around, creating a loping rhythm, a conversational voice. The title of my forthcoming book, Very Far North comes from "Roughly Zones." Just as the title The Deed of Gift, comes from Frost's "The Gift Outright." Here's a poem from that book in hypermetric tetrameter quintets, the exact template for "Road Not Taken." My poem is "The Path Mistaken."


"An ye do naught else, lad, plant mony a tree."
—last words of The Douglas


In a leafless wood I lose my way.
Too many winding paths have crossed:
more choices to make than Robert Frost—
most of them wrong—and now I stray
with an empty bag on a grouseless day.

Like a winded fox I hesitate
but here is terrain I recognize.
A stand of white pines crowns this rise
and a plaque from Nineteen Sixty Eight.
Tipping my flask, I contemplate

the scouts I led above this lake
slashing through brush and tangled vines
to plant a thousand seedling pines.
My back and shoulders recall the ache
of hard work done for the forest’s sake.

For the forest’s sake or perhaps to ease
the prospect of a childless life.
At forty I’ve neither son nor wife,
no plays, novels or symphonies,
but credit me with this tract of trees.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Good grief, Tim, this poem is gorgeous! Frost would have been proud of it--and rightly.

[Caleb Murdock]

Yes, it is beautiful, isn't it?

Rhina won't be missed. She'll be right here posting along with the other Eratosphere addicts, and how nice that will be!

[Carol Taylor]

Tim, what Rhina said.

Carol

[Solan]

Tim, I bought Andre Bjerke's book on verse yesterday, to check if my impression of the variable baseline was right. And indeed I was!

It seems we have a whole treasure house full of tested "mixed meters" as Bjerke calls it. The most common are trochee/dactyl mixes or iamb/anapest mixes. It seems to work best when the iambs envelope the anapests, or similarly when the trochees envelope the dactyls. Or when - at least - the shorter foot ends the line. So the meter of the poem which had me start this thread (iamb-iamb-iamb-anapest) would not have been considered a good mixed meter.

Bjerke quotes Olaf Bull (a Norwegian great) about a quite peculiar one: Dactyl-dactyl-spondee. To my ear, the spondees truly can be spondees in Norwegian, and the verse sounds great. The lines go (and makes me remember my first question here about the meter from line to line):
dactyl-dactyl-spondee
dactyl-dactyl-trochee
dactyl-dactyl-trochee
programmatically in 3-line stanzas.

According to Bjerke, IP is the meter of more than half the poetry tradition in Germanic languages. But Norwegian - and then probably many other Germanic languages - has good room for other base meters, mixed or uniform.

A curious uniform meter Bjerke attributes to Wildenwey (another Norwegian great) is the "third peon": ooSo. Having read the discussions on this board, though, the example lines all struck me as soSo, a programmatic alternation between heavily stressed and lightly stressed trochees. It flows much lighter than I'd expect trochaic verse to do - probably because the lines always start on a light and not too perceptible stress.

I don't know if this has tempted anyone to try mixed (base) meters, or if you consider such meters to be best fitting in other Germanic languages, but I hope to see some attempts.

---

Svein Olav

.. another life




[This message has been edited by Solan (edited September 16, 2001).]