Quote:
Originally Posted by A. E. Stallings
It's true that in trying classical hendecasyllables, we often convert long syllables to accents--DUM (as Frost does); but Tennyson is concerned with syllable length rather than strictly with accent--he's trying for the full classical effect. A curiosity. Don't know that it works, however. He seems to be saying as much, that it is a mere exercise.
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No, Tennyson is working with the natural accents of the English language. "Syllabic length" has nothing to do with it, except insofar as the feature is correlated with tonic accent. Of course Tennyson
says (tongue in cheek!) that the poem is "all in quantity," but we don't need to take his word for that at all. Back when Latin formed the model for most poets' understanding of grammar, "length" was often confused with "accent" as a matter of terminology, but in practice no one since the 16th century has tried to write with "syllabic lengths" in English. (If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Derek Attridge's
Well-Weighed Syllables.)
Anyway, as for the Justice poem, I simply disagree. I think that the lineation adds very little of real purpose to the poem. But my main point is something else: assuming that the kind of effects that you described in your first post on the poem are really all that important, I simply wanted to show that they could be brought out even more strongly with a different arrangement. So, for example, putting "I" at the head of each stanza really gives us a "thin man" in the flesh, and enjambing at "this" rather than "to" makes the drop to "edge" below all the sharper (tension or no, "to" shifts "edge"
away from the edge of the line, and so blunts the effect) and so on. That being the case, what is the virtue of the syllabic arrangement here?
Well, of course, it is
metrical. But the metre is dimeter, and the arrangement into groups of five syllables as such is irrelevant to its functioning. That's all.
Steve C.
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