The extended discussions of metre, and in particular of accentual-syllabic metre, provoked by bear_music’s recent postings on the metrical boards suggest perhaps that some of the underlying issues might be worth discussing away from the context of his own poems. (The following paragraphs are by way of preamble, for which I apologise. The key question appears at the end and is highlighted.)
I wonder if a minor exchange between Annie Finch and myself on the thread concerning bear_music’s "For Galway Kinnell" might offer a way in. This exchange sprang from my asking - disingenuously - how Shakespeare and others managed to write accentual-syllabic verse before the advent of modern prosodies. Annie rightly pointed out that theories of prosody predate by centuries our own wranglings over this matter and also - a writer’s observation - that our interest in prosodic theory occupies a different part of our brain from the activity of writing, something I firmly believe.
No doubt from the standpoint of modern linguistics, the prosodies available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and successors were inadequate, derived in the main from theories descriptive of languages quite different from English. This did not stop them producing what we still regard as fine verse. What I suspect occurred was that, having internalised the patterns of accentual-syllabic - having caught the tune, as it were - such writers paused only rarely to think about metrical feet, though occasionally they may have counted syllables or, perhaps more likely, beats, on their fingers. I admit at once that this is a speculation largely beyond proof.
Difficulties arise once we consider the way in which descriptions of actual prosodic practice work back into and come to influence new writing. To reflect on my own earliest experience for a moment, though I was taught the "traditional" techniques of metrical analysis as a schoolboy of about ten or eleven, that was not, I think, when I first understood that verse offered special and pleasurable rhythmic patterns: I had had already acquired this sense from being read to by my parents and from reading for myself. I do, however, vividly remember being taught how to scan lines of verse and suddenly realizing that, through this technique, I could make abstract sense of the special delight which reading verse occasioned. It was only a short step from this to my first serious attempts to produce such verse for myself, puerile though they certainly were. I recount this little history to make two general points.
First, if we wish to preserve and sustain the techniques of accentual-syllabic metre, there is simply no alternative to exposing children from an early age to a great deal of well-written, metred verse. That means reading it to them, encouraging them to read it for themselves out loud and, as Timothy Murphy repeatedly recommends, having them learn it by heart. Reading aloud needs to make clear - without falling into an ugly, rhythmic insistence - that it is indeed metred verse which is being read. (Some years ago the BBC went through a phase of engaging readers who read such verse as if it were the most informal kind of prose.) As to the issue of learning by heart, this goes deeper than might appear, since it can seem to challenge what became in some educational quarters over the last thirty or so years - at least in the UK - a kind of educational orthodoxy which held that to require young children to learn anything by heart was to inhibit their freedom for intellectual growth or - worse - to impose upon them undesirable cultural norms.
Secondly, had the theory I was given at the age of ten or eleven been, from the point of view of linguistics, more complete and naturally, therefore, more complex, I doubt it would have proved as serviceable as it has.
Given these considerations, the kind of prosodic theory taught to aspiring writers is crucial. The discussion of bear_music’s pieces illustrates this well, for I wonder if here (and elsewhere, too) some of the notions about accentual-syllabic which emerged may be unnecessary and a distraction in the practical task of writing successful verse. No doubt some of these notions are the result of confusions in terminology, but not, perhaps, all. It seems likely that, despite the fascinating variousness of prosodic theories, there may exist a relatively small number of key ideas, a kind of irreducible minimum, which those setting out on the accentual-syllabic road would be well to grasp as intimately as possible. No doubt these would be best demonstrated in a live session: for all its virtues, the internet is no substitute for such sessions. I should be interested, nonetheless, to read what other Spherians think such key notions might be.
As a footnote, let me join with Annie in commending John Thompson’s The Founding of English Metre (London and New York, 1961), a book I used routinely to suggest to students. It is not, perhaps a beginner’s book, but, for anyone wanting to understand the evolution and establishment in the sixteenth century of accentual-syllabic metres as the normative pattern which would run for the next three hundred years, it is still well worth reading.
Clive Watkins
[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited January 17, 2002).]
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