[Clive Watkins]

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).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Clive: Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you. It seems to me that this boils down to a question of the realationship between theory and practice. I believe that theories are post hoc: they are efforts to formalize something that is already inherent in the situation, but because they are inevitably reductive, they can be no more than approximations. Shakespeare (and Chaucer, and the Beowulf poet) probably knew very little about prosody in formal terms, but they knew how the human voice bumps along through a sentence, especially a sung sentence, and they tried to capture those patterns. Even though the Beowulf poet was writing on what we take to be completely different prosodic principles, he (she? why not?) was still capturing a form learned from long exposure and maybe, just maybe, somehow intrinsic to human phonology and even neurology. Chaucer is writing in a form adopted from the French and imposed upon English, but as I recall the last line of the first sentence of the Prelude to the Canterbury Tales, he lapses into pretty accurate alliterative verse. It's as if the ghosts of his ancestors are whispering in his ear. Yet he makes the line fit into the iambic couplets that the French brought over.
For me the terms of prosody are a convenience, like grammatical terms, to help me explain to myself and to others what is working or not working. I simply need a vocabulary. But the bumps and thumps of speech predate the terms for them. As Frost says somewhere, they are part of cave speech, sounds from the mouth of the cave and from the cave of the mouth.
RPW

[Roger Slater]

Shakespeare might have thought about theory less than we do, but I doubt that he wrote iambic pentameter by accident, and I suspect that even he would sometimes go back over his drafts to make sure that the metrical patterns weren't violated, and perhaps sometimes he would even correct himself when he found that he had written a line that didn't scan correctly. What vocabulary he used as he thought about these things is beyond my ability to guess, but I simply can't imagine he wasn't acutely aware of metrical issues or that he never thought about his writing in formal terms. One might assume, of course, that he had an extraordinarily good ear, and didn't need to correct his own meter very much, but he also had a pretty good brain and wasn't likely to miss much about the technical aspects of his craft.

[Clive Watkins]

Hello, Richard!

I agree that, properly speaking, prosodies should be descriptive. As Annie and I have both said in our different ways, experienced poets write by ear and use whatever analytical tools lie at hand only intermittently and as a check.

Unfortunately, I suspect that for those embarking on this great venture - and even for some who are already nearing the end of that voyage - prosodic theories, when over-complex, actually distort what the ear hears. Hence my suggestion that it might be worth considering the minimum technical requirements for accentual-syllabic verse.

You extend the question into accentual verse, and while the same arguments might well apply there too, my own interest in this trhead was specifically in accentual-syllabic metres.

In any case, Old English metres were themselves much more complex than is, I think, sometimes supposed - though again I am certain that practised scops had internalised their patterns just as securely as Milton and Herbert had internalised the patterns of accentual-syllabic.

So, an irreducible minimum for the achievement of accentual-syllabic metres?

Clive Watkins

[RCL]

I vaguely recall that there are many studies suggesting even the Beowulf poet was writing with techniques from classical rhetoric. Of course, poets may have intuited some of it, as suggested above.

------------------
Ralph

[Richard Wakefield]

Ralph: I shouldn't have implied that I think Shakespeare or any other accomplished poet could ever work entirely by intuition. There had to be plenty of tuition. But it needn't have been learned in a methodical way. Every poet, as far back as we can find 'em, has written in a tradition -- even those writing against a tradition. I suspect that they learned their craft through vast memorization and repetition. Today, even poets who read a great deal probably hardly approach the exposure that people in more oral (and aural) cultures gained in the ordinary course of life.
My point remains simply that the terms we use to explain prosody aren't necessary to the performance. They're useful in all kinds of ways, but they are no substitute for an ear trained by a lifetime of attentive listening. Same goes for rhetorical figures. The human brain seems to be a metaphor making organ as surely as the stomach is a food digesting one. It's good to be able to analyze these processes, but the analysis is a second-order activity.
RPW

[Robert J. Clawson]

Yes, Shakespeare clearly knew is numbers, as did Milton, Pope, et al.

Today, Neil Simon won't let an actor improvise from his script because it's likely to destroy his desired rhythm. He'll revise, if he feels an awkwardness, but his script is the law.

As to basics, Clive, I think we have to take from the label accentual, and assume that a line will contain a certain number of accents, ie., pentameter, tetrameter, etc. It should also contain a certain number of syllables corresponding to the normal two-syllable per foot expectation, ie., eight syllables in tetrameter. Finally, accentual/syllabic should display useful variations, ie., those that enhance the rhythm and that emphasize crucial content of the poem. When these variations, such as a trochee in a pentameter line, an anapest in a hexameter line, or, say a dactyl in a basically anapestic ditty, fall judiciously to surprise or delight, they make good poetry. When they are used to extreme, they tend to muddy the work.

I think that many good writers hear in numbers for certain kinds of poems. It might be a writer's style to write a first draft in a regular iambic tetrameter, then to follow it up with metric tinkering to improve its rhythm and content through more precise control of its music and diction.

I firmly believe that SOUND is the main ingredient of a poem and that it should firmly support its other conveyers of meaning, ie. denotation and connotation.

Is that basic enough?

Bob

[MacArthur]

Clive, how about more than one metrical style? These thoughts are based on some remarks by Alan Sullivan, and have been stirring in my mind for several weeks. Finally wrote them out during an insomniac night. Might do for an article.(Don't take any of this too seriously.)
We’re talking about accentual-syllabic meter: not Free-verse. Syllabic verse or accentual meters. We’re talking about Iambic meters: not triple-meters or falling-meters. For ease of discussion, let’s use the Iambic Pentameter…although the same considerations can easily be adapted to any line-length from tri-meter to fourteeners.

Style#1 The Strict Style
Metrical Substitutions: As you’d expect, the strict style is the most restrictive. There is generally only one substitution permitted per line and usually only about one in every three lines. And sustitutions are limited in where they occur.

Reversed feet are most common on the first position, less so in the third position (in ip), perhaps in the 4th and rarely if ever on the second or last foot of a line.

Almost the only extra syllables readily accomodated are the “feminine ending” and more rarely the extra syllable at the beginning of a line.

The only unaccented syllable that can be deleted is the off-beat that initiates an iambic line. Accented syllables are never added or subtracted in verse where line-length is otherwise consistent.

Pyrrhic-spondee pairs are permitted pretty much anywhere in the line…although there might be misgivings about placing a pyrrhus on the second foot.

Rhythmic Variation:

Promoted accents are common in the Strict Style…the regularity of the meter makes it easy. Still, only about one per line, usually inside the line in the second half (after the rhythm’s established), and usually in lines that don’t otherwise contain caesurae, substitutions or end with a high degree of enjambment.

Demoted off-beats are fairly common, but are usually pushed to the beginnings or ends of lines, where they less likely to disrupt the iambic rhythm.

Both promotions and demotions are very clear-cut: promoted accents might be bracketed on one or both sides by suffixes/prefixes; demotions will fall clearly on less important parts of the statement.

Traditionally, caesurae fall in the middle of the line and occur only about once per line— although both strictures have been relaxed in this past century. How many lines contain a caesura is simply up to the poet. Enjambment at line-endings tends to be moderate— but how many lines end in enjambment is again largely up to the poet.

Works of genius have been composed in this style, and it may be the single most common style in the Tradition (although probably only a large minority). It flourished in the 18th Century but has examplars in all periods. It is the style most associated with the current Neo-Formal Revival. It’s the kind of thing they like at Storyline, Eratosphere and most of the formalist magazines.

The strict style is the style most often employed for non-literary purposes (eg. greeting cards and popular song lyrics). It’s the most popular style of poetry for an audience that is not very sophisticated artistically (although dumbed-down Beat-verse is catching up). It may well be the only form of verse well-suited to be taught to pre-adolescent children.

It works supremely well in amusing poetry, it’s well–suited to narrative and discursive poetry (particularly at length). It may be a little too stiff for most dramatic verse but is excellent for libretti. Of course, works of genius have been composed in lyric poetry using this approach, and it strongly supports rhyme. It dominates the composition of sonnets and was Shakespeare’s preferred approach in this form.

The regularity of strict verse is often described as “musical”, but I think “incantatory” might be the better word. Although it’s most commonly associated with straight-forward traditional poetry, because of this chant-like quality, it is well-suited to a certain mystical or Symbolist aesthetics…Modernists, don’t despair!

Two things are commonly said about the Strict Style that are highly debateable— that it’s easy to learn, and that some advantage accrues from learning it first.
Allan Sullivan is apt to say such things, but that’s mostly because he prefers to read this kind of verse and finds it easier to critique.

The Strict Style is…well, strict. What’s easy about that? It is one style choice among others and, if it doesn’t suit your native genius, it will never be easy, and it may not be possible to acquire it.

There is something sorta conceptually normative about the Strict Style, though— it is metrical poetry. It’s easiest to describe the other three styles of metrical verse by constrasting them with the Strict Style.

Style #2 The Lilting Style

Metrical Substitution: The Lilting Style revels in certain kinds of substitutions— principally anapests, but also reversed feet and double-feet when these can generate an “anapesty” rhythm. Sequences of two consecutive unaccented syllables pop up everywhere. That’s the point— to write scannable Iambic verse that sounds as much like anapestic verse as possible. Kinda the best of both worlds, one hopes.

Multiple substitutions per line are permitted, although usually only two extra unaccented syllables per line are allowed (eg. 12 syllables for a pentameter etc.). If you accept a pyrrhic-spondee pair as a substitution, entire lines might be constructed containing no iambs. There are no particular strictures about where substitutions occur, although traditionally substitution on the second foot of a pentameter is considered “sensitive” (apt to disrupt the rhythm).
Feminine endings aren’t especially more likely to occur, (although they may have a certain flavor, see below) because that’s the one case where the extra syllable isn’t “anapesty”.

Rhythmic Variation:
Promoted accents aren’t especially common in the lilting Style— perhaps because the looseness makes them both harder to achieve, and harder to justify.
Demotion on off-beats is very common, for the same reasons it’s common in true anapestic verse.
A special case is the Feminine Ending. The Lilting Style seems to like demotion on that extra syllable…I’m not sure why.

He TRAV-elled On the WHITE horse

Endings like that are very common in the Lilting Style, and this is the infamous “abuse of the feminine ending” in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, so deplored by 18th-Century and Victorian critics.

Caesurae are very common in the Lilting Style, as a device to “smuggle in” the extra syllable, or “spring” a reversed foot smoothly. But the flavor isn’t choppy— it flows.
But enjambment is fairly modest. After all, the line-lengths are apt to be irregular, and some kind of control is needed.

The Lilting Style became common in late Elizabethian and Jacobean dramatic verse, and Shakespeare’s late Blank Verse tends in this direction. It was revived by the Romantics and fought with the Strict Style for the soul of Victorian Poetry. It persists in the modern era, and was the preferred style of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donald Justice and many others. Absent rhyme, it can sound sorta like free-verse.
The genius of the Lilting Style is found in dramatic verse, and anything that requires dialogue…it’s close to our speech-rhythm. It is too slack for Light Verse. It works reasonably well in narrative and discursive poetry, and it lends itself to a kind of breathless, fast-paced lyric. It’s only so-so with rhyme, because of the irregular line-lengths. It is the principal cause of bad sonnets.

For many, this style is easy to learn. Like anything, when it’s well-done, it’s easy to like. If you’re prone to spontaneously compose anapestic verse, this might be your preferred style in composing iambic verse. Who knows?

The Lilting Style lends itself to all kinds of vice…but you could say that about anything.

The remaining two styles can be described more briefly.

Style #3 The Metaphysical Style

So-called because it flourished in a brief period of tense religious and political conflict in English literary history— the first half of the 17th Century. It’s associated with John Milton, John Donne and George Herbert. It reflects the over-strained, crabbed and gloomy sensibility shared by those guys. (Curiously, two protogees of Milton— Andrew Marvell and John Dryden— were mostly unaffected). It has become widely admired again in modern times.

Rhythmically, Metaphysicals love demoted off-beats and have almost no recourse to Promoted accents— there are almost no low-stress syllables to promote, anyway. Metaphysicals will employ weird locutions to stuff their lines with long sequences of syllables of high-dynamic stress.

Deleting unaccented syllables almost anywhere in the line can be done-- producing "clipped" and "broken-backed" pentameters-- and it's even possible to "smuggle in" an extra stress to make a weird "broken-backed hexameter". Philip Larkin was fond of these effects.

Fierce enjambment is the rule along with frequent and off-center caesurae. The preferred metrical substitutions are reversed feet and pyrrhic-spondee pairs, although anapests also occur whenever they might serve to make the line more “choppy”. More than one trochee and/or double-iamb per line is almost normal, and rarely will you encounter a purely iambic line. Metaphysicals construct their lines out of concrete and barbed wire— a poem by Robert Lowell could stop a tank!

Although Milton wrote Paradise Lost, because this style was only briefly popular before modern times, there are few examples of narrative, dramatic or discursive poetry in this approach…but it’s hard to believe it lends itself to any of these uses.
The true home of the Metaphysical Style is a certain kind of lyric, filled with riddling “meanings”, bizarre locutions and counter-intuitive and unpleasant imagery.

All this may seem kinda modern, but it’s been with us all along. Metaphsical poetry may be a sort of throw-back to god-awful Beowulf, and the sensibility can be detected in Jonathan Swift and Thomas Hardy. (Anybody who was a real prick seems to have an affinity for this approach.) Hopkins is a hero to these guys.

It became extremely popular with the advent of the 50’s formalists— especially Robert Lowell, but to some degree or another also Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov and Anthony Hecht. John Donne was the darling of English departments from the 50’s thru the 70’s, and I can recall not really liking Donne’s poetry, but thinking I should. (I’ve since liberated myself.)

If you haven’t guessed, I don’t really care for this style of poetry, so I’m not sure how I can recommend it to anyone. I suspect this syle is easy to affect— I find myself lapsing into something like it whenever I unwisely follow anyone’s advise to “enjamb more!”.
It can be done well. I’d guess some of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets are in this vein. Although Dana Gioia once called it stress-heavy syrup, his own poetry seems like it might be moving in this direction.

Last, and perhaps least, is the Subdued Style.

Style #4 The Subdued Style

This is a style designed to make scannable, metrically regular poetry sound less…metrical. It’s hard to think of any pre-modern examples, since this would have seemed like a curious goal before the advent of free-verse.

The way you do it is to write metriccally regular verse…extremely regular. Substitutions are even less common generally in this style than in the Strict Style. The art is in the sources of rhythmic variation, which are systematically played off against the underlying meter.
Some examples:

He filled a glass with cold gin and vermouth

Where is the third stress in this tetrameter? On “gin”, making a reversed foot? Or “and”, making a promoted accent? Either reading is reasonable, and something between the two is perhaps the most natural. Robert Mesey calls this a “reverse iamb”, and it’s a sort of ambiguity achieved by placing a possible demotion in front of a possible promotion. The accent “hovers”. (And you could also read this as two iambs followed by two anapests.)

Another ambiguity (this time, involving a substitution):

And leave, as she left, with no good-byes

There is an anapest here— but where?

And LEAVE, as she LEFT, with NO good-BYES.

or,

And LEAVE, as SHE left, with NO good-BYES.

Again, either reading is reasonable.
Riddle a poem with a lot of these ambiguities, employ no rhyme or off-rhyme, and at least a modest degree of enjambment and creative use of caesurae, and you can create a poem whose surface will feel Free-Verse/Prose/ Syllabic, but with some of the “authority” of the underlying metrical patterning.

For a certain theme or tone this might be spot-on…and a lot more likely to be received in mainstream lit. jounals.

Well, each of us must wrestle with the devil.

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited January 21, 2002).]

[Alan Sullivan]

Andrew, you seem to have shut down this thread with your dissertation, which is a pity, since no one has really responded to Clive's call for an irreducable minimum, something to initiate young people or metrical beginners to a concept that keeps elaborating until it sometimes seems, well, devilish, as you suggest at the end of your comments.

While I largely follow and concur through your first two categories, I have some problems with your attempt to differentiate some metaphysical poetry on metrical grounds. It does not seem evident to me that we need posit a separate variety of metrical practice when we scan Milton or the other poets you mention. What they do seems to me more a matter of divergent personal styles and preferences within the larger category of "strict" accentual-syllabic meter.

In the last part of your comments on "lilt," you seem perplexed by the frequency of feminine endings in anapestic verse. That's because you haven't considered "line-wrap," a concept I only absorbed a year or so back. Juxtapose a feminine line ending with an initial iamb, and you get another pair of unstressed syllables, this time bridging the line break. Call it a "ghost anapest."

I could continue, but I would come no closer to answering Clive's question. For that I shall have to return another time.

A.S.

P.S. I often write with lilt myself, so I'm not quite the fundamentalist you suppose. As I have explained before, I urge beginners to write in strict meter because, as the old saw has it, you must walk before you can run--not to mention hop, skip, or jump.

Beginners need to identify and count stresses. It's not at all hard to do. They just have to listen to words, instead of looking at them. Of course this goes contrary to the early training in sight-reading that we all experience. That's why it's hard for some. The ones who listen more easily are often the musically-inclined, who already know how to sing.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Originally posted by Alan Sullivan:
That's because you haven't considered "line-wrap," a concept I only absorbed a year or so back. Juxtapose a feminine line ending with an initial iamb, and you get another pair of unstressed syllables, this time bridging the line break. Call it a "ghost anapest."

Alan,

Similarly to the idea of "line wrap," I wonder about other instances when a "ghost foot" might be good for effect, even within a line. For instance, a line which contains for the second and third foot a trochee/iamb combination might also contain a "ghost anapest" which would possibly resonate with an anapest in the next line.

--I've been a little bit obsessed by such considerations, lately. I posted a poem called "Barracks" at The Deep End with these two consecutive lines:

the dark: wearing T-shirts and boxers, forms
bend to polish boots and buckles, place pins

Although this might not be an ideal example, I've wondered if the "ghost anapest" in the combination WEARing t-SHIRTS might resonate with the next line's -les place PINS. Perhaps a better example would be a poem in which the trochee/iamb and the anapest in the next line occurred at similar places within the individual lines.

I've also wondered about the reverse construction: iamb/trochee might contain a "ghost spondee" on the stressed syllables.

Curtis.


[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 01, 2002).]