[Caleb Murdock]

Originally posted by robert mezey:
Sigh. For the last time, Caleb, you cannot
scan that line that way or read it that way
without messing up the line, which is a fine
line. The accent, however light, is on
had, period. And there is no pause
after convoys, none---if there were
any pause at all, it would be a very slight
one after hours, but even that is
completely unnecessary. As Carol says, you
hear lines read in all kinds of ways, well
and badly. But of all the possible ways of
saying a line of well-made verse, only one
or two can be the right way. Sorry---strait
is the gate.

You're not the only one who's sighing, Robert. If you teach your students the same way you explain things to me, you have a lot of students who don't listen to you.

[Deborah Warren]

Tim, thanks for a belly-laugh. I'd forgotten that one.

Latinate nonsense? Vergil was known to do it.

[robert mezey]

Well, Caleb, I guess my students find these things
easier to understand. I don't know how else to
explain them to you. I've tried to make clear a
few important points, and wrote as clearly as I
could, and more than once. If you don't get it,
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's my fault. You
are very stubborn and dogmatic in matters that you
really don't know a great deal about. Not that
it's essential for you to know---one can write good
poems without knowing exactly what one is doing---
but I don't see how you could possibly hear lines
of verse as they should be heard if you insist on
bringing such weird and mistaken preconceptions to
the reading.

[Caleb Murdock]

Part of the problem may be that we are examining lines out of context, although even in context, I find some promotions to be unacceptable. If the promotion is so slight that you can't hear it, it isn't there.

On an intellectual level, I see our language as too complex to be so easily quantified by any metrical theory. And I object to this notion that there is an absolute right or wrong to the pronunciation of any line. For you to say that a certain line has no caesura, when I naturally speak it with a caesura, is just meaningless. If a reader has to be educated in a particular theory to read a line properly, then the line isn't well written, or the reader's unique reading has its own validity. Even the best poets can't control what the reader will do.

On a personal level, I'm tired of being told that I am wrong when in fact I just have a different point of view. Generally speaking, my views arise from my direct experience with poetry, and not from books, and I would have it no other way.

To forestall the inevitable joke, I hasten to add that I do read books and try to acquaint myself with various theories, but I disagree with many of them. A good metrical theory will apply to poetry as spoken, not to poetry as it "should" be spoken. Language in general has to have standards, but those standards need to be flexible enough for the language to breath. When you tell me that my pronunciation of a line is wrong, when it varies from yours by only a slight amount, you are being inflexible and even dogmatic.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited September 30, 2001).]

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

4 years ago. There's a different crowd here these days, and I wonder if anybody has anything of interest to add.

<FONT >(I, for my own part, would like to subtract rather than add, from the list of Norwegian poets, a certain Mr Vold.)</FONT c>

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Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[Mark Allinson]

Yes, an interesting read, Svein - what has changed in four years? The arguments on metrics go round and round like the eternal seasons.

But I am glad I read the thread, if for nothing other than Tim's story on prepositions at Yale.

And there is the now famous rejoinder from Churchill, when he was pulled up for a preposition at the end of a sentence: "that is a nonsense up with which I will not put."




------------------
Mark Allinson

[Alder Ellis]

Interesting thread. "inverted iamb" is I think a valid metrical idea -- & Steele discusses it (in "All's the Fun"), not using that name, in terms of compound words crossing metrical foot boundaries, as I recall, so it's not like Mezey was making it up. Mezey's example:

Like stormclouds in a troubled sky

has a compound word crossing between the 1st & 2nd feet. Disyllabic compounds are idiomatically stressed on the first syllable, forcing the second syllable into an unstressed position, hence the "inverted iamb" in the 2nd foot. Compare:

Like dark clouds in a troubled sky.

Adjective-noun combinations do not have the idiomatic stress pattern of compounds (& that is precisely how compounds are differentiated, verbally, from adjective-noun combinations), & so the 2nd foot here is a trochee.

As Mezey says, it's the distinction between "stress" and "accent" or however you want to put it that confuses people -- because, while they usually more or less coincide, they don't always, & then it's hard to explain what exactly the difference is. An obvious application of the distinction is to the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a spondee in English poetry -- as came up recently in Albert Geiser's thread in DE. Here's an IP line from Shakespeare:

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Certainly the 3 syllables "age, ache, pen" receive equally strong speech stress. It would not make much sense to "save the iamb" in the second foot by claiming that "ache" is stressed ever so slightly less than "pen." So you have a choice: either treat the second foot as a spondee, or differentiate between speech stress & metrical accent. Either there are 6 accents in this pentameter line, or the second foot is an iamb, not a spondee, in that it falls into the iambic rhythm of the line.

Metrical theory seems simple at first but it can get very subtle very quickly, & Mezey was wonderful with the subtleties. He knew what he was talking about. I think he's sworn off Eratosphere, though, because of some political thread some time ago -- too bad!

[Gregory Dowling]

I'm intrigued to see the heated arguments that metrical theory could arouse throughout September 2001 (beginning in the small hours of September 11).

I thought I'd just add a follow-up to the Murphy and Churchill preposition stories, though I can't remember where I heard it; it concerns a small boy in bed who asks his mother to fetch a book about Austria from downstairs and to read a chapter of it to him; unfortunately his mother brings him one about Australia. At which point the boy asks:

"What did you bring that book to read out of about Down Under up for?"

[Terese Coe]

"For all I know, every iamb dreams of becoming a trochee" breaks me up. Congrats to Bob Mezey for managing to retain a sense of humor here!

Gregory, yes, I'm kind of astounded the discussion continued in the midst of 9-11. I certainly wasn't aware of this thread at all, and there's good information in it.

In view of the telescoping of time in these threads, why not:

for HOURS the CONvoys had ROLLED BY

Sigh. Not that I have trouble pronouncing it with a stress on "had." But ROLLED BY seems to have more pathos.

[Jan D. Hodge]

With Terese, I read (and hear) it:

for HOURS the CONvoys had ROLLED BY

x X x X x x X X (iamb, iamb, double iamb*)
.....................*also called "ionic a minore"

Four stresses, consistent with tetrameter, and with a common substitution. Am I "wrong" too?

Cheers,
Jan

[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited July 01, 2005).]