[Maryann Corbett]

Sam Gwynn's poem "Evergreen" over on Metrical has some of us scratching our meter-minding heads. Sam describes it as trochaic octameter. Some of us have called it anapestic, but there's only one anapest, really, in each line. The term "fourteeners" has come up, but there are fifteen.

It seems to me the that our disagreement only shows the limits of our metrical terminology. I submit that it's a musical problem: where are the bar lines, and how many strong beats are there in a measure?

In my ear, the first two syllables of each line are pickup beats, and the third syllable is the downbeat of the first bar:

in the |HEART of A la|BA ma there's a|TOWN called E ver|GREEN

A good analogy is the structure of most lines of the verses of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Describing the meter as "trochaic octameter" doesn't give me the information about where the first real heavy beat is.

"Trochaic octameter" would have us starting with the downbeat of the measure:

|IN the |HEART of |A la |BA ma |THERE's a |TOWN called |E ver GREEN

That's more stresses than I'm really hearing in this poem.
That would be more like the meter of the folk song "Reuben and Rachel."

Agree? Disagree? Care?

[Mark Allinson]

My ears agree with yours, Maryann.

Yes, you have picked out one of the meters here - the tet, four anapests.

Since long-lines can be tricky, I do think it is best to begin emphatically with the meter you want to establish.

In Sam's "Evergreen", for example, starting off with a line like the one beginng with "Sumac", would be the way to go.

It's so easy for the poet to "hear" what he or she WANTS to be heard, but without the annotations such as on musical scores, there is no way to go other than by the normal pronunciation of words.

[E. Shaun Russell]

I hear it exactly as trochaic octameter, personally.

If you want to extend the music analogy, this would be more of a shuffle than anything else. Actually, another good point of reference (thanks to the Alabama line) would be the traditional tune "Oh Susanna":

Oh I COME from AlaBAMa WITH a BANjo ON my KNEE

[Roy Hamilton]

Thing is, as Quincy would say, it doesn't matter if the first foot is anapestic because the other seven are pure trochaic.

[Mark Allinson]

Well, Roy, the poem to me is clearly anapestic hept.

And apparently it is for Maryann also.

It all fits perfectly into that meter for me.

[Roy Hamilton]

I wish we could discuss this in person, Mark, on your beach!

[Maryann Corbett]

Shaun, your use of bold suggests that you hear the beats "A-" and "with" and "on" as having exactly the same degree of stress as "come" and "bam" and "banj-" and "knee."

That's not true for me, and it's the heart of my point. There are primary and secondary stresses, but we don't generally talk about those.

Mark, I agree that there are four stresses in the line, but can we really talk about anapests? After two initial unstressed syllables, we get a stress and then THREE less stressed ones, several times.

Seems to me we were talking about dipodic meters somewhere else around here....

[Janet Kenny]

Maryann,
I hear the line as you do. What I also hear in Sam's poem is a huge pause at the end of L3 and a syncopated long bar in L4. We do run out of terminology but our ears don't let us down. In the end I trust my ear. I fear that when we pin down the butterfly with a name we lose the space of its flight--if that's not too arty-crafty
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 23, 2008).]

[E. Shaun Russell]

Yup...how I bolded it is exactly how I read it / hear it. In Sam's poem I read it thus:

In the HEART of Alabama there's a town called Evergreen.

You're right though -- it differs from trochaic in that I read the first beat at the third syllable. Hmm!

[Roy Hamilton]

I wish you luck with your spin, but trochees dominate the line and hence must be our guide. IMHO