[Janet Kenny]

Originally Posted by Catherine Chandler

Counting-Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
     Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
     Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
     Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
     Twig of willow.

Cathy,
That seems metrical to me.
(Edited back) I see that others agree. Sorry, I hadn't read the other responses.
Janet

[Janice D. Soderling]

Janice, I'm looking at "Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam" and counting seven, eight if the compound counts as two.

Cam't deny that, Maryann. But I'm thinking Edna was thinking, "That is just such a pretty line that my muse gave me, I will use it to avoid monotony and sing-songiness. No one will notice except Maryann and I daresay she will like my verse anyway, since she is a poet par excellence."

But I am just guessing.

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I think if you are not going to resist--work somewhat against--a regular metrical pattern, you might as well just write accentual syllabic verse. And you are going to miss out on the different kinds of textures available here. To say that something mostly scans is to say that something does not always scan. That there might be some coincidence of iambic or dactyllic sounding lines does not negate the poem as syllabics unless that impulse overwhelms it. And it is pretty natural for, say, five-syllable lines to average two beats each, so there might be a dimeter swing in the background. English has accent, and so syllabic poems in it will of course have accents, but it is thinking about syllabic poems the wrong way I think to talk about beats and substitions. It can be done, of course. Prose can be scanned as well, if you like.

[A. E. Stallings]

Another neat example in haiku stanzas:

In Memoriam John Coltrane

Listen to the coal
rolling, rolling through the cold
steady rain, wheel on

wheel, listen to the
turning of the wheels this night
black as coal dust, steel

on steel, listen to
these cars carry coal, listen
To the coal train roll.


--Michael Stillman


For me the extreme line breaks (even on "the") work--there is a rolling feel of them as they trundle heavily into the next line. But would they work without the pressure of syllable-count? Not so well for me. Then they would feel more arbitrary.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Oh, thanks for the Stillman above. Neat!

I think the break on the works because it causes a rhetoric pause and makes the accent to fall on "turning" (the coal /rolling does the same thing) which is what the whole thing is about, the wheels rolling and turning.

In other words, the form certainly contributes to the content. Very nice.

[Gemma Mason]

Interesting thread. Thanks to everyone who gave examples. I'm inclined, myself, to wonder if using five-syllable syllabics would be a nice way to practice the idea, since five syllables is a tighter restriction and easier to see. Having played with that, it might then become easier to see how techniques developed in the five-syllable case could be transferred to a more subtle seven-syllable case.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Question to the learned from the learning.

Isn't this syllabics? Only it uses eight syllables and cuts each stanza in half with half that number.

This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wind the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

- Dylan Thomas

I'm thinking that some would rise up in arms and say that "snap" was rhyme-driven. (I am not saying that, just thinking out loud.)

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks for all of these fine examples. I am being won over. Thanks in particular to Alicia for her illuminating comments, bringing out just how the syllabics work in these poems, some of which are new to me. The Wilbur poem has long been a favourite and I have to say that I find the rhymes help me get my bearings - help me quite simply to hear the lines.

One perhaps rather naive question: when reading aloud this stanza -

wheel, listen to the
turning of the wheels this night
black as coal dust, steel

- would you put a pause between "the" and "turning"? Or is it only supposed to work visually?

[Philip Quinlan]

Originally Posted by Gregory Dowling

As Alicia suggested, I'm opening a Mastery thread on the subject. And I'm taking up her proposal of Plath's poem, "Mushrooms", as a successful example of a syllabics poem. Here's what Alicia wrote over on GT:

I confess to the fact that I find it difficult to read this aloud without imposing a "dimeter swing" (although some lines resist my imposition, as Alicia points out), but that presumably is due to my lack of familiarity with the way syllabics work. If anyone can teach me how to break myself of this habit, I'd be grateful.

Anyway, I now declare the Syllabics Mastery Thread officially opened and look forward to seeing more examples and comments.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

(Sylvia Plath)

Gregory

Excellent example, and a superb poem.

By its very nature a basically two-stresses per line pattern against 5 syllables per line is very unlikely to fall into an unnatural "swing". And that is the beauty of this.

[Janet Kenny]

I would read:
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Some singers stress words because of dictionary meaning instead of the way they fall in the context of a phrase. I always fought against that.

I don't agree that one might as well always write regular metrical poetry if one is not going to write syllabics. I think it's a matter of ear and instinct and conformity prevents surprises which may be the life blood of poetry.

I would love a response to the classical Italian song I posted further back on this thread, with a superb link which shows the words in the score as the singer sings the song, My point was that its stresses are similar to English stresses despite the obvious differences.