[Tim Murphy]

Dear MoM, One of my biggest goals is to learn to write loose iambics, as I think Frost conceived of them, that is to get away from strict accentual-syllabic verse and write with the loping rhythms we see in so much of Hardy and Frost. First, would you agree that the following are masterful examples? They Were Welcome To Their Belief, trimeter; The Need Of Being Versed In Country Things, tetrameter; There Are Roughly Zones, pentameter. Next, are the terms "loose iambics" and "accentual verse" interchangeable? Finally would you discuss this little Hardy poem:

The Wound

I climbed to the crest,
Fog-festooned,
Where the sun lay west
Like a crimson wound,

Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I'd given no sign
It had pierced me through.

[MacArthur]

Tim-- what a coincidence. I was going to post a topic asking you for examples of well-known poems in Dimeter and Trimeter...iambic, that is. (I am gathering them for instructional purposes.) On the examples I've gathered so far, it can be tough to make a call: Iambic or Anapestic? Even Elizabeth Bishop's "First Death in Nova Scotia" employs many lines with one or two extra syllables. Perhaps it's just too stilted to sustain a strict iambic trimeter.

Here's another example:

from Easter, 1916 W. B. Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born...

To me, the tone seems iambic, though all but two lines contain at least one extra syllable. Your thoughts?




[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited January 02, 2003).]

[Tim Murphy]

More than any other, this is the poem where I fell in love with "loose meters." It is unquestionably iambic trimeter, and the substitutions simply give it that loping rhythm for which this aspiring poet longs. Anyone seeking to replicate these rhythms should be well-versed in song.

[Len Krisak]

Hmmm...

" Being certain that they and I "

Two trochees followed by two iambs.
So four stresses.

[Tim Murphy]

Oh Bullshit Len! Two anapests, followed by an iamb! But that is the dangerous ground onto which we tread when we follow the Masters.

[Alder Ellis]

Mightn't the Yeats be accentual trimeter? Which goes back to your question, whether "loose iambic" and "accentual" are interchangeable terms. By my quick & dirty count, only 22 of the 48 feet in the excerpt are iambs, so...

I suppose a strict definition would be based on whether or not there is a discernable "default" rhythm in the poem, but this would often be debatable, I think. (Perhaps we can get the NEA to fund a special research project to investigate this issue.)

I totally agree that

Being certain that they and I

is trimeter in context. In a tetrameter context, it would be tetrameter. It's a "Zelig" line, assuming the characteristics of its neighbors.

A metrically peculiar line in the excerpt, though, is:

To please a companion

In a "loosely" metered context this would normally, I think, be dimeter, whereas in a more strictly metered context the concluding "ion" dipthong of "companion" would be, by poetical convention, divided into two syllables, so that the word takes two beats. Yeats relies on this strict-meter convention, along with the rhyme with "done", to foist this line off as trimeter in the loose-meter context. It's metrically mischievous.

There's a "Zelig" line at the end of "The Wound":

It had pierced me through.

Trimeter or dimeter? Depends on the context. But the interesting thing about this line is that "It" has no antecedent. In the semantic context, the antecedent seems to be "wound," but when you think about it, the wound can only be the result of the piercing, not its cause. The line is semantically mischievous.

In any case, I look forward to definitive statements as to the differentiation of "accentual" and "accentual-syllablic" verse, and if anyone wants to throw in a definition of pure "syllabic," that would be good too. Please include examples with the definitions.

[MacArthur]

"to please a companion" is a Dimeter, followed by a tetrameter, "around the fire at the club". One line is short, the next long. Yeats needed to rhyme both "done" and "jibe".

I hate the way "accentual" is becoming a trash-can category to dimiss difficulties with a proposed theory-- after all, it's uninformative, telling you nothing more than is already agreed upon; ie, that a line appears to have a certain number of accents. If the shape of the line presents a difficulty for a pet metrical theory, this only re-states the problem.
It's anti-empirical-- in Galileo's day they called this "rescuing the appearances".



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited January 02, 2003).]

[robert mezey]

The movement of the Yeats poem is masterly, yes. No question
that they are all three-beat lines, but iambic? If so, very
very loose. But not anapestic either. Loose iambic and
accentuals are theoretically not the same, but it's often very
hard to distinguish between them. Bridges spoke with some authority about this matter. MacArthur, you scan three lines
and all three scansions are dead wrong. The poem tells you how to read the lines, and if you don't hear three beats in
each line, you are not hearing the poem.
Much more to be said on this subject. Till later.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Here's how I'm scanning it:


from Easter, 1916 W. B. Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born...

If you have to account these lines in standard notation, to my mind it would be done as trochaic with an occasional dactylic substitution, ordinary truncation on some lines, one or two extrametrical unaccented syllables at the beginning of most lines, and only one promotion (the end of "companion," to give it the same stress as "done") to make everything count out at three beats a line.

Is this how you hear it, MoM?

[MacArthur]

Absurd...simply absurd.

"to PLEASE a com-PAN-yun
a-ROUND the FI-re AT the CLUB"

That Yeats would tease out all the syllables in "companion" and get com-PAN-i-ON is just remotely possible. And unlikely.

That Yeats would pronounce "fire" like Johnny Cash is unthinkable.

(and what's with polite? Not even in Mississippi.)

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited January 03, 2003).]