[Solan]

English metric poetry is usually called accentual-syllabic. Still, I notice that the poets here scan primarily in terms of stress. Steele's 1234 system is a pure stress-system, for instance.

Bob Mezey's osOS system differentiates between accent and stress, as far as I understand, but it is a system I don't quite get for that precise reason: What is the difference between accent and stress in poetry?

Also: Do English poets in general really write accentual-syllabic, or would it be truer to call most English metric poetry stressual-syllabic?


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Svein Olav

.. another life

[nyctom]

Dear Svein:

Your posts on technical matters always make me feel incredibly ignorant. It does make me curious about one thing: which poets are your favorites?

I know it is not relevant to the particular topic, but I would be curious to know.

Thanks.
nyctom

[Solan]

Tom: I am the ignorant one here, which is why I need to ask all these questions. I wrote my first verse in June, so I am quite the newbie. I have an academic / cerebral approach to things, which is why you find me tossing all these concepts around.

Favourites ... well, have I read enough to proclaim any true favourites? In general, I go for content first and take the form as an extra bonus. The form is best when it stands selflessly in the background and promotes the content. IMHO.

I truly like Borges, especially after I found Bob's translation. Aside from him, I like a lot from Goethe and the few poems I have seen by Nietzsche. I have a friend who knows most of Blake by heart, and so many of his poems have become dear to me. I haven't read much by Frost, but like what I have seen. The same goes for Bob Mezey on this board, btw.

I respect a lot of others without necessarily liking them. Dante, for instance. I read his Inferno, but failed to relate to the culture and political intrigues. Milton's Paradise Lost is a frustrating-good book. I quit halfway through, though I thought many speeches there were very well made. I guess I sided with the losing faction there. I generally get frustrated by long poetic pieces, though there are obvious exceptions. (I even decided to quit the Odyssey and the Iliad halfway through.)

But I am from Norway, and relate to the local poetry here as well. I have enjoyed reading Jan-Erik Vold, a very, very experimental poet. Bjørneboe is very good - and also an interesting political rebel. Halldis Moren Vesaas - the little I have read of her - has a very appealing voice. Åse-Marie Næsse, whose poems a this Blake-interested friend of mine is trying to translate, also has some interesting ones. And of course André Bjerke, who read poems on the TV when I was a kid. (I know I should say "Wildenwey", but I haven't read any of his after high school.)
Aside from that, others too. But just like in English poetry, there's a lot of Norwegian poetry that should never have seen the light of day.

But finally: Let's not forget Håvamål, our national treasure.

No better burden on your back
than the memory of many men's wit

(freely translated by yours truly)

---

Svein Olav

.. another life



[This message has been edited by Solan (edited September 10, 2001).]

[robert mezey]

Svein, it would make life easier if everyone writing or
speaking about prosody used the same terminology, but---
The most common meter in English poetry is accentual-
syllabic, which means simply that there is a fixed number
of accents and a fixed number of syllables. E.g. in a
pentameter, five accents and ten syllables (though of
course there are many exceptions to that count). The
difference between stress and accent, as I use the terms
(and others as well) is that accent has to do only with
the meter, and it is determined almost entirely by its
position in the line. It may be heavy or very light.
Stress has to do with how we speak the language, the
sound of the sentence, inflection of phrases etc. It
often coincides with accent, but far from always. The
beauty and subtlety of accentual-syllabic meter lies
largely in the continuous conflict between stress and
accent. To quote Frost again,

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTRegular verse springs from the strain of rhythm
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTUpon a metre, strict or loose iambic.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTFrom that strain comes the expression strains of music
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe tune is not that metre, not that rhythm,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBut a resultant that arises from them.

Is that clear? The whole secret is right there, and what
we call the music of verse is just that, the play between
meter, which is a completely fixed and abstract paradigm,
and speech rhythms, which vary a great deal depending on
meaning, tone etc. (what Frost called "the sound of sense").
That play sometimes looks like a dance, sometimes like a
wrestling-match, but as in those activities, one partner
needs the other. (Oh, I guess one could dance alone, but
it's not nearly as interesting or exciting as with a
partner.)




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited September 10, 2001).]

[nyctom]

Dear Solan:

Thank you for your response. When you are done with your translations, please post them on here. I would love to see YOUR work AND the poets. Good introduction to Norweigan poetry.

nyctom

[Solan]

Bob,

I agree that the dance with the meter is what makes it interesting. But I feel I am dancing blindfolded some of the time; I don't know if my partner follows me or not.

The difference between stress and accent, as I use the terms (and others as well) is that accent has to do only with the meter, and it is determined <u>almost</u> entirely by its position in the line.

It is this <u>almost</u> that I am trying to grasp. In your notation, an inverted iamb is Os. I don't know if there's such a thing as an inverted trochee, or sO.

What I wonder about is what makes the difference between an inverted iamb and a trochee. If there is no difference except in the abstact - in the metrical structure - then a trochee and and inverted iamb would be the same. I could end an IP line on a trochee and just call it inverted iamb, appealing to the overlaying meter. Yet, that is precisely what cannot be done, if I understand you right.

Knowing when a heavy syllable followed by a light syllable is an inverted iamb is a matter of skill. And skill can, IMHO, be taught and learned.

So I wonder about that residual difference outside of position in the line which determines something as inverted iamb rather than trochee.

I asked a linguist at the company where I worked, and he explained accents as a change in tone rather than stress. Often, the tone and the stress vary together, but sometimes they part ways. An accent would then be if you went down in tone. I'll try to illustrate, with the line from your poem:

And some then dance off in the late sunlight,

Here, we go down in tone on the light. Let me rewrite this to

Do some, then, dance off in the late sunlight?

Here, we go up in tone on the light. I would gather that in this case, sunlight would be counted as a trochee rather than as an inverted iamb. But it is a guess. Am I right?

Given this, is the lowering of the tone on syllable 2 the general criterion for when a foot is an inverted iamb rather than a trochee in an iambic meter?


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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Solan]

Tom, I'll be translating from English to Norwegian. I'll none the less post my translations on Alan's board, with original, translation, scansion, literal re-translation and possibly a sound file of me reading it.

The poems I am going to translate are ones at http://www.pair.com/solan/scotty/joy...tersVoice.html

My own sorry attempts at poetry are to be found at http://www.pair.com/solan/scotty/joy/joy.html - some of it has been through a critique process here.

---

Svein Olav

.. another life

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited September 11, 2001).]

[Carol Taylor]

Solan, there is no difference between an inverted iamb and a trochee except the name, or an inverted trochee and an iamb. They are opposite sides of the same coin. While a trochee is very common at the beginning of an iambic line and may occur elsewhere in the iambic line, it doesn't work so very well at the end. What you'd use instead is an iamb with a hyper syllable or feminine ending.

Carol

[robert mezey]

Carol, I'm sorry to disagree, but you are quite wrong
on both counts. An inverted iamb is not a trochee;
if it were, wouldn't it be dumb to invent another name for
it? The point of calling it that is to distinguish it
from a trochee, because it isn't the same thing. I have
already given several examples, but I'll repeat one:

Like storm clouds in a troubled sky

Because of the contour of storm clouds, the
word clouds is not accented; the preposition
in is. To read the second foot as a trochee is
to destroy the beautiful movement of the line, a wholly
iambic line. There are many other examples, some even
more dramatic, but I was not merely inventing another
quite useless term.
Also, a trochee in the last foot of an iambic line is
indeed very rare (or used to be), but not on that account necessarily to be avoided. It is found in a good many
poems and sometimes to thrilling effect. (It has nothing
to do with a feminine ending.) Here, for instance, are a few lines from Stevens' great poem "Sunday Morning"---
the trochee is in the last foot of the second of these
three lines (it is generally called a scazon):

Grievings in loneliness, and unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights...

Surely you wouldn't lose that lovely scazon by adding
a syllable (e.g. "and gusty") and making it nothing more
than a garden variety feminine ending?

[Caleb Murdock]

Like storm clouds in a troubled sky

That's a very interesting line, because it can be pronounced in three ways, two of which are very similar:

x X / x X / x X / x X

x X / X x / x X / x X

x X X / x x X / x X

How it would be pronounced depends on the line leading up to it and the overall meter of the poem. (The 3rd of those three scansions would be different from the 2nd in that there would be more of a pause between the first and second foot, as I read it.)

So what you're saying, Robert, is that "clouds in" is the inverted iamb, because it really wants to be a trochee, right?

I find that line particularly interesting because it reminds me of the kind of syllabic poetry I write myself, and which I've noticed that I tend to speak in clusters. I might say that line more like this:

x X X / x x / X x X

Of course, that's not any kind of reasonable scansion, but that's how I often read poetry, in clumps of rhythmic sounds.