So far, we've established that poetry is the speech we preserve verbatim and that it is currently found almost exclusively in song lyrics. To fit the music, poetry is in set lengths called "meters", alongside other lines that take about the same amount of time to bring forth. In a sense, all meter is quantitative.
Today, we're going to see how these meters work to create rhythm, especially in spoken verse.
"Why the sudden focus on spoken poetry?"
Because if it works in speech it will do so even more mellifluously in song. Determining how we build cadence is called "scansion". Knowing that meter involves counting something--alliterations, stressed syllables, patterns, tempos--let's begin with a historical perspective: In 1066, the French counted syllables, perhaps because they didn't stress them as strongly as the English, who counted only accented syllables. The result of the invasion was a mashup or compromise, with subsequent English verse being "accentual-syllabic". Each line would have the same number of syllables with stressed ("DUM") ones interspersed with unstressed ("de") ones. These form patterns called "feet" because each stress corresponded to a dance step. These are the most common feet:
de-DUM = iamb <- Iambic pentameter:
Gray wolves | surround | the eg|ret. Fox|es slink | away
DUM-de = trochee -> Trochaic pentameter:
Time was | gravit|y as | shooting | stars des|cended.
de-de-DUM = anapest -> Anapestic hexameter:
Brock would say | no more val|orous war|rior exists. | Sure as ap|ple trees bud
de-DUM-de = amphibrach -> Amphibrachic tetrameter:
the pleas of | a peacemak|er can't be | imparted
while even | your traplines | have got to | be guarded.
de-de-DUM = dactyl -> Dactyllic pentameter:
Yours was the | song of that | egret, your | life like a | burning poem.
This is one of the myriad reasons why we need to hear poetry. Our ear will learn to detect these cadences--typically after only seven syllables. All of this is, and so much more, lost on the page.
"Wait, hold on. I heard a lot more accented syllables than you highlighted. Are you cheating here?"
Good catch! Yes, I "omitted" a number of stresses here to concentrate on the base rhythm. Here I've added them back in for reference:
Gray wolves | surround | the eg|ret. Fox|es slink | away
Brock would say | no more val|orous war|rior exists. | Sure as ap|ple trees bud
the pleas of | a peacemak|er can't be | imparted
while even | your traplines | have got to | be guarded.
Yours was the | song of that | egret, your | life like a | burning poem.
This shows that we can add accents to give the cadence some variety, some flair. Toward the same end, we can delete all of the stresses in a foot. For example, the second last foot in these two lines are "pyrhhics" (i.e. "de-de"), having no beat, when reciting the verse without music:
The rain | in Spain | falls main|ly on | the plain.
But I | have prom|ises | to keep,
Here is a tribach (de-de-de) followed by a molossus (DUM-DUM-DUM):
out on the | wine dark sea
These deviations are called "substitutions". Do not confuse these with their evil twin, the dreaded "inversion", where the poet switches the order of the cadence. Note the switch from de-DUMs to DUM-de in the second line here:
Pale fac|es, dough|like breasts <- Spondee (DUM-DUM), iamb, iamb.
help me | forget. <- trochee, iamb.
Lines often "find" their rhythm as they go along, such that patterns at the end of the line are more reliable than those at the beginning. Thus, don't sweat the first foot. In fact, we'll often see unaccented syllables--second class citizens, essentially--dropped entirely from the beginning of line. For example, is this line trochaic, missing a syllable from the end ("[x]" marks the spot):
Tyger, | tyger, | burning | bright [x]
...or is it iambic, missing a syllable from the beginning :
[x] Tyg|er, tyg|er, burn|ing bright
Trusting the ends of lines more than their murky beginnings, we already know the answer: iambic tetrameter. We have already discerned that, if scanning a line to detect its cadence or meter, we should start at its end and work backwards.
There is another critical aspect in this particular poem. Were we to have seen Blake's entire piece there wouldn't have been a mystery in the first place:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame | thy fear|ful sym|metry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist | the sin|ews of | thy heart?
And when | thy heart | began | to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And wat|er'd heav|en with | their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he | who made | the Lamb | make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame | thy fear|ful sym|metry?
We note that, while 18 lines are ambiguous, trochee or iambic, there are six lines of perfect iambic tetrameter and zero lines of complete trochee. Ergo, when someone hands you one line and asks you to scan it, the proper response is not iambic, trochaic, dactylic, amphibrachic, or anapestic; it's: "Let me see the whole poem!"
This is line 1 from the first canto of Lord Byron's "Bride of Abydos" (1813):
Know ye the land where cypress and myrtle
Can you tell me what meter this is in?
"Where's the rest of it?"
Perfect answer! When Edgar Allen Poe read this he said the poem could not be scanned, but if he had continued reading he'd have seen many verses of perfect anapestic tetrameter and no lines of anything else:
Where the light | wings of Zeph|yr, oppress'd | with perfume,
Where the cit|ron and ol|ive are fair|est of fruit,
Where the tints | of the earth, | and the hues | of the sky,
And the pur|ple of Oc|ean is deep|est in dye;
'Tis the clime | of the East; | 'tis the land | of the Sun —
Where the vir|gins are soft | as the ros|es they twine,
Can he smile | on such deeds | as his child|ren have done?
Are the hearts | which they bear, | and the tales | which they tell.
He'd have been able to see that this line is simply missing two unstressed syllables in its initial foot:
[x] [x] Know | ye the land | [x] where cyp|ress and myrt|le
Where the rage | of the vul|ture, the love | of the turt|le,
"Wait, what about the "-le" at the end of the lines, messing everything up?"
These have a weird "schwa" sound. We see it most often in "-er" and "l" sound endings (e.g. "pencil"). Consider these semi-syllables: counted if needed, ignored if inconvenient. In the same poem we see the "-er" overlooked in "flowers" while the very same "er" is counted in "ever" twice, and "never" in a subsequent line:
Where the flowers | ever blos|som, the beams | ever shine;
And the voice| of the night|ingale nev|er is mute;
"I see what you mean when you called unstressed syllables 'second class citizens'."
They are like Rodney Dangerfield. They get no respect. In fact, the might even be replaced by commas. Check out the second of these two lines from Shakespeare:
The best | of men | have sung | your at|tributes,
Breasts, | lips, | eyes, | and gold|en hair!
That's iambic pentameter with only 7 syllables! Imagine the shame: three perfectly good syllables, the basis of our language and civilization, replaced by lowly commas!
There are fancy names for most of these irregularities. Syllables missing at the beginning of lines? Acephaly, meaning "headless". Missing syllables at the end of lines? Catalexis. Extra syllables--full ones, not just the semi-syllables we mentioned--at the end are hypercatalexis. Extra syllables at the beginning of lines? Anacrusis, as we see with T.S. Eliot's heterometrical "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
Let | us go | then, you | and I,
(iambic trimeter with anacrusis)
When | the ev'n|ing is | spread out | against | the sky
(iambic pentameter with anacrusis)
Like | a pat|ient eth|erised | upon | a tab|le;
(iambic pentameter with anacrusis)
Let | us go, |through cert|ain half-|desert|ed streets,
While we often use the terms "line" and "meter" interchangeably, "meter" refers to the syllables that form feet (iambs, in this case). The syllables elsewhere (e.g. the first word in all four of the lines above) and the semi-syllable at the end [of "table"] are part of the line but not the meter.
We now know the key to scansion: scan poems backwards. Not just one line in isolation but the whole poem. Practice this with your favorite poems and songs [bearing in mind that they could be accentual instead, in which case just count the stresses in each line].
200 years ago every grade six graduate (which Poe was not) understood this. Today? Not so much.
Next: Scan Poems Backward
The Outerview Series
The Outerview Series: Part I - What is poetry? The Outerview Series: Part II - Where is poetry?
The Outerview Series: Part III - What is Rhythm?
The Outerview Series: Part IV - Scan Poems Backward
The Outerview Series: Part V - Rhyming is Fun
The Outerview Series: Part VI - Super Sonics
The Outerview Series: Part VII - Production
The Outerview Series: Part VIII - Manufacturing an Audience
The Outerview Series: Part IX - Crafting Drafts
The Outerview Series: Part X - Production
The Outerview Series: Part XI - Attracting and Impressing
The Outerview Series: Part XII - The Meaning of Meaning
