A Note to Teachers of English
B. Traditional Language of Verse
So what to do now? Students may be mildly curious about French or Old English verse, but their main literary energies are more likely to be spent elsewhere. What about English verse?
First and foremost, we should stop discussing and teaching English versification in the traditional language of feet and foot types found in handbooks. Students do not understand how to distinguish trochaic from iambic lines even in cases where the distinction is meaningful; they don’t know what a foot means or why people think it is important; they don’t know Greek terminology; and when they write verse, they don’t think in these terms. In consequence, Iambic Pentameter really, really needs to go. When I heard the best student in one of my classes use this term as a synonym for verse itself (“the iambic pentameter in this line consists of five syllables”), whatever tolerance I may have once had for it vanished.
Second, we should concede that English verse is not uniform; different poems and verse types are based on different and sometimes conflicting principles. Even in the limited number of cases discussed here, different language and different notation has to be employed to describe different verse types. We cannot expect language that works to describe one system (say, Greek epic) to describe another, nor should we believe those who claim it does.
Finally, we need to accept the fact that much is simply unknown. We can articulate the rules for a classical Latin dactylic hexameter or a French Alexandrine; but this does not mean that we should expect to do the same for a line in Shakespeare. And this of course has nothing to do with the relative virtues of Latin, French, and English verse, any more than our confusion about the afterlife has anything to do with how grand it might well be.
B. Traditional Language of Verse
Before teaching or learning anything, it is well to consider why we are doing that. What are the reasons to teach or to learn such things as trochees, iambs, dactyls, and anapests? This terminology is extremely useful for teaching classical metrics; it has been used since the earliest treatises on Greek and Latin verse were written, and it has a continuous history of use through the twentieth century. As a consequence of their classical education, many English poets were exposed to this language and may have internalized it the same way they internalized the principles of classical verse from the beatings they received when they did not. There are thus times when knowledge of this language is useful: if one is interested in the formal origins of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, it is a good idea to know what trochaic tetrameter is. Furthermore, for better or worse, standard handbooks on verse in English use this language. To understand, say, a midcentury handbook on poetics, a cursory knowledge of classical terminology is essential. But the cases in the history of English poetry where knowledge of this traditional language is necessary or even helpful are very few. Unless a poem at hand is written specifically in imitation of classical metrical forms, or unless one’s interest is in the history of descriptions of versification rather than in versification itself, there is little reason to invoke this language or to ask anyone to learn it.
Poems are constructed in visual patterns that distinguish them from prose, and any paragraph typeset in lines (or in any other shape) is different from the same paragraph set continuously. But metrically, a poem is no less a poem if it reads like prose when typed as prose. The most familiar poem pattern involves repeating lines and is called “verse”—the word itself is part of a plowing metaphor: when you reach the end of a furrow, you have to reverse the plow to start the adjacent one, and what you end up with is a field of plowed rows. The lines of most Western poems are actually or potentially repeatable, and poets mark that repeatability in different ways: by terminal rhyme, line or syllable length, the number of accents, or even the number of r’s if they want. Or, they can simply hit the return button.
The easiest and least controversial way to analyze the form of poems written in verse and to discover the basis of this repeatability is simply to count the syllables in each line. It will not take long to discover that most English poems use lines of six, eight, or ten syllables. The same types of variation are used in English that we have seen in other languages. Feminine endings, unaccented endings, and post-tonic endings in an English line generally result in an extra syllable. Sometimes two unaccented syllables count as one. If a poem is written according to different principles (say, a late Middle English alliterative poem), that will quickly reveal itself.
C.1. Examples
English poets keep track of the number of syllables in different ways. Some poems are based heavily on accent, as in the English ballads of the eighteenth century and in this version by Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately Pleasure Dome decree,
Through caverns measureless to Man
Down to the soundless Sea.
(“Kubla Khan”)
I count eight, eight, eight, and six syllables in these lines. The close of each line is marked by a terminal accent and a rhyme. The first three lines are perhaps organized by accent: four of them. The last has three. If one wants now to speak of “iambic” rhythm in the first three lines, that will probably not do any particular harm, but it probably will do little good.
In poems where the metrical basis is uncertain, it is often useful to begin with syllable count. The following stanza is by Wallace Stevens:
Call the roller of big cigars
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear . . .
(“The Emperor of Ice Cream”)
Lines of eight, eight, eight, and nine syllables. Each line ends with a terminal stress that rhymes. Each line has four accents. In the second and last stanza of the poem the number of syllables varies between eight and ten. There remain four accents.
Other poems are constructed around a variable caesura following a regularly accented syllable:
Not with more Glories, in th’ Ethereal Plain,
The Sun first rises o’er the purpled Main,
Than issuing forth, the Rival of his Beams
Launch’d on the Bosom of the Silver Thames.
(Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”)
The above lines regularly show accent on syllable 4 and a caesura after syllable 4 or unaccented syllable 5.
Some poets may keep track simply by counting:
Of man’s first disobedience and the Fruit
of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the world and all our wo. . . .
(Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1)
Ten syllables, with an accent on syllable 10; no caesura, no accentual pattern, no rhyme. If this were written as prose, it would not be possible to reconstruct the meter. If you follow a handbook, this will be called blank verse.
Other poets do not keep track at all:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
(Allen Ginsberg, Howl)
I have no idea how many syllables each line has because I lose count. A new line is one that is written or typeset as a new line.
There is clearly a continuum here. Some poets use a very regular and pronounced line structure, defined by syllable count and reinforced by accent. Others use a loose system of syllable count. Others simply start a new line, perhaps (radically!) one that begins with a lowercase letter.
C.1.1. Shakespeare
When we come to Shakespeare, and we must, using this plain language to describe what is before us should not prove difficult:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
(Sonnet 138)
Ten-syllable lines (possibly aided by alternative pronunciation of “unlearnèd” and “untutor’d”), terminal accent supported by rhyme. No caesura, no apparent required accent.
Shakespeare’s plays have a different metrical basis. The main evidence that Shakespeare writes in regular accented (iambic) decasyllables is from his parodies of them, as in this rhymed version from the play-within-a-play in Hamlet:
Full thirtie times hath Phoebus Cart gon round,
Neptunes salt Wash, and Tullus Orbed ground:
And thirtie dozen Moones with borrowed sheene,
About the World have times twelve thirties beene . . .
(act 3, sc. 2)
One could also cite this unrhymed passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost:
Thus poure the stars down plagues for periury.
Can any face of brasse hold longer out?
Heere stand I, Ladie dart thy skill at me,
Bruise me with scorne, confound me with a flout.
(act 5, sc. 2)
In some cases, the notion of iambic decasyllables might prove useful in analyzing particular passages from his plays. In other cases, it will not:
Thou Nature art my Godesse, to thy Law
My services are bound, wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custome, and permit
The curiosity of Nations, to deprive me?
For that I am some twelve, or fourteene Moonshines
Lag of a Brother? Why Bastard? Wherefore base?
(King Lear, act 1, sc. 2)
Our models above are of little help. Is the basic line here ten syllables? or is it eleven? or thirteen? There is an answer to this question: we don’t know. The above text is from the the 1623 First Folio, the version found in most printed editions today. But the two earlier quartos do not agree. They print this same speech as prose. This is only one of many cases in Shakespeare’s plays where equally reliable textual authorities disagree on what constitutes a verse line, or whether there is any verse line at all.
Finally, a word about performance. For English, the simplest, plainest description of any given verse is never a bad idea: line x has ten syllables with an accent on the last one. That description, of course, will not tell you how to read a line aloud, any more than your third-year French course will tell you how to read particular lines of Corneille. But it will put the fewest constraints on reading or performance. The discussion of whether to stress “thy” in line 1 of Edmund’s soliloquy from King Lear quoted above is a matter for actors and the literary critics on whose opinions all actors rely; it is not a matter of concern for those who study metrics and versification. Versification is not as difficult or mysterious as these other fields. A student of versification is concerned only, say, with prosodic value (e.g., Nature is a two syllable word with stress on syllable 1); how that prosodic value is realized in performance is a matter for those who perform it. Overly rich and complex metrical language involving such things as multiple levels of emphasis or stress (primary, secondary, tertiary, relative . . .) should thus be looked at skeptically; it is often no more than a guide to performance, something like the suggested fingerings in a Schirmer piano score.
| I have no doubt that many students will still not “get” meter when it is presented this way. But at least this will be because verse itself is of no interest to them, or because the subject is too simple. They will certainly develop no more respect for literature or interest in it if our language suggests that its simplest formal elements constitute some kind of mystery religion to which they can never hope to become initiates.