Verse metricality is intrinsically unstable: I’ll try to defend this assertion. (Readers may also read this – correctly – as yet another assault on our inherited New Critical values: what I call ‘introjection’ and ‘projection’ are, respectively, aspects of intentional and affective forces entirely necessary to the existence of poetry as aesthetic event.) The phenomenon of verse metricality arises through a variable combination of three things. These are introjection, the poet’s engineered coincidence of speech-rhythm and metrical template; projection, the reader’s determination to hear such a coincidence, whether it exists or not; and the metricality proposed by the resting state prosody of the line itself.
The scansion of a poem’s RSP may reveal a metricality either stronger or weaker than that which the poet believes imprinted there, or the individual reader thinks they have heard. This metricality should not be confused with the poet’s intentions; what poets intend is often not well communicated, and their metre is no different. Poets are fallible, and – as readers of their own lines – just as capable of erroneous projection as readers are, which affects the reliability of their calculations and claims. Similarly, readers are capable of remarkable acts of ‘willed metricality’, where subtle and unconscious shifts of emphasis can result in the perfect lining-up of speech rhythm and metre in a way that appears wholly deliberate on the poet’s part, but is often nothing of the sort. (This is the bane of most prosodic theories; indeed theorists are perhaps the readers least exempt from this bad habit.) These three readings are broadly equivalent, if you like, to the intentional force, the affective force and the disinterested close reading of the text. The refusal to acknowledge or be aware of the extent of one’s introjection and/or projection has often led to the erroneous assumption that x or y passage is intrinsically metrical. However, an unread text can no more incarnate its own metricality than possess its own meaning. The RSP may suggest the presence of a metrical template, but only the reader confirms it.
Convergence represents the extent to which the introjection and projection of a metre successfully converge on the RSP of the line. A verse with high convergence will be found overwhelmingly and unequivocally metrical, and it may take only one or two lines to confirm this; verses – especially in light metres – with lower convergence will be unstable, and even after several lines will remain open to different metrical interpretations. (See the later analysis of Auden’s ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’.) Strictly speaking, no one line can confirm the presence of a metrical template, only several lines which are felt to be organised by it. (However, some frames – common metre and i.p., for example – are so strong and culturally ingrained that the reader can often project the metre with near-certainty from a single instantiation.)
Sometimes introjection is very weak. The poet may deliberately be writing only loosely to their metrical template; alternatively, they may be in the grip of only a half-realised, partly unconscious or naive one. This is remarkably common. Not only doggerelists, but many decent contemporary poets untrained in metre will stumble into a loose common or ballad template, entirely unconscious of having done so; or they will write a few approximations of 4-strong, vaguely aware that they are ‘having a bash’ at metred lines – but with no ability to repeat the trick consistently, or accurately scan the lines they already have. (Significantly, iambic pentameter is never written ‘naively’; I’ll return to this later.) Often ‘projection’ is weak, and if the reader has no ear for metre, the poet’s introjection must do the job alone – as it often does in metrically naive theatrical readings of Shakespeare, where the metre is still communicated to the listener, even if the actor neither feels it nor performs it.