THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY: TYPES OF VERSE AND RHYTHM

From the very first poems, oral accounts of adventures we date from the eighth century, an individual line of poetry has been the basic unit we recognize as "poetic." Up until the time of Walt Whitman's revolutionary poetic experiments, we were even able to say that a poem ''looked like a poem," by which we meant that the lines stood apart in a certain recognizable manner and did net run together like a prose paragraph.

Poetry will make a great deal more sense to you if you read it in a normal speaking tone, letting the accents fall where they seem natural. Pay attention to the punctuation the author uses, ending a line only when the punctuation indicates it is correct to do so. The punctuation marks in poetry tell us how the author wishes the work to be read. A period or an exclamation mark can be thought of as a complete stop, while a comma, in contrast, would be a half-stop. So there is no need to stop at the end of a line unless there is some punctuation mark to indicate that we must.

Farewell, too little, and too lately known,

Whom I begin to think and call my own;

For sure our souls were near allied, and thine

Cast in the same poetic mold with mine.

These first four lines of John Dryden's "Tothe Memory of Mr. Oldham" show several uses of the pause. When a line of verse has a pause at its end, as in "known," "own," and "mine," the line is called end-stopped. But when there are pauses indicated within the line, as after "little" and "allied," the term employed is caesura. This simply means a " little pause." When there is no pause at the end of the line, as in line 3 of this example, one line flows into the next and the line is called a run-on line. These effects are common in modern verse especially.

The act of breaking down poetic lines into their basic units to discover their rhythm and rhyme is called scansion. Rhythm is the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables in poetry. Rhyme is the repetition of sounds at the ends of words ending lines in poetry.

Scanning a poem( using symbolsto mark accented and unaccented syllable and thus to identify its metrical pattern) is not an attempt to discover its meaning; it is breaking down the verse into its textual

parts. We use this system to indicate accents: An ictus(') over a syllable means that it is to be accented.

A breve (") over a syllable means that it is not accented.

When we scan, we will discover that there are four basic types of verse:

1) accentual,

2) syllabic,

3) accentual-syllabic, and

4) free verse.

Accentualverse. The earliest recorded poetry, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon verse mentioned above, was measured neither by rhyme nor by meter. From its inception in other languages, English has been an accented language. This means that certain words receive more spoken emphasis than others, that we stress certain parts or sounds within the word. The Anglo-Saxon poets used this system of accents as the basis of their poetry. The accents determined the length of the line of poetry.

Accentual verse comes up again in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, who lived from
1844 to 1889. reintroduced accented verse to the modern ear with a variation called sprung rhythm,in
which strongly accented syllables are pushed up against unaccented ones to produce a new way of
scanning verse. Hopkins hoped to shake up the reader to his meaning by forcing us to look at his words
in a new light. .

Syllabic verse . Syllabic verse, has a different basis from accented verse. The French language, unlike English, makes little use of strongly accented words. One rarely counts out the number of accents in a line of French verse. Instead, the French developed a way of counting the number of syllables to establish the length of their lines of verse. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he introduced French poets experienced in syllabic rhythms and rhyme. The next few centuries, until the 1400's, saw the change from Old English (Beowulf, as we saw before, for example) to Middle English. Old English and French melded together, the language of the lower classes and the language of the court meshed to form Middle English, a midpoint between Old English and modern English. For a short period, the English court spoke French and listened to French poets composing verse within the strict confines of a syllabic line. Although this was a brief period and syllabic verse was altered quickly into accentual-syllabic poetry, later poets occasionally utilized lines determined solely by the number of syllables. In these verses, the number of accents could vary as long as the number of syllables remained constant. Modern poets continue to experiment with the syllabic idea, for it enables the author to escape the boundaries of a more regulated and often jingling or monotonous rhythmic cadence. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who lived from 1914 to 1953, constructed such a syllabic verse:

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

Andthe lovers lie abed...

Each line has seven syllables, even though the accents change in each line, both in their number

and position.

Accentual-syllabic verse. Accentual-syllabic verse is the kind of poetry that most people would identify immediately as "poetry." It often rhymes, has a definite beat-—called meter—and usually moves with a predictable regularity. From the fourteenth century to the present, accentual-syllabic verse has been the norm, following rules strictly enforced. In some instances, the skill of the poet has been equated with ability to follow these rules and manipulate words within their confines.

Accentual-syllabic verse came into being when the counting of accents and the counting of syllables in a line occurred at the same time. Although many modern poets feel that this type of verse sounds forced and artificial, for centuries few were bothered by this at all Rather, they felt it lovely and truly "poetic"—the measure of the craftsman's skill in forging words and ideas into a preconceived pattern. Poetry was closely linked to music and understood to be little more than the construction of a series of sounds, a work of skill and art. Conventional verse gains much of its success and beauty from the fact that English is a language in which word order is highly significant. When the poet is able to fashion language into a verse that moves with ease_: a tension and power are created. It is like a formal garden, trained under the craftsman's eye for symmetry and order.

The foot of English poetry was created by counting out the number of accents and syllables together. Because English has an accented base, dividing a line into stressed and unstressed syllables creates certain recurring patterns. These measures also fit the patterns of classical Greek and Latin. In counting stresses, the two classical languages were also counting duration—the length of time it took to express an idea. In Greek and Latin, syllables were separated according to length, not stress. Long and short syllables were equated to what English terms stressed or unstressed, the quality of a syllable. Therefore, counting in accentual-syllabic verse came to be measured in feet. There are four basic types of metrical feet in English verse:

IAMB _/

TROCHEE /_

ANAPEST _ _ /

DACTYL / _ _

A foot is composed of either two or three syllables, such that the nature of the foot is determined by the placement of the accent. Every English sentence, no matter whether classified poetry or prose, is made up of these units. Their placement determines the rhythm of a line. Even more significantly, they establish the meter of a line, the regularity of a verse in an accentual-syllabic piece. One particular root determines the poem's rhythm.

A slash / is used as a divider to separate feet in a line.

Poetic lines are usually not composed of only one type of metrical foot, for this would sound dull. Variations are constructed to give the line more exciting movement. There are two rare feet,

SPONDEE / /

PYRRHIC _ _

that are occasionally mixed in with the more usual ones. An iambic line, thus, may contain other feet, such as trochees, just as a trochaic line could contain iambs for variety. In lines with mixed feet, whichever foot is most prevalent determines the type and name of the line. Thus, a line with six iambs and four trochees would be called an iambic line.

The following chart explains the number of feet and the length of the line:

Number of Feet Line Length

one monometer

two dimeter

three trimeter

five pentameter

four tetrameter.

six hexameter

seven heptameter

While it is possible to have a line containing more man seven feet, in actual practice, the heptameter line—a line from 14 to 21 syllables long—approaches the outer limits of most poems.

The most common foot in English is the iamb, perhaps because the use of articles— the, a, an—
establishes that an unstressed syllable will occur before a stressed one. Children's verse, such as nursery
rhymes, often has trochees dominating. This is also because children don't use as many articles as adults
do in speech. The most common line in English poetry is the iambic pentameter line, in part because
a line greater than ten syllables in length requires an intake of breath, which translates as requiring
another line. . .

Even though the measurement of an accentual-syllabic line can be very precise, as illustrated earlier, there is a way for the poet to shorten or lengthen the line, even within strict metrical lines. This is called elision. For example, two vowels placed side by side may become a single syllable. We consider the letters h, w, and v as vowels, as well as the more easily recognized a, e, i, o, and u. These four lines by Raleigh illustrate the process:

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields

To wayward winter reckoning yields;

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Infancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Accents may also be used to give the poet greater leeway at the end of a line of verse. A line is said to have a feminine ending when it ends on an unaccented syllable, a masculine ending when it ends on an accented one: These lines from Milton's epic Paradise Lost have a feminine ending:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent

The fruitless hours, but neither self condemning

The second line has an extra syllable because of its feminine ending, but as an unaccented additional syllable at the close of a line, the "ing" may be discounted. Thus a line that counts out to 11 syllables may, at the poet's decision, become technically a 10-syllable line thanks to the feminine ending.

Free verse. Free verse has no-fixed metrical pattern: It is free from counting, measuring, meter. Free verse replaces the expected pattern of a particular foot with a looser movement called rhythm. Free verse shares a common basis with accentual and syllabic verse, but it must be devoid of all predominant measurements to be considered truly "free." The placement of accents must follow no pattern; the syllables must not be able to be measured with any regularity. In the same manner, rhyme, if used at all, is irregular. A poem may be considered free verse if you can find no accentual or syllabic pattern. It may, of course, have other regularities. This type of verse can be found in the work of E.E. Cummings and Walt Whitman, among others.

There are some modern poets who consider free verse to be anything in which no attempt has been made to make the lines of verse fit a definite pattern, even though they do, in fact, nave patterns at intervals. "Often a page, of poetry will look like free verse, but upon closer examination, will reveal itself to be syllabic or accentual. The poems of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas are of this type.

Some poets have carried matters to such a length that they have created poems where the shape, not the words, is what matters. These are called concrete poems. Sometimes just repeating one letter of the alphabet, they leave it to the reader's eye to create a pleasing or important shape and meaning.

We have looked thus far at rhythm and accents, syllables and lines, but it's obvious that these can be grouped in several ways. Often these lines arrange themselves into blocks of specific numbers—two lines, four lines, six lines, etc. Usually there is a space, followed by an equal grouping of lines. A grouping of lines is called a stanza, roughly the same as a paragraph in a prose work. Stanzas may be classified as follows:

Couplets 2-line stanzas

Quatrains 4-line stanzas

Sextets 6-line stanzas

Octets 8-line stanzas

(From: Laurie Rozakis. ЛР English Literature and Composition, p.] 74-179)

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1534