Prosody as it Really Is

A paper given at the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota, 1980's

Thank you for being here. There are not many of us, but to tell you the truth, I am surprised that a talk about metrics will turn out anyone at all. In fact, I often think of myself as the last of the scanners, the last of that dying breed who, when confronted by poem, instinctively begins by scanning to see about its meter and who can spend half a hour with a poem without getting around to asking what it's about.  I offer no explanation other than to say I can't help myself.

Students responses to metrical analysis range from puzzled to indifferent or hostile a great many  poets feel that the same way about metrical concerns as Katherine Hepburn character feels about Human nature when she explains to Humphry Bogart that "human nature, Mr. Oldnose, is what we were put on earth to overcome." To hear some poets talking about meter, if  Homer and Virgil and Dante and Milton and Shakespeare and Frost  hadn't been distracted by counting syllables, they might have written something really good.
   
But my own interests stem not from the metrical nature of our greatest poets, nor even from that fact that most poetry in English, historically speaking, is in regular meters. No, I think my interest is quirkier or more mystic than that, and stems from four sources. One is the frustration I have felt in teaching poetry, where I still feel some obligation to at least mention the iamb, and my frustration, not with the students' glazed eyes, but in my own inability to give a clear account of the matter.

A second is my  interest in the metrical issues that arise in my own writing of verse, in which I take great pleasure, but which I distinguish from poetry as I distinguish what I do in an exercise room from what Barishnakov does on a stage. Exercise is good for me, but I don't expect anyone to pay to watch me do it.

 A final source of my addiction is simply the tone of writers on metrics. There are few things more downright fun than listening to the tone of wounded outrage one prosodist uses to discuss the work of another. My favorite metricist, who is, believe it or not, Valdimir Nabokov, to take but one example, says that he has "not yet come across a single work that treated the English iambic--particularly the tetrameter--on a Taxonomical and comparative literature basis, in a way even remotely acceptable to a student of prosody" (3). And in criticizing Herbert Grierson's scansion of a line by Donne ("Both years and days deep midnight is," from a "Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day") Harvey Gross (in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, 1965) throws up his hands in horror and declares that "we wonder if anyone understands the nature of English syllable-stress metric" (6).

Fourth in my list of reasons I care about metrics  is my own thoroughly unsubstantiated and probably unsubstantiable certainty that the central matter of art is not content--whatever that is--but form, whatever that is.  
  
 I will have more--but not much more--to say about that anon, but for now, let me turn to a brief survey of the literature of scansion, all of which I hasten to say, I have not read. At one pole we may put a wonderful observation by Herbert Read. (Certainly as catholic and sensitive reader as one could name) in The True Voice of Feeling (NY; Pantheon: 1953) that "blank verse is virtually free verse" (47), a statement he expands a few pages later where he says that the apparently random fluctuations of a needle connected to the microphone of a person reading poetry aloud are "the only accurate scanning that can be made of English blank verse--perhaps the only accurate scanning of any kind of verse" ( 50). 

From that amiable shrug of the metrical shoulders we pass at the other extreme to books which proceed with utter certainty and invigorating confidence to scan dozens of lines of verse, labeling them with those jaw-jarring names that begin with the iamb and end somewhere on the other side of cloud-cuckoo land with things like the amphribrach and amphimacer as in Clement Wood's good-hearted Poet's Handbook (Cleveland: World Publishing: 1946) or with things like tilted scuds and false pryyhics in Nabokov's tortured but I think brilliant analysis.

In between,  we have god's plenty though decreasingly so as we move into free verse.  Historically, studies of metric abounded in the Renaissance when English poets like Wyatt and Tottel and Surrey and Gascoigne and Barnaby Googe were trying to absorb classical and continental metrical systems into English verse, a story summarized in an elegant little book of John Thompson, called The founding of English Meter. NY: Columbia: 1961). Mr. Thompson does not raise a question I sometimes raise with my students: Could English have passed  directly to free verse instead of sending us into this 400 year interlude which produced Shakespeare and Milton and Keats and Browning and Yeats and Wallace Stevens).

 Ruskin wrote a book on prosody in 1880, at about the same time that Sidney Lanier wrote one in America. Much of 19th century scholarship is enfolded into Saintsbury's multi-volume History of English Prosody, published in 1908, remarkable both for the exhaustive nature of its coverage, but also for the fact that in all its volumes you can hardly find an actual line actually scanned except in the footnotes. 

Between the wars, the name of  T.S. Omund's seems to be the most respected among prosodists. Robert Bridges's seminal study, Milton's Prosody appeared in1921. Karl Shapiro's books are readable and short besides, partly, no doubt, because he was a poet himself.  Among the studies written since the advent of free verse, Paul Fussell Poetric Meter and Poetic Form (NY: Random House: 1965) and Harvey Gross's Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (Ann Arbor: U. of Mich: 1965) are the best known, at least by me.

Though scansion parties are not popular, metrical study is far from dead. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (which often seems to me is not as good as it ought to be, given its name)  is out in a new and more formidible edition. Terry Brogan's 1981 study English Versification 1570-1980 lists the names of  more than 7,680 scholars,  many of them the author of more than one study. That study was published by Johns Hopkins which has become the center for metrical studies. When I searched the on-line version of MLA, which goes back to 1963, I found  4,000 items under the term "prosody," about 25 percent of them in languages other than English. In 1994, there were over 200.

Some method of classifiying such studies is clearly in order. A useful classification of metrical studies is given by Dereck Attridge study The Rhythms of English Poetry (NY: Longman: ____) There we find a useful distinction between accentual and temporal analytic schemes, , that is,  between systems which pay attention only to the "force" of a syllable (presumably its loudness--though even this might be problematic) of a syllable--usually using a binary system--and those that identify whether a syllable takes a longer or shorter time to say, usually using some form of musical notes to convey this information.

Of such temporal studies Nabokov has said, with the charming diffidence so characteristic of prosodists: "I have of course slammed shout without further ado any such works on English prosody in which I glimpsed a crop of musical notes or those ridiculous examples of strophic arrangements which have nothing to do with English poetry" (4). The handbooks tell us with great confidence that English poetry is quantitative, not qualitative like the meters of Homer and Virgil which counted long and short syllables, not beats and the absence of beats.  Yet we know that it cannot be so easy and that lines like Eliot's " Stone bronze, stone steel, stone oakleaves, horses heels,"  will scan quantitatively as  nine consecutive beats which it would be nonsense to label, but which yield very nicely to a temporal analysis I show on the overhead.
   
Still, we must, in our finite time, turn aside from temporal studies and concentrate on those which study syllabic emphasis.  Even here we must use crude tools to hack through the thicket, and I have mine which is the distinction between metrical and rhythmical emphasis. That is, in any line of verse written before the modernist revolution, one can identify a two patterns of emphasis, one given by the meter and one given by the "sense" that is, the natural reading rhythm.

When I encounter a discussion which does not acknowledge this simple fact, I exercise the prerogative of prosodists: I without further ado, I slam the book shut and move on.  Even our best handbooks often fail us here. Hibbard and Holman draw back from any firm commitment to whether this distinction is useful and if so, which should be called stress and which accent.   I will at least  be consistent and refer to metrical stress and rhythmical accent, or when I can get away with it without confusing you,  to stress and accent
   
I will not say at the risk of becoming tedious, but with the certainty of becoming tedious, let me explain by offering a line of verse:
  
 If music be the food of love, play on.

I assume most of us would scan it as I have it marked on the handout, as iambic tetramter with emphasis on the MUS, BE, FOOD, ON.  But of  course no one would read the line that way. We would probably read it with emphasis on the syllables MUS, FOOD, and PLAY.  If MUSic be the food of LOVE, play ON. (I would be willing to be accept another rhythmical accent on LOVE. The point is not worth quibbling about. ) In Shakespeare's line, we could "get to" the two schemes by writing out the line twice, capitalizing the different set of syllables each time:

    if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE, play ON (metrical stress)
    if MUSic be the food of love, PLAY ON (rhythmical accent)
   
But writing out every line twice is awkward. Let us look at simpler schemes which focus on this distinction between stress and accent.  Only two prosodists I know of, out of 7,680 (though, to be honest, I have not read them all) have confronted this problem directly.  One is George Stewart in widely cited little book called The Technique of English Verse (NY; Kennikat: 1930). The other is Nabokov in Notes on Prosody (Princeton: Bollingen: 1964).

Both of these men observe that once you acknowledge two sets of emphases, then one of four things must be the case for any given syllable: 1) It may take both metrical stress and rhythmical accent, or 2) it may take neither, or 3) it make take metrical stress but not rhythmical accent, or 4) it may take rhythmical accent and not metrical stress.  Stewart and Nabokov have different ways of indicating each of these four possibilities, which I summarize on the handout.

Of the three, I submit that mine is the simplest and the most teachable. It calls for us simply to mark the metrical stress in the conventional way with an acute accent mark (which Nabokov calls an ictus) and  a breve above he line, and then to mark the syllables which receive rhythmical accent below the line. When I can write the line out with plenty of space, I like to use the ictus under the line as well. When I scan lines on the printed page, I use the underline.  Syllables on which the meter and rhythmical stress are "in conflict" will then immediately jump out and can be marked with an arrow pointing up under the syllable.

 If the meter "wins," I label the arrow with an M; if the Rhythm "wins," I label the arrow with an R. On the handout I have scanned Shakespeare's line using first Stewart's system, then Nabokov's,  then my own. (handout) My scheme calls attention to the  doubled accent at the end of the line: play on, which other schemes might try to call a spondee, but which would fail to acknowledge that the two emphases come from different sources. My scheme also accounts for the way the line rushes over the stressed but unaccented "be" in the fourth syllable in its hurry to get to the fanfare of the last two syllables.
   
But Shakespeare is too easy, you say. Well, yes. So let us look at line of Marvell:
   
"Vaster than empires and more slow," which Nabokov scans with a trochaic "substitution" in the first foot as indicated on the handout.   Well,  yes, but  that scansion overlooks the other more interesting feature of the line, which is the doubled emphasis at the end: More slow. If we do acknowledge that, we shall have to say that a spondee has been "substituted" for the last iamb as well as the trochaic for the first one. Frankly the whole business of substitutions seems to me simply a morass. So far as I can tell--and I stand open to correction--most schemes which talk about substitutions scan lines with some vague mixture of attention to the accent and stress and then try to impose some kind of ad hoc labeling on it, moving the foot divisions around to get feet they can pronounce the names of.  When I see these scansions, I want to ask with Mr. Gross or at least to ask if anyone understands the nature of English syllablic stress metric.
   
My scansion is indicated on the handout. I get it by forcing (violently I admit) the line to fit the metrical stress, with emphases on ER, EM, AND, and SLOW.  The rhythmical stresses are on VAS, EM, MORE, and SLOW: VASTer than EMpires and MORE SLOW.  Conflicts abound, on the first, second, sixth and seventh syllables, with the rhythmical accent and the metrical stress each winning twice.  The first set of conflicts, it could be argued, calls attention to the Vastness of the empires in question, and in the second set, the stressed but unaccented AND creates a rush which "sets up" the final doubled emphasis with its assonant "O" sounds in "more slow." But do not get me started on assonance.
   
We have been working with tetrameter. How does it work on pentameter? Well, not bad. I have scanned many, many lines from Shakespeare's sonnets, and while I have not examined  the considerable literature on Shakespeare's metrics, I think I can account for much of what is interesting in those poems. Take for example, the first line of sonnet #118. That line reads:
  
 Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Forcing the metrical stresses to the surface produces something I grant is bizarre:
   
let ME not TO the MARriage OF true MINDS.

While the rhythmical accents seem to fall thus:
   
let me NOT to the MARriage of TRUE MINDS--five stresses, four accents with irregularities at syllables number 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9, the large number of irregularities pointing up the particular ironies in the line: a mind sensing impediments all over the place while saying that it only wants harmony.
  
 Frost, as you might expect, yields well to this kind of treatment. The first line of Mending Wall goes: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," which scans as I have it on the handout, with irregularities at syllables 1, 2 and 4. The substitution of a trochaic in the first foot is something any scheme would have picked up, but this scheme also picks up the conflict between  meter and rhythm in syllable #4--it takes stress, that's clear. Does it take accent as well? The very fact that we ask the question calls attention to the word reversal, and thus to the formality of the poem's opening line, in a poem about formality.    
    
But you are all thinking of lines this scheme won't work on. April is the cruelest month. Well, I admit I can't  do much with  anything that is not really accentual-syllabic, Beowulf for example or Eliot's Four Quartets or Coleridge's Christabel, which are in some verson of accentual or  strong-stress verse, not accentual syllabic.  Pentameter lines that don't have ten syllables for example are troubling.  Shakespeare's sonnet 144 has a line "The worser spirit a woman colored ill." Unless you elide IT  A between the third and fourth words, that line has 11 syllables. I deal with it by adding a third kind of "irregular" symbol--X or extra syllable, but I don't know how far I can push that.   I have not done any work with Hopkins, or with Dickinson. Stay tuned. Nor have I done anything with the so-called triple rhythms: dactylic and anapestic. So many lines; so little time.
   
About free verse, I would prefer to reserve judgment. More work with the rougher rhythms of metrical verse, in, say Donne, might provide some insights into free verse. Eliot said that no verse is really free for a poets who want to do their job, and  Pound said he composed in the sequence of the musical phrase, which raises lots of questions, since even musical notation does not always indicate the nature of the musical phrase, since such phrases often run across the bar divisions.

 But such statements surely point us in the direction of temporal analytic schemes with their musical notations. It also seems clear to me that while free verse may mean a poem has no overall metrical scheme, line by line, verse, whether free or not, cannot help but set up tensions in which the counterpoint between rhythm and meter is relevant to the poem's effect. The first two lines of The Wasteland can,  in fact, be scanned as iambic pentameter (APril IS the CRUElest MONTH, breedING) and the next five as tetrameter, and doing so might tell us something. It might even be that the next book I read or the next line I scan or the question you ask after I finish--may convince me that all I have done is utterly wrongheaded and I must start again from scratch. In short, all I am offering you here is a tentative and clumsy baby step and we all have miles to go--and books to read--before we sleep.
   
We could go on scanning lines for hours, but it's time to play you bet your accent. More accurately, it is time to turn, in conclusion, from individual lines and syllables to a bit of speculation which metrical analysis raises: to on larger matters of form in art  Let me close then, with eight large and fuzzy statements, offered to clear your palate after asking you to look so closely at some tedious matters of  meter and rhythm.
   
 1) To answer the question in my own title, No, Prosody does not exist in the way that, say Chemistry exists--as an agreed-upon method for investigating a body of material, producing replicable results. Even prosodists who focus on old-fashioned binary analysis don't even agree on mechanics, some of them borrowing from classical prosody the horizontal dash (called the macron) and using it to indicate a light syllable, some using the short curved line, generally called the breve.
   
2) In the nature of things, prosody probably never will exist in the way Chemistry exists, nor should it, since lines of poetry are atoms but something else, though what else I am not prepared to say.
   
3) Still, it seems to me we can do better than we do. Schemes which do not somehow distinguish between rhythm and meter seem unnecessarily confusing and muddled.
  
 4) So long as poetry consists of lines, we are going to have to account for those lines. And the line seems to be the one irreducible fact of poetry. Milton justifying the ways of God to men and a semiliterate but broken-hearted lover pouring out his heart in a dorm room agree on one thing: In a poem, the lines do not come out even down the right-hand edge.   
   
5) I am not sure that  current emphasis on free verse and the de-emphasis on metrics is doing poetry any great service. It sometimes seems to me that the most profound and moving poetry of our time as well as the most popular is found in the song lyrics of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. And I cannot help but wonder if some of their power comes from the fact that  because they set their poems to music have to  be aware of meter  in ways not required of those who write from the heart, breaking the lines where it strikes their fancy.
   
6) We need to remind ourselves of an obvious truth:  that when we scan a line with whatever method, we are not reversing a process the poet went through in composing the line. Obviously, poets do not stop to consciously embed in their lines the relationship between counterpoint and meaning that our anal-retentive analytic schemes might uncover. When we read, we uncover things that were never covered over in the first place.  Good poets composing good poetry are doing the same thing the rest of us are as we write--thinking about what they want to say, trying to find the words that will, as Stevesn says, "suffice." A poet is trying to say something, but that something has has more "behind it" that simple prose: propositional truth, metaphorical associations, emotional states, rhythmical considerations, and the literary tradition.
   
7) We obviously have to be very careful in how we introduce matters of meter to beginning writers and beginning readers.  It is right that we recognize that literature has a spirit and a letter and that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth light. But it may be that the romantic movements of 60's education have led us to distinguish more sharply between letter and spirit than we really can.  There is a place for literary jargon and metrical analysis, though only sensitive teaching can say where it is for particular students.   
   
8) It may be, in fact, that letter and spirit come together and even generate one another in truly mysterious ways.  In more cases than we think, it may be that attention to matters of form (matters that beginners find most tedious) is just what, under the right conditions,  produces the Sacred Trance in which emotions are rendered most precisely and truths revealed and the world made new.  Many artists have noticed that when they  are  pouring out their hearts we are least likely to succeed in doing so, whereas when they are trying to solve some technical problem, they are most likely to be tricked into telling the real truth of their hearts, the truth they could not even know until they stopped thinking about it and starting thinking about some mechanical matter like rhyme or  syllable count. 

This is a consistent theme in the notebooks of Theordore Roethke,  which I read at the University of Washington. One version of it  copied out a passage from Pater, where Pater says that "the perfection of poetry seems to depend in part on a certain suppression of mere subject so that meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding." Now a person who talks about the "perfection of poetry" and about "mere subjects" is to be taken with grain of salt, surely. But I think Pater's statement points us in a fruitful direction. Prosody need not be the part of the course where we say, Now this is really dull stuff but you have to know it. It can be one path into the heart of the mystery of art. Prosody is dead. Long live prosody.