Reading Assignment
RHYTHM, THE CRUX OF THE MATTER, for it's only in terms of
rhythm that poetry is different from prose.
For most of you, this will be the most difficult part of the course because of the
bewildering variety of technical terms (anaphora, anapestic tetrameter, caesura,
etc.). Relax: it's not necessary to learn or know those terms in order to be
aware of the rhythms of poetry. If you can keep time to "Jingle Bells," you're home free.
All poetry is either metered or it isn't. If it's not metered, it's what we call
free verse, though as T. S. Eliot famously said, "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job."
METER comes from a Greek word meaning "measure." Metered poetry is simply measured
poetry. What is being measured? Sound moving through time, the way it's measured in music
by a time signature such as ¾ in which there are three beats to the measure and a
quarter note gets one beat. When we beat out the rhythm of a song we're measuring
the sound moving through time, which is to say that we're measuring the song's rhythm.
In poetry, the kind of meter the poet uses determines how the poetry is measured.
There are four kinds of meter in English:
Accentual meter, in which we measure by counting accents:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade……… --W. H. Auden
Syllabic meter, in which we measure by counting syllables:
you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,
a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food
than apple seeds-the fruit
within the fruit-locked in
like counter-curved twin
hazelnuts?................. -Marianne Moore
Accentual-syllabic meter, in which we measure by counting both accents
& syllables:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate…… -Shakespeare
Quantitative meter, in which we measure by counting long vowel sounds:
Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,
Make thyself flutt'ring wings of thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be:
Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else
Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else
Playing alone careless on her heavenly virginals…… --Spenser
Accentual meter is the meter of Middle-English poetry. Quantitative meter is
the meter of Greek & Latin poetry & is rarely used in English, largely
because our ears aren't highly sensitive to vowel length. We simply don't hear
what Greek and Roman listeners heard. Syllabic meter was used c. 1660-1740 but
not much before or after, though Marianne Moore is a notable exception.
Accentual-syllabic meter is the meter of 99% of all metered poetry in English.