Metre Poetry is “memorable speech”, as W. H. Auden once remarked: “the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence” with “all its power of suggestion and incantation” (Auden v). By ‘cadence’ he meant ‘rhythmical form’, and for most of human history rhythmical form in poetry has been synonymous with metre: metre is to speech what dance is to movement, a way of revealing the potential order and beauty that underlie the chance-prone ungainliness of ordinary human activity. All poetry, including free verse, is rhythmically organized to some degree; we call it metre when one or two aspects of speech-rhythm are pervasively and systematically patterned throughout the poem. Because poems may be indeterminate in length, the constitutive rules of metrical patterning apply not to the poem as a whole but cyclically to successive segments of the poem, called ‘lines’. The Mechanisms of English Metre As an organisation of speech-rhythm, metre must engage the same mechanisms as speech-rhythm itself. Accounts of English metre usually ascribe speech-rhythm to the functioning of a single feature of prominence, commonly referred to as either ‘stress’ or ‘accent’, but this is a misleading simplification: we need to distinguish between the two. Stress, to begin with, is a built-in feature of lexical or ‘dictionary’ words — nouns, main verbs, adjectives and so on — in which one syllable is perceived as most prominent (fénce, defénce, defénsive, defénsible); some words also have a secondary stress (ùnknówn; phótogràph, phòtográphic). By contrast ‘grammar’ words like prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns have no stress in monosyllables and much weaker stress in polysyllables. Stress also has a role in distinguishing grammatical structures: we discriminate between the phrase [a] blàck bírd and the compound noun [a] blackbird (in the phrase, subordinate stress falls on the first syllable, and in the compound noun on the second). Stress is part of our knowledge of the language, and so will tend to be perceived whether or not it gets any phonetic prominence in an utterance. In any given utterance, however, we may actively highlight a particular word or syllable, whether stressed or not, by sudden pitch-change, called focal or contrastive accent: i said IN the fridge, not ON it; man proposes, god DISposes. In English, however, the main rhythmic mechanism is not stress or accent but the system of ‘beating’. Beats are the means by which we shape utterances in time; they usually represent peaks of muscular effort in articulation (people who tend to gesture will gesture on the beats) and occur at (very roughly) equal intervals, a principle called isochrony (Greek: ‘equal timing’). Isochrony is normally a rather weak tendency, easily disrupted by interruptions, pauses, hesitations and so on, and is strongly present only in procedures such as counting (/One, /two, /three, /four, /five) and listing (/Plums, /apples, /figs, /pears). Most commonly beats fall upon primary stressed syllables (/drink a /pint of /milk a /day), though not normally on successive stressed syllables in a phrase (/old brown /dog, BBC [/bee-bee/see]); they may also fall upon accented syllables even if those syllables are not stressed: /man pro/póses, /god /DISpóses. Beats may also fall upon unstressed syllables in order to break up a long run of them: instead of saying there’s a /néw a/méricanist in the de/pártment, for example, with a scarcely tolerable gabble of six offbeats (underlined), we will tend to say there’s a /néw a/méricanist /in the de/pártment, with a beat on unstressed in. It is important to note that this technique of ‘Beat Addition’ is unobtrusive: it doesn’t involve assigning stress or accent, but rather a deceleration in approaching the beated syllable, and in the case of an unstressed syllable like in, a slightly greater degree of clarity in enunciating the (normally reduced) vowel. Most oddly, beats — being events rather than kinds of sound — can occur in silence, like a rest in music (indicated in what follows by “<!>”): if I say I /spoke to the /waiter who /brought my /ORder, it means something different from I /spoke to the /WAIter /<!>, who /brought my /ORder. In verse we distinguish between a sounded beat (an ‘ictus’ — the plural is ‘ictus’, last syllable rhyming with ‘obtuse’) and a silent beat (a rest). We may think of beats, or syllables of different kinds (depending on the language). as ‘events’; metre works by regulating the number (and sometimes the arrangement) of events in successive lines (‘numbers’ is, indeed, an old-fashioned term for metre). We don’t consciously count these events, which is why their number must be limited to six or so, roughly the upper limit of items we can ‘subitize’, or intuitively grasp the number of without counting. ‘Chunking’ or subgrouping increases the limits of subitization: we can subitize five dots flashed onto a screen in any arrangement, but we can only subitize eight dots if they are patterned in (say) two squares. Thus the classical French alexandrine is not perceived directly as twelve syllables but as two cola of six each. Simple Metres Simple English metre (also called accentual, demotic or isoictic) is no more than a counting — or rather subitizing — of beats, so many to a line. In simple metre, beats come in pairs, most commonly two pairs to a line to make a four-beat line (in what follows I shall indicate a sounded beat. or ictus, with a capital “I”, and an offbeat (a syllable not carrying a beat) with an “o”; I shall indicate a stressed offbeat with a capital “O” and an unstressed beat with a superscript “i”): (1) /Tom, /Tom, the /piper’s /son, I I o I o I /Stole a /pig and a/way he /run. I o I o o I o I (Trad.) The first thing we notice about this is its insistent rhythmicality: simple metre co-opts the strong isochrony we find in counting and listing (see above) and tends to distort the performance of the verse away from naturalistic speech, towards chanting. It thus represents a communal verse-form, easily chanted in groups (e.g. of children, Shakespearean witches, protestors and so on). The measure — that is, number of syllables between any two ictus within the line — varies from zero to three, though the following well-known couplet has one rare — and uncomfortable — measure with four: (2) There /was an òld /wóman who /lived in a /shoe; o I o O I o o I o o I She had /SO many /children, she /didn’t know what to /do. o O I O o I o o i o O O o I (Trad.) There are a number of other ways of finding four ictus in the second line, as the complexity of the notation suggests, so that the reader experiences something like the old woman’s confusion in the face of a multiplicity of choices. As these examples suggest, simple four-beat lines do not exist by themselves: they come in couplets of eight beats (examples (1) and (2), with eight ictus, are called octometers). Eight-beat structures themselves tend to be linked into quatrains of sixteen beats, in which the units may be linked by rhyme or by some other device. Where all sixteen beats are sounded (a pair of octometers) we may usefully adapt the hymnodists’ name of ‘long metre’: examples below include (7) and (11). Another linking device is the use of a rest (silent beat) at the end of the octometer, as a sort of terminal punctuation, as in the case of this protest chant: (3) /What do we /want? I o o I /Ten per/cent! I o I /When do we /want it? I o o I o /Now! I /<!> R (Trad.) This second form of eight-beat structure (tetrameter (IIII) + trimeter (IIIR)) is very common throughout English poetry, and is called the septenary (Latin septem, ‘seven’, for the seven ictus). A stanza made from two septenaries is known as ‘common metre’ by hymnodists, and is the standard form of the ballad, and of anonymous folk-poetry like the following (see also (16) and (18)): (4) /Hinx, /minx, the /old witch /stinks, I I o I O I The /fat be/gins to /fry o I o I o I /<!> R There’s /nobody /home but /Jumping /Joan o I o o I o I o I /Father, /mother and /I. I o I o o I /<!> R (Trad.) A third kind of eight-beat structure is the senary (IIIR + IIIR), here doubled to form a stanza (‘truncated metre’): (5) /Break, /break, /break, I I I /<!> R On thy /cold grey /stones, O /Sea: o o I O I O I /<!> R And I /would that my /tongue could /utter o o I o o I o I o /<!> R The /thoughts that a/rise in /me. /<!> o I o o I o i R (Tennyson, ‘Break, Break, Break’ 1-4) A persistent rest on the last beat of each line, with its resultant sense of incompleteness, can be a way of supporting a mood of loss, absence or thwartedness. The last two stanzas of Tennyson’s poem exemplify a fourth widely used kind of sixteen-beat structure, the senary-plus-septenary or ‘short metre” (see also (14) and (19)); in this poem the ‘complete’ line recalls the perfect but unattainable past: (6) /Break, /break, /break, I I I /<!> R On thy /cold grey /stones, O /Sea: o o I O I O I /<!> R But the /tender /grace of a /day that is /dead o o I o I o o I o o I Will /never come /back to /me. o I o O I o i /<!> R This last example from Tennyson shows that while simple metre is in generic terms the primary medium of anonymous, demotic or folk-verse — nursery-rhyme, protest chants, weather saws, graffiti, advertising jingles and so on — it has also (since the Romantics) been a medium of ‘art-verse’. The difference between the two is that in art-verse, while the length of the measure remains unpredictable, it no longer seems random or merely adventitious. Throughout Masefield’s “Cargoes”, for example, the differing length of the measure carefully regulate the tempo for mimetic purposes, suggesting the gaits of the different vessels, and the placement of beats highlights the ‘vowel-music’ of the poem throughout: in the first line, for example, it underscores the insistent patterning of two close vowels, the long vowel of “beat” (/i:/) and the short vowel of “bit” (/I/): “quInquIri:me of nInIvi: from dIstant Ophi:r”). The beats of the second line pick up the open long vowel of “Ophir” and develop a new voweltheme (“rOwing hOme to hAven”): (7) Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, I o O o I o o o I o I o Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, I o O o I o o I o O o I With a cargo of ivory, o o I o o I o o And apes and peacocks, o I o I O Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. I o O I o O o I O I (Masefield, “Cargoes”) It should be emphasised that in simple-metre art verse, which flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, it can be difficult to find the poet’s metrical intention, because the prosody may offer a number of competing possibilities: we could, for example, read the second line of “Cargoes” as a senary, but while it would make good metrical sense in its own right it would not fit the equivalent lines in subsequent stanzas: (8) Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, I o I o I o R o I o I o I R Similarly, when you first read Hardy’s “Afterwards” your initial instinct may be to read the first line as a senary: (9) When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, O o I o o I o I o R o I o I o o I R The problem with this reading is not in this line but in the fact that the other odd-numbered lines in the poem are clumsy and awkward as senaries, forcing rests in the middle of phrases like “new-spun <!> silk”, “like <!> an eyelid's”, “nocturnal <!> blackness”, and so on. The reading that fits all equivalent lines is a septenary: (10) When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, I o I o o I o I o o I o I o o I R “Afterwards” is an example of ‘dolnik’ (see Tarlinskaja), a partially regulated form, transitional between simple and compound metre, in which the measure varies only between one and two (rather than between zero and three). Dolnik was very popular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (11) When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, o o I o I o o I o I o The mother of months in meadow or plain o I o o I o I o o I Fills the shadows and windy places I o I o o I o I o With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain o I o I o I o o I (Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon 65-8) To recapitulate: simple (and compound) metre exhibits the following kinds of common line-structures: Standard Four-beat structures: IIII IIIR IRIR tetrameter trimeter extended dimeter Standard eight-beat structures: IIII + IIII (tetrameter + tetrameter): IIII + IIIR (tetrameter + trimeter): IIIR + IIIR (trimeter + trimeter): octometer septenary senary Standard sixteen-beat structures: Octometer + octometer: Septenary + septenary: Senary + septenary: Senary + senary: long metre common metre (e.g. ballads) short metre (e.g. limerick, Poulter’s) truncated metre (mainly art-verse) Compound Metres The example of dolnik shows that the regularity of the measure represents a kind of sliding scale: as the number of offbeats grows more and more predictable in a poem, the verse approaches the condition of compound or ictosyllabic metre, where there is both a primary regulation (of beats) and a secondary one (of the measure). It should be noted that a measure lies between ictus within the line; what precedes the first ictus (the head) or follows the last (the tail) doesn’t count as part of the body. In (11), for example, the second line has a head but no tail, the third a tail but no head, and the first line has both The fact that in (14) below the first two lines have only one offbeat in the head does not, therefore, affect our perception of the regularity of the measure. Regulated measure is usually either duple (one offbeat) or triple (two offbeats); quadruple measure (three offbeats) is rare (see 16), and single measure (no offbeats), though found in occasional lines of simple metre (“/Ding /dong /bell /<!>”, “/Nine /days/ old /<!>”) is almost impossible to sustain as a compound metre for obvious linguistic reasons. It might be thought that the double regulation of compound metre would render it more sophisticated and mentally engaging than simple metre, but in fact the reverse tends to be the case: it rapidly becomes tedious. It is not only that the metrical pattern itself is unvarying, but also that the inflexibility of that pattern seems to crush all resistance (and thus lifelikeness and interest) out of the language-material: (12) And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea o o I o o I o o I o o I When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee O o I O O I o o I O o i (Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”, 3-4) In the first of these two lines, the complete co-incidence of metre and prosody represents a kind of tour de force that might be initially striking, but rapidly becomes monotonous; in the second, the disjunctures between the two represent not a struggle (since the metre always wins) but a reduction of the rich prosodic complexity of English speech towards the mechanical binary opposition of the metre itself. One of the first kinds of compound metre used in Modern English was the dreary Poulters’ measure of the sixteenth century, short metre in duple measure: (13) The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, o I o I o I R o I o I o I R Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds. o I O I o I o I o I o I o I R (Queen Elizabeth I, “The Doubt of Future Foes” 5-6) The wooden regularity comes at a price, reflected here in the clumsy dislocations of syntax (how much more effective would it be as part of a pentameter: “The eyes dazzled with pride”). It is possible that the popularity of the form among courtly Tudor poets — even the great Sir Thomas Wyatt used it — was precisely due to its inflexibility, and the decisive triumph that it seemed to represent of aristocratic order over the slovenly simple-metre doggerel of late medieval culture, as exemplified in the work of a poet like Barclay or Skelton. Generically, compound metre could be described as a ‘middle-brow’ form, a favourite with those who feel culturally obliged to admire poetry but don’t really enjoy it at any very sophisticated level, like that sizable proportion of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes for whom contemporary poetry meant Longfellow, Kipling, Robert Service, Punch magazine and (in Australia) ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Henry Lawson. Compound metre is also the form that light verse invariably takes, since such verse requires technical skill and compound metre exhibits a kind of skilfulness that most people can appreciate. One of its most famous forms is the limerick, a stanza of short metre in triple measure: (14) There was a young man who said “God o i o O I o O I Must find it exceedingly odd o I o o I o o I That the sycamore tree o o I o o I R R Still continues to be O o I o o I When there’s no-one about in the quad.” o o I o o I o o I R (attributed to Ronald Knox) Triple measure tends generically towards light verse: not necessarily humorous, that is, but certainly uncomplicated, as in the case of (9). Tennyson famously used it mimetically, to suggest the galloping of horses (superscript indicates elision, the quick and light pronunciation of a weak syllable that doesn’t count in the metrical tally; in texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries elisions are often indicated by an apostrophe): (15) Half a league, half a league, half a league onwards, I o O I o O I o O I o Into the vall ey of death rode the six hundred I o o I o O I o O I o (“The Charge of the Light Brigade”, 1-4) Tennyson conveys the idea of a gallop that is at the same time weighty and forceful by making many of the measures oO rather than the expected oo. But if triple measure is light, quadruple is positively vacuous, only suitable for comic verse or simple narrative, as in the case of this common metre stanza in quadruple measure: (16) There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around o o I o o o I o o o I o O o I That the colt from old Regret had got away o o I o O o I o O o I R And had joined the wild bush-horses; he was worth a thousand pound, o o I o O O I o o o I o O o I So all the cracks had gathered to the fray. o I o O o I o o o I R (A. B. Paterson, “The Man from Snowy River”, 1-4) Quadruple measure can also be seen in the patter-songs of W. S. Gilbert: “I /am the very /model of a /modern major-/general”. Quadruple metre is not only highly artificial but also unstable, since the middle of the three offbeats is always a candidate to become a beat, and that candidacy is strengthened when the offbeat falls on a stressed syllable surrounded by unstressed ones (I have underlined such oOo measures in example [16]). For this reason some writers see quadruple measure as dipodic, which refers to an alternation of unstressed and stressed beats producing a kind of higher-order patterning (“dipod” means ‘double foot’). Dipody is hard to sustain, though the following line could just about pass as dipodic on the grounds that “passed” is syntactically subordinated in stress to “around”: (17) There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around i o I o i o I o i o I o I o I One way of reducing the monotony of compound metre is to ‘modulate’ it — that is, to vary the measure in some systematic or consistent way. The first three stanzas of Hardy’s “The Voice”, for example, all switch from triple to duple in the last measure. Since the number of syllables in a measure affects the tempo of reading — the more, the faster — this represents a meditative slowing-down, functioning also as a kind of stanzaic punctuation: (18) Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, 1 o O I o o I o o I o o Saying that now you are not as you were I o o I o o I o o I When you had changed from the one who was all to me, I o o I o o I o o I o o But as at first, when our day was fair. i o o I o o I o I (“The Voice”, 1-4) This is very different from what happens in the last stanza, where the deflating realization that what he is hearing might be “only the breeze” causes the metrical structure to collapse like a balloon, from compound to simple metre and from sixteen ictus to thirteen (common metre): (19) Thus I; faltering forward, I o I o o I o R Leaves around me falling, I o I o I o R Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, I O o I o o I o I o And the woman calling. i o I o I o R This rather neatly illustrates the principle of unity-in-variety that underlies all metre: strikingly different as this stanza is from its fellows, it remains like them a sixteen-beat structure. It illustrates another point worth emphasising about metre in English: that it is not completely determined by the text, but something co-operatively created by the reader in performance (and to read a poem we must perform it, if only in the mind). Although my scansion of the last line conforms to the pattern (echoing line two), it is not the only way of realising the line as a four-beat utterance: an unusual IRIR (extended dimeter) reading (found also in ballads like “Edward, Edward”) underscores the line’s paradoxical stubborn insistence on the final reality of the apparitional voice by forcing a slight pause that turns “calling” into an afterthought: (20) And the woman calling. o o I o R I o R The prosodic structure of a line — the distribution of stress, accent and syntactic breaks — is a map of potential: it will rule out some metrical patterns but it may allow more than one, and our choice among those possibilities is an act of interpretation (some readers, for example, would accent “I” in the first line of (19), rendering the pattern oI Ioo Io). You may prefer (19) for its greater fidelity to the underlying pattern or (20) for its greater complexity and contextual appropriateness: the choice is yours. Complex Metres (including Iambic Pentameter) Most accounts of English metre conflate the categories of compound and complex metre into something called ‘accentual-syllabic’ or ‘syllabotonic’ metre, but as we shall see the two are very different. Simple or isoictic metre is lively, but disordered; compound or ictosyllabic metre is ordered, but not particularly lively (though it might have a kind of mechanical vigour); complex (also called ‘ictothetic’ or ‘footed’) metre, in the form of (say) iambic pentameter, is both ordered and lively, and for this reason closer to the rhythms of English speech than either of the others. This is why most of the canonical poets of English literature from Spenser to Yeats make relatively little use of simple and compound metres (though Blake is a notable exception). Shakespeare, for example, uses compound metres only for special purposes (e.g. the chanting of the witches in Macbeth) and simple metres for occasional doggerel passages, like the Fool’s prophecy in Lear or this senary couplet in simple metre from the very early Comedy of Errors (there are a few other ways of scanning it): (21) Mome, malt-horse, capon, coxcomb, idiot, patch! I I O I o R I o I oo I R Either get thee from the door, or sit down at the hatch. O o I o i o I R o I I o o I R (3.1.32-3) It’s vigorous, bouncy stuff in the manner of the older comedies such as Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1575), but it’s hard to imagine the subtler parts of Hamlet in such a metre. Shakespeare’s plays, like the major poems of Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Keats and Larkin, are written in a metrical form that manages to avoid both the insistent sing-song of simple metre and the deadening regularity of compound metre by specifying two different kinds of regulation but permitting a certain degree of slippage between them. Complex metre specifies both a certain number of beats, that is, and a grid of syllable-positions, allowing the placing of the beats to vary to some extent along that grid of positions. The price paid for this flexibility, incidentally, is that unlike simple and compound metre its form is not automatically obvious, even to native speakers: it has to be acquired, albeit unconsciously, as a kind of skill, through reading and listening, and not everyone succeeds in acquiring that skill, as teachers of English literature and patrons of amateur Shakespeare can testify. So how does it work? I shall deal with iambic pentameter because of its importance in the tradition, but mutatis mutandis the same remarks apply to iambic trimeter, tetrameter (as in Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”) and hexameter (the ‘alexandrine’). The prototypical pentameter can be mapped directly onto a grid of ten syllable-positions, alternately w(eak) and S(trong): wS wS wS wS wS, where every S-syllable may carry a beat. This is traditionally, economically and conveniently (though not necessarily) thought of as a sequence of five similar ‘feet’, each consisting of a w[eak] and a S[trong] syllable; such feet are often referred to as ‘iambs’ (hence ‘iambic pentameter’, where penta derives from the Greek for ‘five’): “The cur|few tolls| the knell| of par|ting day|” (Gray, Elegy 1). The division of the line into feet, it should be emphasised, is purely notional: feet are a kind of scaffolding, irrelevant to the performance of the verse. They do not necessarily correspond to pauses or boundaries of any kind (we don’t say “cur, few” or “par, ting”), nor need they coincide at all with punctuational or syntactic cuts, any more than the lines on an architect’s blueprint need correspond to cracks or fissures in the fabric of the building. Each position is usually occupied by one syllable, but under certain circumstances may be occupied by two or by none.i For a line to be metrical, each S-position must be occupied by an independent syllable — that is, one capable of carrying a beat, by virtue of being either (a) a fully stressed syllable, (b) an accented syllable, or (c) an unstressed syllable that is not dominated by a neighbouring stressed syllable (that is, it is protected by an intervening syntactic break). An Elizabethan critic, George Gascoigne, remarked of the following two lines that the first would “pass the musters” but that the second was “neither true nor pleasant”, the reason being that in each of the middle three feet the unstressed syllables in S-position (italicised) are dominated by stressed neighbours: (22) I ùnderstánd your méaning by your éye w S w S w S w S w S *Your méaning I ùnderstánd by your éye w S w S w S w S w S If this were all there were to it, then iambic pentameter would simply be another kind of compound metre, albeit with an anomalously odd number of beats. This in itself would make it a more naturalistic form, however, in that it “escapes the elementary four-beat rhythm, with its insistence, its hierarchical [dipodic] structures, and its close relationship with the world of ballad and song” (Attridge 1981: 124). ). Another interesting consequence of the ‘fiveness’ of pentameter is that it has a kind of completeness in itself and is not required to enter into pair-bonding with another line (in theory a poem could consist of one pentameter) and so it is the one form of English metre that does not require rhyme (poets have experimented with unrhymed trimeters and tetrameters but these have never become naturalised in the tradition). Unrhymed pentameter is known as ‘blank verse’. What makes a complex metre markedly different from a compound one is that it is not confined to one template. From the original or matrix template we can derive others: the simplest way of producing a new template is to add an extra weak position — a tail — to the end of an existing template, indicated here by a “{“ or opening brace functioning as the final foot-marker: Resem|bling sire|, and child|, and ha|ppy mo{ther (Shakespeare, Sonnets 8.11). Tails were traditionally called ‘feminine endings’; they make a line a little less formal, and in broad terms their frequency tends to increase as Shakespeare’s career progresses, from less than 1% in at the start of his career to over 20% in the last plays. More interestingly we can reverse any wS foot in the original template to Sw (sometimes called a ‘trochee’, rhyming with ‘poky’), provided it is followed by a w-position (which rules out consecutive or final reversals). The odd thing about a reversal is that we perceive not just a beat but a beat where we expect an offbeat, and an offbeat where we expect a beat. The result for one who has internalised the metre is an interesting doubleness of effect, a sense of two things happening at once that Hopkins described metaphorically as ‘counterpoint’. In what follows reversals will be enclosed in angle brackets (when both syllables in a foot are independent we have a reversible foot, one where the reader or performer must choose one option or the other, indicated by “<Foot|”: <Trees cut| to Sta|tues, Sta|tues thick| as trees|, Pope, “Burlington” 120). To illustrate with examples from each century from the fourteenth to the twentieth: (23) <Redy> to wen|den on| our pil|grimage| S w w S w S w S w S (Chaucer, General Prologue 21) <Done is> a ba|ttell on| the dra|gon blak| S w w S w S w S w S (Dunbar, “Done is a battell” 1) <Wanton> as youth|ful goats|, <wild as> young bulls|, S w w S w S S w w S (Shakespeare, 1 Henry 4 4.1.103) Since the second tier of scansion adds no extra information I shall scan the remaining examples without it: <Abject> and lost| lay these|, <covering> the flood|, (Milton, Paradise Lost 1.312); <Woman’s> at best| a con|tradic|tion still”, (Pope, To a Lady 270); <Season> of mists|, and me|llow fruit|fulness|, (Keats, “Ode to Autumn” 1); My swi|vel eye| <hungers> from pose| to pose| (Larkin, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” 3). Reversals lend energy to the verse, because they carry an element of surprise — a beat where we expect an offbeat — and in consequence can have a button-holing, attention-grabbing effect: <Hung be> the heavens| with black|, <yìeld day| to night|! (1 Henry 6 1.1.1); <Cromwell>, I charge| thee, fling| away| ambi{tion! (Henry 8 3.2.440); <Batter> my heart, <three-per|son’d God|, for you| (Donne, “Holy Sonnets” 14.1; compare “Assault| my heart|”); ‘<Courage>!’ he said|, and poin|ted toward| the land|. (Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters” 1). Whereas reversals apply to feet (odd-even pairs like syllable-positions one and two), a swap is a switching of properties between even-odd pairs of positions (two and three, four and five, etc), so that the sequence w-S w-S becomes w-[w S]-S (we write this as “w-[W s]-S” to reflect the fact that only certain kinds of syllable may form part of a swap: the s-syllable, for example, is always a stressed syllable that is subordinated syntactically to the following Ssyllable, as indicated in the following examples ! we begin with Shakespeare because swaps are a sixteenth-century development): (24) The per|fect ce|remo|ny [of lòve’s] ríte| W S w S w S w W s S (Shakespeare, Sonnets 23.6) He trus|ted to| have e|qual’d [the mòst] Hígh| w S w S w S w W s S (Milton, Paradise Lost 1.40) Swaps are less common than reversals, but commoner then you might think (from about 1.5% of lines in Pope to nearly ten times that number in late Shakespeare). Later examples: A youth| of fro|lics, [an òld] áge| of cards|, (Pope, To a Lady 244); To vi|sit dol|phin-co|ral [in dèep] séas|; (Keats, “To Homer” 4); The fa|thers [with bròad] bélts| <under> their suits| (Larkin, “The Whitsun Weddings” 36). Whereas in a reversal the beat occurs a little earlier than expected, in a swap the beat on the subordinated stress is momentarily delayed, because that syllable is closely bound to the following word: the effect is that of a slightly deferred beat, a little like a syncopation in music. At the same time, the s-syllable or subordinated beat will be slightly prolonged and more prominent by virtue of carrying a beat (we may even, as readers, consider the possibility of accenting the s-syllable — “the most High”, an old age”, “in deep seas”). Another feature of the engaging complexity of iambic pentameter is the fact that since we perceive each syllable in terms of its position while keeping aware that those positions may slide around in the template from line to line, we are much more aware of the prosodic values of beats and offbeats than we are in compound or simple metre. Heavy mappings (stressed syllables in offbeat positions), for example, offer a felt resistance to the metre: in the following lines Milton uses heavy mappings (underlined) to suggest the effort of Satan’s journey through Hell: O’er bog| or steep|, through strait|, rough, dense|, or rare|, / With head|, hands, wings|, or feet| pursues| his way| (Paradise Lost 2.948-9); Hamlet contrasts the efforts of this world to the fluid ease of heaven in a transition from a dipodic line with two light mappings (non-stresses in beat position, indicated here by Roman type) to an awkward line with two heavy mappings: Absent| thee from| feli|city| a while|, / <And in this harsh| world draw| thy breath| in pain| (Ham. 5.2.346-7). In simple and compound metre light mappings are often performed rather heavily and insistently; in pentameter, they co-opt the procedure of Beat Addition (see above), which satisfies the demands of the metre with minimal disruption to naturalistic speech-rhythms. A Note on Traditional Terminology The traditional terminology for discussing metres in English is frequently unhelpful, because it is based not on an analysis of English but on the terminology of Classical Latin and Greek verse, as a way of attempting to dignify by association the (very different) home-grown variety. To begin with, it only applies fully to compound and complex metres, which it fails to distinguish (simple metres are beneath its notice and beyond its analysis). Metrical labels consist of a two-term phrase like “iambic pentameter”: the first term refers to the typical number of offbeats per beat and the second to the typical number of ictus in the line (not beats: rests are ignored). To make the second term you count the ictus — one ictus (mono-), two (di-), three (tri-), four (tetra-), five (penta-), six (hexa-), seven (hepta-), or eight (octo-) — and add the appropriate prefix to -meter (the stress falls on the third last syllable). Thus (12) and (18) above are tetrameter, (16) a combination of tetrameter and trimeter, (9) hexameter, and so on; in ignoring rests, incidentally, such a taxonomy is unable to discover or demonstrate the underlying relatedness of (18) and (19). Traditional terminology sees compound metres as composed of classical ‘feet’ such as the iamb (oI), the trochee (Io), the anapest (ooI), the dactyl (Ioo) and the paeon (oooI). Thus (12) is supposedly ‘anapestic tetrameter’ and (15) ‘dactylic tetrameter’. Where there are fewer syllables in the head or the tail (as appropriate) than in the measure, as in (14-16) or the evennumbered lines of (18), the line is traditionally called ‘catalectic’. But consider the evennumbered lines of (18): traditionally they would be called ‘dactylic tetrameter catalectic’ ( Ioo Ioo Ioo Ioo ), but if the first line had had a head and no tail (e.g. “O /Woman much /missed, how you /call to me /so,”) we would be obliged to describe exactly the same second line as something quite different: ‘anapestic tetrameter catalectic’ (ooI ooI ooI ooI). Or consider that very common metre of Elizabethan drama, the four-beat duple. Traditional terminology requires us to specify it as either ‘iambic’ or ‘trochaic’: (25) Now the hungry lion roars, I o I o Io I And the wolf behowls the moon; i o I o I o I (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.371-2) Metrically it is neither, though rhythmically we may find falling sequences (“<hungry><lion>”) as well as rising ones (“the wolf| behowls| the moon|”); for further discussion see Attridge (1982: 108-114). Finally, it should be pointed out that the terminology not only creates meaningless distinctions but conflates a crucial distinction in (for example) using the same term (‘iambic hexameter’) for a compound metre (duple senary — e.g. the odd-numbered lines of Poulter’s measure, (13) — and for the six-footed complex metre called the ‘alexandrine’. Pope writes of the alexandrine as something <That, like| a woun|ded snake||, <drags its> slow length| along” (“Essay on Criticism” 357; the double solidus indicates an obligatory word-break to accommodate the necessary — though somewhat attenuated — rest). Pseudo-metres So far I have dealt only with overt metre — that is, metrical regulation that can be perceived by a listener or apprehended during the process of reading. There might seem to be little point in any other kind, but some Modernist poets (such as Marianne Moore and W. H. Auden) have experimented with forms of linear regulation that are covert, in the sense that they cannot be directly perceived or experienced, only discovered by examination; the main example would be isosyllabics, the regulation of lines solely by the number of syllables. Because syllables in English vary so grossly in length and complexity they cannot be subitized, and so isosyllabic metre is impossible to perceive directly. Covert metre of this kind is not easily distinguishable from free verse to the reader or listener, and is probably more useful to the poet in the process of composition as a form of ludic constraint to work against. Finally I will say a word about imaginary metre: metre that is based on more or less imaginary qualities of syllables. The major example of this is a product of the dream that has haunted English-language poets since the sixteenth century, that of writing poetry in the quantitative metres of Classical Greek and Latin. Those metres are based on the opposition between two kinds of syllabic structure, ‘heavy’ (or ‘long’) and ‘light’ (or ‘short’), and though this distinction also obtains in English phonology (and, as in Latin, in part governs stress-placement in words) it is less obvious in English and unsuitable for quantitative metre in generating too few light syllables. For a full account of imaginary quantitative metre in Elizabethan poetry see Attridge (1974). The quest was renewed by nineteenth-century poets like Longfellow; perhaps the best solution to this self-imposed ‘problem’ was that of A. H. Clough, whose hexameter gives the appearance of adhering to classical rules but is in effect simply a headless tailed dolnik senary. In the following example, I indicate the actual scansion on the second row, and the imaginary Latin scansion within the line, with “|” for foot-divisions and “/” for caesurae; it will be seen that the actual scansion partly reflects the imaginary one, in that each pseudo-foot begins with an ictus (as Teutonic scholars claimed of the Latin hexameter) and the caesura (in Latin merely a word-break) coincides with the first rest in the senary: (26) Rome disa|ppoints me| much; / I| hardly as |yet under|stand, but I o o I o I R o I o o I O o I o R Rubbishy| seems the| word / that| most ex|actly would| suit it. I o o I o I R o I o I o o I o R Clough, Amours de Voyage 1.1.9-10) I have underlined the most outrageous violations of classical scansion. Notice the way in which the final rest of line 9 encodes Claude’s typical finicky hesitation over the exact word. Metre and Genre Some connections between metre and genre are almost natural, such as that between folk-poetry of all ages and simple metres. Meters also become generic markers or signals because they get used for particular genres and thus acquire associations that subsequently connect them to those genres. For example, one important reason that verse drama from Dryden to Browning (and the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue) is written almost entirely in iambic pentameter is that Shakespeare wrote his plays in iambic pentameter; this is equally the reason that twentieth-century verse dramatists like late Yeats, Eliot and Fry chose not to use iambic pentameter. But this doesn’t mean that the original choice was purely arbitrary: there can be little doubt that blank verse took over as the language of drama in the 1580s because as a complex metre it represents a genuine improvement in both subtlety and lifelikeness over the simple four-beat and senary couplets of the medieval and late Tudor stage. One metre may acquire more than one association: Milton in the seventeenth century made blank verse the vehicle of epic poetry, and Thomson in the eighteenth of meditative anecdotal poetry. A different use of i.p. developed in the same century in the form of the endstopped heroic couplet, with its cultivated antithetical balances within and between lines, which tend to reinforce a conservative ideology in which apparent superficial contests and contradictions are evidence of an underlying political harmony that shouldn’t be disturbed by innovation or reform: (27) <Here hills| and vales|, the wood|land and| the plain|, <Here earth| and wa|ter seem| to strive| again|, Not Cha|os-like| toge|ther crush’d| and bruis’d|, <But, as| the earth|, harmo|niously| confus’d|: Where or|der in| vari|ety| we see|, And where|, though all| things di|ffer, all| agree|. (Pope, Windsor Forest 11-16) In this way a metrical form can become a way of encoding ideologies, which can make it difficult to say anything new or subversive in the form: this is why William Blake, in trying to make poetry say new and radical things in the late eighteenth century, felt obliged to abandon complex metre altogether (juvenilia notwithstanding) and return to simple and compound forms in the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that whereas medieval and early modern folk-poetry is almost all in simple metres, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivals of those genres (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Mary had a little lamb”) are almost always in compound metres (Coleridge’s “Christabel” was an early and interesting exception). Bibliography and *Further Reading Attridge, Derek. Well-weigh'd Syllables: Elizabethan Experiments in Quantitative Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. * ——. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longmans, 1982. [A comprehensive account of English metre] *——. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. [A simpler introduction to the topic] Auden, W.H. and John Garret (eds), The poet's tongue: an anthology (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1935). *Brogan, T. V. F. English Versification 1570-1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. [Invaluable reference and introduction to the historical range of metrical theory] *Cureton, Richard D. Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. London and New York: Longman, 1992. *Groves, Peter L. Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line. ELS Monograph Series 74. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1998. [A full account of the complexity of iambic pentameter] ——. Shakespeare’s Pentameter and the End of Editing. Shakespeare (Journal of the British Shakespeare Association), 3 (2007): 126-42. Tarlinskaja, Marina, Beyond “loose iamb”: the form and themes of the English “dolnik”. Poetics Today 16 (1995): 493-522 Peter L. Groves, Monash University INDEX TERMS Alexandrine Anapestic Dactylic Dolnik Hexameter Iambic pentameter Metre Quantitative metre Scansion Syllabotonic metre i A position has double occupancy when it includes an unstressed syllable that doesn’t count in the metrical tally, like the eighth position in the following line : “ These vi|olent| delights| have vio l|ent ends|” (Romeo 2.6.9). Zero occupancy is very rare, confined to early pentameter like Chaucer and W yatt, late pentameter like Larkin, and Renaissance dramatic blank verse: “ ^ W han| that A|pril with| his shou|res soo{te” (Chaucer, General Prologue 1); “ ^ Come|, my lord|, I’ll lead| you to| your tent|.” (Shakespeare 1 Henry 4 5.4.9); “Ano|ther church|: ^ ma|tting, seats|, and stone|” (Larkin “Churchgoing” 3); for a fuller account see Groves (2007).