POETICS

 

         Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this thingy.  The noble intention behind this monthly series of articles is to share the knowledge of metre, rhythm, and poetic form that I have acquired through unnecessary hard labour.  This has driven me to insanity on at least four occasions, but the instructions contained herein should spare you from the frustrations I have suffered, and, indeed, the horror of the asylum. 

         This course will begin with a thorough examination of the Parnassian tradition, which is the preferred formal style of the Renaissance poets, the Augustan poets, the Romantics, and many of the Victorian poets.  By studying the Parnassian tradition you will learn how to annotate metre in English and American poetry, and write metrical poetry with confidence.   It is not my aim, however, to turn you into a Wordsworth, I merely hope to introduce, or refresh your memory, with a broad range of poetic styles.

         The first instalment will introduce you a simple linguistic technique for identifying stress in American and British English.  Next month we will cover metrical feet, and in the following months we will explore sonnets and various other poetic forms of the Parnasian tradition.  Once we are comfortable with scansion and form we will proceed to experimental poetry composed by the likes of Maggie O’Sullivan and Bill Griffiths.   

         

STRESS

 

          Rhythm is a difficult kettle of fish.  There are many texts on the subject, but none of them actually explain what a stress is.  It would seem to be the assumption that we are born with an ear for that sort of thing, but I certainly wasn’t, and it has taken me years to get the hang of it.  After sixteen years of getting to grips with stress I found the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English, ISBN 0-19-860772-5, edited by Clive Upton, and costing £19.99.  This is a brilliant book, and it is the only book you will need for the duration of this course. With this tome you will be able to write rhythmic poetry or mark the scansion on a poem that you are reading.  This is not the ideal way to go about it, because stress can be affected in connective speech, but if you use this method for a poetry essay you will not be challenged.  Later in the course we will start to use complex linguistic theory and speech analysis software, which you will be able to download for free.  Apart from the Dictionary, all other teaching resources will be provided in these articles.  So off you go to Waterstone’s, or another leading purveyor of books.

         Now you’ve made a successful trip to the bookstore, we will begin.  According to the dictionary there are two levels of stressed syllable in the English language: a strong stress and a medium stress.  There are also, of course, unstressed syllables.  I will flick to random word in my copy and see what we come up with: Merrymaker.  This word is represented in the dictionary thus:             

 

ˈmɛrɪ   ̩meɪkə(r)

 

This word is four syllables, as you can see.  The higher mark that proceeds ‘mer’, or ‘ˈmɛr’,  indicates that this is a strong stress.  The lower mark that proceeds ‘mak’, or ‘  ̩meɪk’, indicates that this is a medium stress.  The syllables ‘ry’ and ‘er’ are unmarked and are, therefore, unstressed syllables.  Be careful, though, because when a word has only the one stress, and that is a medium stress, the dictionary gives it the higher mark.  To make sure, you can look up other words that contain that syllable.  An example of this is ‘in,’ which is stressed in ‘inward,’ but not in ‘inside.’  The syllable ‘in’, then, is a medium stress.  Another problem is that the dictionary doesn’t always give the stress level of a monosyllabic word, but you can look up a polysyllabic word containing that syllable to determine whether it is stressed or not.

         There are some other phonetic rules that will help you as you start out.  These will be explained in greater detail later in the course, but I will keep it simple for the moment.  The first person pronoun ‘I’ is rarely a stressed syllable, but ‘eye’ is, because it actually sounds different to ‘I’ when pronounced -- say them out loud a few times and you will get the idea.  The conjunction ‘and’ is rarely a stressed syllable.  ‘The’ is rarely a stressed syllable.   Do not panic if this doesn’t make much sense yet.  You will eventually develop an ear for stress whilst you mark the scansion using your dictionary as a crib.  I struggled with stress for years before it suddenly became clear to me, but I think you will get it in a couple of months with these techniques.

         We will start with the first line of poetry I ever attempted, which is from Shakespeare’s famous sonnet:

 

         [Shall I][compare][thee to][a summ][er’s day?]     

 

We can now mark the stresses.  If we look up ‘shall’ in our dictionary we can see that it exists in both a strong and a weak form.  I will explain this later in the course, but for the moment it is easiest to confirm that ‘shall’ is stressed by looking up ‘shallow’ and ‘shallowness.’  We know that ‘I’ is rarely stressed, so we can mark ‘shall’ with a ‘/’  and ‘I’ with a ‘x’ .  When we look up ‘compare’ we see that it is the second syllable that is stressed.  The third box is a bit tricky, so we will come back to that when we have done the rest of the line.  The next box is ‘[a summ]’ with ‘summer’s’ crossing over the last two boxes.  The dictionary tells us that the first syllable of ‘summers’ is stressed.  Therefore ‘a’ must be unstressed.  We already know that the first syllable of the last box, ‘er’s’ is unstressed, but we can make sure that ‘day’ is the stress by looking up words containing that syllable.  ‘Day’ is stressed in some words, but unstressed in others, so we can assume that it is a medium stress and mark it as a stress.  Let’s return to that third box.  If you read the line aloud you may notice that there is a dominant rhythm developing that makes you put emphasis on the ‘to’.   Sometimes it is really just a matter of judgement, and it is often possible to get away with the stock phrase: ‘the dominant iambic rhythm promotes the second syllable of the third foot to a stress, thus making it an iamb’. We now have a line that has been annotated like this:

 

         [    /   x][  x     /    ][   x     /][x   /      ][ x      /    ]

         [Shall I][compare][thee to][a summ][er’s day?]

 

I have set some exercises below, in which you can annotate some lines of prose and verse as I have done in the example above.  You will also find the solutions section at the end.  The relevance of the square brackets will be explained next month.  This month I would like you to focus on identifying and marking stress.

 

EXERCISES

 

[Cross my][ heart and ][hope to][ die,][ stick a][ needle][ in my][ eye,][ if I ][ever][ tell a][ lie.]

 

[That’s my][ last Duch][ess paint][ed on ][the wall] (Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, l.1)

 

[O, the rain,][ the wea][ry drear][y rain] (James Clarence Mangan, ‘Twenty Golden Years Ago’, l.1)

 

[A dusk][ish riv][er-drag][on stretched][ along,] (Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ‘A Crocodile’, l.2) 

 

[The seas][ons bring][ the flow][er again] (Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H, ii, l.5)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOLUTIONS

 

 

[    /        x][    /      x    ][  /       x][   /  ][    /     x][    /    x][  /     x][  /    ][  /  x][ /   x][  /    x][  /   ]  

[Cross my][ heart and ][hope to][ die,][ stick a][ needle][ in my][ eye,][ if I ][ever][ tell a][ lie.]

 

[    /        x ][   x      /    ][ x     /     ][ x   /   ][   x    /  ]

[That’s my][ last Duch][ess paint][ed on ][the wall] (Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, l.1)

 

[ x    x    /    ][    x    /  ][ x      /   ][x   /   ]

[O, the rain,][ the wea][ry drear][y rain] (James Clarence Mangan, ‘Twenty Golden Years Ago’, l.1)

 

[ x    /    ][ x    / ][ x     /  ][ x       /         ][ x  /     ]

[A dusk][ish riv][er-drag][on stretched][ along,] (Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ‘A Crocodile’, l.2) 

 

[    x    /   ][ x       /   ][     x    /   ][x   x  /   ]

[The seas][ons bring][ the flow][er again] (Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H, ii, l.5)

 

 

Now you have the grasp of it you may wish to try this on your own poems.  The more you do the quicker you will develop an ear for stress.