Poetry's Biggest Secret's finally revealed.  One poet dares to speak out but only if he gets to wear a mask.  It's not to conceal his identity, he just derives pleasure from it.  If other poets were to discover the identity of this masked man, they would chain him up and bind his hands and force him into a chest and lock it shut.  He would probably enjoy that too.  His name is Alec Numan, and if you want to know where he lives and at what time he is at home, just write in.

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‘What is prosody?’, you may well ask, and an excellent question it is too. Well, it has something to do with poetry, and something to do with prose. We have covered stress, metre and rhythm in the previous issues, and prosody is the manner in which anyone who employes language utilises stress to make the English Language expressive or ornamental.

 

Metre and rhythm are the rules of poetry, prosody is the way a poet breaks the rules. By inventing their own system of prosody a poet or author is able to create rhythmic style as unique as their own DNA - this is why we get books of poetry criticism with titles such as: The Prosody of Milton, Hopkins’s Prosody, etc.

 

‘A poet’s style is like his / her DNA? Breaking the rules of metre and rhythm makes

language expressive? Surely the Masked Poet has gone completely insane and needs to be locked up to protect himself and others.’ I hear you say. But no, I have my yellow pills and I have my red pills, and everything is OK. Everything I have said can be demonstrated.

 

Now, T. S. Elliot occasionally wrote in fornyrðislag, which is the poetic form of Beowulf. The essential rule of fornyrðislag is that three of the four stresses must fall on the three alliterating syllables. However, in this example, from ‘Ash Wednesday’, the stress does not fall on the syllable ‘my ...’ as it should:

  x            /    x      x      x      x     /     x   x       /     x     /

These matters that with myself || I (too) much discuss (l.28)

 

Instead, it falls on ‘... self’. This is a phonological tripwire. The reader’s expectations of a stressed ‘my ...’ are disappointed, and he / she must wonder why. The stray stress draws the readers attention to ‘self’, which brings into question the whole concept of ‘self’.

 

As the title ‘Ash Wednesday’ suggests that this is a poem with a Catholic theme, one can assume that this metrical misdemeanor was intended to highlight the idea of ‘Aseitas’: God as himself or itself. Therefore, what the prosody suggests, is that the poet should not turn to introspection for comfort, but to God in prayer. So, this is breaking the rules in order to convey meaning.

 

But, what about DNA?  DNA suggests a biological inheritance. So, we can assume that Elliot’s prosody has a mother or father. Take a look at this line from G. M. Hopkins’s ‘From St. Winefred’s Well’, whichis also in fornyrðislag:

  x       /     x      x      x      /  x        x         /     /    x   /

[As] long as (men are) mortal | [and] God merciful (II. i. l. 10).

 

The stress should fall on ‘man’, but it doesn’t. Here Hopkins uses his prosody to highlight man’s insignificance in comparison to God and God’s mercy. This is how great poets break the rules tomake language expressive.

As the name suggests, prosody is analogous in the spoken word to melody in music.  However, whilst melody specifically refers to the tuneful refrain of  a musical composition, as we have seen in the above discussions, prosody pertains more to a rhythmic counterpoint.  But, can it also refer to a sing-song quality to the way in which phonic elements of the words in the text are put together?

This is where the discussion deviates away from a rigid and auditable logic and asks you instead to consider the question from the "feel" of the thing; this last will be very subjective and personal to you and you may disagree with the ensuing. 

I often pass a motorway sign saying

Trafford Park 

Eccles.

My brain reads those two place names one after the other in order in which they appear on the sign: Trafford Park Eccles.  Now, to me that has a certain sing-song quality to it.  In fact, I haven't told you the whole truth here: my brain reads the two place names in the order in which they appear... and then adds the words 'alive alive-oh'.  So, in my own "special" way, I often pass a motorway sign saying Trafford Park Eccles, alive alive-oh.  Now, doesn't that just make you want to join in with the chorus?

Of course, one of the things that my brain has done with the information from the sign is to divide the phonemes from the place names up in terms of sharp and flat sounds as I perceive them.  The "a" sound in trafford is somewhere in the middle while the "or" sound has a very low inflection (deepened by the fact that it is unstressed), and the "e" sound of Eccles is very high pitched (although not as high as the "i"s of alive alive-oh).  Now, I realise that this is a very nebulous argument, but I would expect at least half of you, on reading aloud the words Trafford Park Eccles, alive alive-oh, to "feel" that there is a tune-like quality to those words in that order. 

However, I will accept that given the easily assimilated cultural reference of Molly Mallone, you may say that it is now very difficult to dissambiguate whether the effect derives solely from the motorway sign or I have changed your perception through the power of suggestion.  My personal opinion is that it is a bit of both, and that suggestive referencing can therefore itself be viewed as a phonological technique that you can use to enhance the reader's experience of the prosody of a piece of writing.    

 The other thing that my brain has done is to conceptualise the words through the medium of the process by which I would speak them.  What does that even mean is a very good question.  You see, when I am driving along in my car and I read that sign, I don't say the text of the sign aloud.  The only reason why there is a pause between the "ord" of Trafford and the "par" of park is because I need to adjust my mouth somewhat after forming the first of these sounds in order to make the second.  However, whilst reading it in my head, my mind automatically inserts the pause anyway.  A pause such as this when used as a rhythmic element in a poem is referred to as a caesura (scansion symbol ||, as you may have noticed in one of the above examples). There are many ways of producing caesuras in poetry, and you can have fun finding your own, but the easiest way to insert caesuras is through punctuation (such as full stops and commas).

 

So, when taken as a whole, prosody offers a different approach to the creation of poetry from that of syllable counts and stresses, but one that is complementary to classical notions of scansion rather than entirely separated from it.  It is possible, using prosodic considerations alone to create a poem that has a musicality to it by soloing - creating numerous different rhythm figures to fit one constant underlying beat.  However, that is not to say, that the resulting piece of poetry will defy any attempt to annotate its scansion in the classical way, as illustrated by the example of the unknown motorway poet:

  /        x           /       /     x           x      /    x      /       /

Trafford || Park Eccles, (||)  alive alive-oh

 EXERCISE

This month, take a poem you’ve written and write, or type, it out in continuous prose. Then, break it down into lines containing either three or four stressed syllables. Once you have done this, look at the words that are most important to the meaning of the poem.

 

Use your Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (or the Longman’s version), to find alternative words with a stronger stress. For words of less importance to the meaning, try finding words with a weaker stress. Send the resulting poem off to some high-end mags, and see what happens.