Comments on: Dipodic Verse

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 13:45:02 +0000

Thanks, Alicia. I grant you the triple tet in all but OLD DOG BARKS BACK, which meter be damned, I can’t help hearing as barking. I’ll be studying your post about this. Meanwhile, if the shoe fits – that’s me – clock-work meter. But my last two poems are about clocks – I’m going somewhere with this, you’ll see.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 07:26:16 +0000

Maybe the second line of “Mending Wall” would be an even better example–that “swell” pushing up in its “un”-stressed position–(it is after all not uncommon to start a traditional ip line with a trochee.)
Meter in modern Greek poetry appears to work surprisingly like English meter–stress based. I am no expect here, and I have been unable to get anyone to sit down and “explain” Greek meter to me, but from the standpoint of an autodidact, it appears to work in exactly the same way. Modern Greek is a heavily stressed language, more so even than English–you can get away with mispronouncing a word if you get the stress right; on the other hand, if you pronounce it exactly correctly but get the stress wrong, it will be unintelligible, a verb might be in the wrong tense, etc.. The fifteeners of Greek folk poetry are really no different metrically from fourteeners in English, but with feminine endings. It’s ballad meter.
Cavafy, as in most things, is another matter–he writes in iambic lines of varying lengths, but apparently some of them scan according to demotic rules of elision and others according to katherevousa (the academic Greek register located somewhere between spoken and ancient Greek). Though the majority of his poems are unrhymed, a significant minority, as you know, are rhymed, often intricately so–a lot of use of rime riche rather than straight rhyme, which is perhaps too easy and jangly in Greek. It’s an almost impossible effect to get across in English (the effect seems to me something like Owen’s pararhyme, as one thing transforms into another by the shift of a vowel–with the difference that in modern Greek u, ei, oi, i, and e all actually sound the same), though I do wish more translators would at least try to get across some of his formal elements. Haviaras does this admirably (Walls, Che Fece, An Old Man, etc.), though he does not rhyme all of the rhymed ones (The City, for instance). I don’t know that there has been a definitive study of C.s prosody in English–or Greek, for that matter. If there has, please let me know so I can get it!
Do you know, by the way, Cavafy’s brother’s translations of his work? Rather Victorian in flavor (“fanes” for temples, and so on), but sometimes successful, and he always keeps the rhyme schemes. A worthwhile curiosity!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:10:01 +0000

Alicia makes a fine point here about meter, stress, and rhythm – another good way to test the distinction she makes is to read the first line of Frost’s “Mending Wall” as pure iambics! What I wonder about, and am sure Alicia can explain, is how imabics work in modern Greek poetry. Stratis Haviaras recently translated “The Canon” of Cavafy into loose iambic lines, and I wonder if this establishes a useful analog, e.g.,:
In a Town of Osroine
Last night, around midnight, they brought back to us
our friend Remon, who’d been hurt in a taverna brawl.
The moon, through a window we’d thrown wide open,
set his gorgeous body aglow, as he lay there on the bed.
We’re a real stew here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Remon’s one of us. And yet, last night, as the moon washed over
his lovely face, our thoughts drifted back to Plato’s Charmides.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:33:25 +0000

Meter is often mimetic, of course, but I wouldn’t confuse it with rhythm, which, for me, has to do with the heaviness of syllables and the speed or lack thereof with which they trundle across the page. There can be an infinite amount of discussion of how to “scan” this Frost couplet (and I am sure there are scholars who would disagree with me), but I imagine Frost means both lines to be bouncy (triple–i.e. amphibrachic, dactyllic, anapestic, what have you) tetrameters:
The OLD dog barks BACK wards with OUT get ting UP
I can re MEM ber when HE was a PUP.
Read it this way: I think you’ll find it works. Remember that monosyllables are always anceps in English–they can take a stress or shrug it off, no matter how “important” they may seem. Frost pushed those demoted syllables as much as he dared–this is on the extreme end–but see how those heavy demotions (including the main noun and verb of the first line) slow the line down to a crawl–the line can’t be bothered to get up to bark; whereas the second on skims along, with the “thumps” all landing on important things like nouns and verbs, the emphatic pronoun “he” and, of course “pup”, while unstressed syllables are on light syllables (“was” “a”) that we hardly need here at all.
Meter tells us how to read a line, not the other way around–we don’t go picking out what is important in a line and determine that that must therefore has a stress. Meter tells us what to stress. That’s what gives meter its enormous expressive range–how it pulls against the way we might “naturally” want to read a line. It’s that tug of war that makes it interesting. Otherwise, it would all be a matter of daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM. Clock-work metrical poems slot all the interesting and heavy words into the stressed positions.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:17:29 +0000

PS: If onomatopoeic meter doesn’t already exist by some other term, maybe it could be called onomatopedic verse.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:52:03 +0000

Let me ask you this, Alicia
If onomatopoeic words are imitative of noises, then is there an onomatopoeic meter that is imitative of noises? For example, how would you scan this Frost couplet:
The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
Here’s how I scan it:
The OLD DOG BARKS BACKwards, without getting up.
Can’t you just hear the old dog yapping: OLD DOG BARKS BACK
Perhaps the rest is unscannable, because it’s so quiet and understated, more like an unspoken thought in the silence after the dog’s resounding bark (or thumps, as the case may be).
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:57:40 +0000

I very much agree with Bunting here… I certainly only worry about the thumps–or the downbeats as I think of them. Bizarrely exotic scansions–and one certainly sees them, even in the august pages of places like the TLS–can rationalize much, and may have their scholarly purposes I suppose, but don’t actually reflect how poets write–or think–in meter. Anxiety about things like “allowable substitions”–as if syllables were subject to official rationing–come from the over-intellecutalizing of what is, after all, a visceral process.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:44:19 +0000

Folks interested in a fun explanation of native rhythm in English-language poetry should read Basil Bunting’s lecture called, “Thumps,” in Basil Bunting on Poetry. He finds, in the earliest English verse, four “thumps” to a line, and between the thumps, “or in front of them or behind them, the poets were free to cram as many less emphatic syllables as they could pronounce without gabbling, or as few as they liked — even none at all. [...] The moment poets began to count syllables, their difficulties began too – or the difficulties of the prosodist who tried to explain what the poet was doing. The notion was of a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, or of one stressed and two unstressed. But that is not the way the English language comes to our lips…”
Read the whole thing!
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:39:34 +0000

That’s an interesting point to bring up, Myshkin.
Actually, the prevailing wisdom that iambic pentameter is somehow ideal for relating the rhythms of English speech seems deeply flawed to me. It’s true that it is a wonderfully flexible meter (especially blank verse), capable of expressing an awful lot, but I don’t think English is innately iambic (or if it seems to be, it is because the more natural trochees get thrown into iambic position by the definite article). We’re just used to listening for ip. If you start listening for other meters, they are all over the place in everyday speech too. I hear natural adonic colons all the time–that “strawberry shortcake” rhythm at the end of Sapphic stanzas or classical dactyllic hexameter:
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By: myshkin

myshkin — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:21:26 +0000

This seems to relate to that well-known Robert Penn Warren essay on Shakespeare’s line, which gathers it’s strength from an embedded older form–anglo-saxon alliterative verse, with its 2 beats, caesura, 2 beats, regarless of numer of syllables, with 2 or 3 of the beats alliterative–tugging against the current (17th century) iambic pent.
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By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:09:45 +0000

I’m sure I agree.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:35:23 +0000

Hmmm. I’m not really sure how English meter could always be “really dipodic”–unless it is another conception of dipodic–but I haven’t read the book in question!
I think the mixing of classical terms with English prosody has always been hugely problematic and caused many misunderstandings where none need exist.
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By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:39:25 +0000

Note the difference between (a) descriptions and examples of dipodic metre as a particular kind of metre– one that goes with, or can also be scanned as, long and rapid iambics– and (b) claims that English or English-language verse or metre is always “really” dipodic (rather than being always “really” iambic, as Frost thought, or always “really” nothing in particular, with metrical bases that may vary completely among possible groupings of poems).
I suspect that (b) is a product, and not an especially credible one, of a particular kind of classical education– though I should really read Dennis Taylor’s book before I shame myself with further guesses in the place of informed claims.
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