By: Annie FInch

Annie FInch — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:39:57 +0000

Hi Steve and Alicia, It’s so good to see a post involving prosody here that I will plunge right into the thread…. By dipodic, I mean not anything to do with a number of stresses, but the alternation of strong and weak stresses in each line, so the line swings along as if on two different “feet.” (this is the definition explored by Housman in the famous footnote to his essay “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” where he makes great claims for the future of dipodic meter). A famous example is Gilbert and Sullivan’s
I AM the VERy MODel OF a MODern MAJor GENerAL
(My bold isn’t coming out here so I’ll just say that the caps are in bold on the syllables AM, MOD, MOD, and GEN to indicate the stronger stresses)
Many strongly metrical poems can easily be heard as dipodic; Poe’s “The Raven, ” for example, can fall without much effort into a pattern of alternating strong and weak trochees:
WHILE i PONDered, WEAK and WEARy.
(Caps are bold on WHILE and WEAK to indicate the stronger stresses)
A more complex example, both because it doesn’t make any metrical sense unless you hear the dipodic pattern, and because it also has a strong caesura in the middle, is Meredith’s “Love in the Valley”:
NEAR the FACE of DAWN, that || DRAWS aTHWART the DARKness
THREADing IT with COLour, || like YEWberRIES the YEW.
(caps are bold on NEAR, DAWN, DRAWS,and DARk, and on THREAD, COL, YEW, and YEW, to indicate stronger stresses)
The Gilbert and Sullivan song might be called iambic-dipodic, since it alternates strong and week iambs. The Meredith would be trochaic-dipodic, alternating strong and weak trochees.
At first I heard the Hardy poem as dipodic, but now I really don’t think it is. If it were dipodic, it would have to be trochaic-dipodic, I think, like “The Raven.” That scansion would work pretty well for this line:
SHE in FORMed me WHAT would HAPpen BY and BY.
(caps are bold on SHE, WHAT, and the first BY to indicate the stronger stresses)
But not well at all for this line:
COLoured PURPle, WITH a MARgin OF blue SEA.
(caps are bolld on COL, WITH, and OF to indicate the stronger stresses)
Dipodics is not the kind of meter that poets tend to vary much—it’s too easy to lose track of the pattern—and a poet of Hardy’s ear would not be likely to stress “of” more than “sea.”
Good prosodists tend to subscribe to he Occam’s razor principle of scansion—the simpler, the better—and I think in this case the simplest and most accurate scansion of “The Place on the Map” would be not dipodic at all but iambic. Hardy does use some fairly daring variations in the iambic meter. Each stanza has a pattern of varying line-lengths: a pentameter, a heptameter, a trimeter, and another pentameter. There are plenty of anapests, especially in the third and fourth last line of each stanza. But he doesn’t do anything that breaks the iambic pattern. Iambic meter is the only scansion that makes sense of not only the two lines I just looked at—
She inFORM/ed me WHAT/ would HAP/pen BY /and BY
colored PUR/ple WITH /a MAR/ gin OF/ blue SEA
and also of all the other lines in the poem.
The paper you heard sounds fascinating in so many ways, but unless there are scansions there that will convince me otherwise (if there are, I’d love to see them and will happily change my mind), I think the dipodic part of the argument is not valid. Though Hardy did use some noniambic meters (among the most memorable, to my ear, the dactyls of “The Voice,”) “The Place on the Map” is an iambic poem, as is most of his poetry. Generally, he was more adventurous in terms of form (how the stanzas are built in temrs of rhyme, line length, etc) than meter.
Thanks, Steve, for the intriguing post.…
Annie
Report this comment

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:56:04 +0000

Hi Steve–thanks for bringing us back to the subject of poems! It sounds like this talk had some overlap of ideas, too, with your own interesting presentation on landscape in poems at ALSC. I’ve just been rereading Hardy.
The poem swings prettily easily into dipodic verse for me–(though as is often the case it takes a couple of lines to pick up–or pick up on–the momentum). Hardy is the king of nonce verse forms, but they all have their internal logic, and this no different–this scans quite regularly, with the stanzas all going (in dipodic measure):
3 strong beats (i.e., “For the wonder and the wormwood of the whole“)
4 strong beats
2 strong beats
3 strong beats
As if he has in the first two lines divided up a heptameter, and in the second, divided up a pentameter line.
The Victorians–and the Georgians–were engaged in all kinds of interesting metrical experiments that got thrown out with the bathwater in the vers libre movement. Alas, much post-Victorian metrical poetry (at least in the US) has gone back to an almost 18th century rigidity.
Since I doubt dipodic verse is all that familiar to most people, I am tempted to do a separate post on the issue…
Report this comment

Comments on: the map that hangs by me (or, thomas hardy, or, blogging the MSA, part two)

By: Annie FInch

By: Alicia (A.E.)