Comments on: Marxist Hexameter: Genevieve Taggard in a Heroic Measure–now with audio!

By: anonanew

anonanew — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:06:14 +0000

“But much of that notion of modernism is really shifting in critical circles these days making it reasonable to discuss modernism and political poetry in the same breath!”

Sure, if by “these days” you mean the last 20+ years.
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:33:26 +0000

The Modernism/New Critical doublewhammy. You’ve summed it up concisely and it makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Julia. Another question I’d enjoy learning your answer to is why it’s NOW that the definitions (and corollary aesthetic standards) are finally shifting again, after having felt pretty frozen for about 40 years. . .
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By: Julia Lisella

Julia Lisella — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:57:56 +0000

Why has that aspect of modernism been obscured? I guess the short answer is the legacy of New Criticism coming later and preserving a modernism that fit their bill of the poem as a riddle to be cracked, revealed by the reader’s ingenuity and the poem’s. A certain type of modernist poem was right for such an endeavor. But I also think the rejection of Taggard’s version of modernism had to do with how inflected it was by gender. She wrote a lot about her own domestic life, her child, her role as a mother, and really tried to insert those topics into the political agenda. I think most of her contemporaries didn’t seem to have as much trouble integrating those issues as critics later seemed to in the 1950s…. On top of that, for many of the radical left poets, Modernism was also defined as a socio-cultural rejection of what came before–middle class, Victorian sentimentalism–even though one could argue that much of the wonderful 1930s rousing political poetry was pretty sentimental, too! and that many a poem and novel by a Victorian “lady” or “gentleman” helped create radical change in their own time even Taggard would have to admit– Still, modernists like Taggard saw modernism as a way to call into question capitalist constructs of middle class life, though in a complicated way, she also praised her domestic life. She has a great poem about her guilt and feeling of being torn between her middle class life and those around her during a strike, “Middle Class Woman at Midnight”… She called T.S. Eliot’s “brand” of modernism “nihilistic” or something along those lines, because she felt it was too removed from people’s struggles. But the comment also suggests that she believed there were several versions or “brands” or ways of being a modernist. Somehow we inherited the notion that modernism equals apolitical linguistic experimentation. But much of that notion of modernism is really shifting in critical circles these days making it reasonable to discuss modernism and political poetry in the same breath! I myself am pretty happy to teach Eliot, Taggard, Rukeyser, Millay, HD and many others as examples of modernisms–well it looks as though this conversation quieted down last week, but I finally got to a computer and thought I’d send this out.
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:12:58 +0000

Julia, this is a really useful contribution to the discussion. Thanks so much! What you say seems to have been true also of Sandburg, Lindsay, Markham. Why and how do you think this aspect of Modernism has been obscured?
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By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:15:38 +0000

NOW STOP, dear friend. It’s God’s gift–give Gabriel a chance to deliver.
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By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:06:22 +0000

It only takes two to start a linguistic love-in Woodie. We are all only after trying to make that genuine connection of logorrheic larghetto which leads to a language of eloquence, essentially euphonious, the tuneful diatonic that quickens and slows into rallentando, between consenting adults in love with shape-making, artists of the virtual air-space where mind-scapes fashion and flit fully melodious, mellow and appassionato, are the notes on our vowel-scale of ogham and go, go, go

the coat of arms for a Swiss canton
reverse design on Mercury dimes
the borough flag of Brooklyn
on the Coit Tower San Francisco
seal of Colorado state – Senate and HoR
National Guard – on pylons flanking
a staircase leading to Lincoln’s seat

on the front arms of his memorial
Hupmobile car – emblem of Columbus
Knights, and above the door to Chicago
City Hall – carried within the limits
of a sacred inner city – white-birch
rods, cylindrically wound in red
leather ribbon, a blade of bronze
facing out – frieze on the facade
of a Supreme Court – the imperial
symbol – fasces facists smash it
trash it, lash out her lags who’d have
us not gassin cuz there aint no imbas
fizzin within their frame.
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By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:35:36 +0000

Do you hear what he’s saying, everybody? He’s saying my polite and elegant diction has a fascistic element in it, which indeed it has. I’m only 70, but was still brought up so much in the Wasp era and mould that when I went away to my Public School in Hampshire I assumed along with my classmates that all Americans looked just like me. Indeed, I had just left Saint Paul’s in New Hampshire where there had never been a black, were just a handful of Catholics, and the only Jew was a Boston Strauss.

The final step, I pray, dear God, is that Barack Obama has laid that ghost to rest forever. He certainly has for me, because when I see that handsome face looking straight back at me and speaking such sense on the BBC I know I’m face to face at last with humanity.

Desmond Swords is Irish, and he’s got his laptop just clear of that Guinness spill where he sits at his table by the fire in the pub (it’s still damp and chilly in July). And the language of the people is what he’s typing out for us with his fingers on fire too, that’s why it’s so long. You can’t control language if you’re Irish–it’s got you in its grip and you better be quiet! So quiet too had better be we.

And I mean that.

Christopher
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By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:06:25 +0000

Yeah, Ronstar Silly Mohn was saying it is the first time in forty years the print mag is reflecting what’s happening with the flarf issue.

I am not a flarf groupie but am fully behind the flarf issue, because for too long there has bee a closed shop with lyric normals droning in the spot-light and getting all the (subsidised) praise in our miniscule community on life-support. This gaffe too is the first to actually execute the truly fair philosphy we get to hear a lot of online by the self-styled dictators of Democracy like John Boddie and other facists whose tight-ass talk of freedom and whatnot is merely the sheen of plank factory bosses whose idea of free speech extends soley to agreeing with every word they say.

I ‘ve lost count at the amount of pretend groovers in anti-intellectual cliques run on a basis of fear, founded on the rhetorical principles in which (as Laurie Smith who authored this article on The New Imagination in English poetry rag Magma, states) the mods of cod web democracies “use language as control – to control their own feelings by denying or minimising them and to control others by suggesting, through fluency, grammatical precision, irony or accent, that they are inferior.

Here the editorial policy is actually not run by idiots, which is very surprising for a poetry organiastion. What gets me is the people who moan about others saying their thing, when the best thing to do is, not read and if you get a ranter, as i had at the guardian poem of the week yesterday saying i was utter shite – just ignore it. If you are in any way good, loonies launching frenzied attacks are all part of the fun, and if you just say nothing and move on, once the heat’s gone the jibe’s just hanging there like frozon vomit. Pliny says something about it in his letters, how the moment befits passion, but time is conducive to reasoned opinion.

Unless we are trying to get global drug, sex-trafficking, or conspiracies to topple nations, there really is no good reason to start the Thirties Berlin shtick.

We are too lucky, too rich, to be thinking that Christopher Woodman, a very eloquent 70 year old man or Brady, should be treated as though they’re Robert Mugabe, for actually talking quantum level linguistics, impelled only by a deep love for language.

Once the logophobic oppos in the Big Mac and Fries of Poetry start waving the gun at yer head in a small room and demand crucifiction for the logorrheic – it’s time for the spirit of Borat, Bruno and Michael Moore to take over at the podium.
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By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:53:14 +0000

You in Dublin, me in Chiang Mai.

We just had a guest from Washington who said that the change was even bigger than that, that people had learned to talk again without notes! People were listening much better too, an equally important skill which Obama also models.

I am new to Harriet, but it seems to me there’s something of that rubbing off here too. The Poetry Foundation is the first powerful, well-financed poetry organization that is not part of the Old Dispensation, and I hear views regularly expressed here that would have had all sorts of institutional control freaks waving guidelines in your faces before. Is that possibly Obama too, that with the Bush etablishment voted out people are more willing to take chances?

At last the women are moving indeed—out from under the skirts of the feminists too. Hilary Clinton didn’t quite make it, but those 23 debates got men and women together as never before, and somehow her role as America’s representative abroad is equally important as Obama’s as president. At least that’s the way it looks to me in the Golden Triangle.

Christopher
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By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:12:07 +0000

I bumped into a bloke over from Chicago, New York, or some American megatropolis, last Friday evening in the Palace Bar on Fleet Street, which is a major lampost on the literary tourist round of Dublin boozers where proprietorial fingers fumble in a greasy till, adding the halfpence to the pence.

He was a lawyer and i asked him what changes had occured since Obama got sworn in. He said, though it was still at the stage were no-one talked of it, there had been a palpable release and dissolving of tension between the various racial communities that was too big to put into words. The historic magnitude of the simple fact of an African-American being president,and the fact that who is clearly the most intelligent person in the room who got the job on merit – had procured an immediate effect which has achieved what no amount of equality legislation could have done.

But no one talks about it, he said, even though it is clear to all.
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By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:10:06 +0000

Fascinating, Julia.

I don’t quite know why but the details of that post make me want to be there. I have tried so hard to keep left all my life, but even I was too late to be an unselfconscious socialist. I never joined a march I ever felt wholly comfortable in, as Genevieve Taggard’s obviously did. Indeed, I never found a political cause that I didn’t know from the start would create as many problems as it solved.

Born to late!

I too would have been a “modernist” in the sense that Genevieve Taggard thought she was, even if I didn’t write like one. Indeed, I still am, in a sense, simply because I was born before the Second World War. But still I don’t write like one—and I’m also very sympathetic to the political movement that would wipe the whole American slate clear of their prejudices and distortions.

Christopher
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By: Julia Lisella

Julia Lisella — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:21:17 +0000

Thank you Annie, for initiating the lively conversation about a poet who is too often ignored. I wanted to add here, though, a comment in connection with the poem being “uninflected by modernism”. Genevieve Taggard, along with many of her radical left poet contemporaries, considered herself a modernist and believed she was participating in a modernist project. For her, as for others, that experiment was both linguistic and socio-political. And a line like “Such women looked odd marching on American asphalt” could be a way to define that modernist “moment” when those seemingly “out of place” in the American conversation because of gender and/or class become present through language, through poetry. For Taggard, this was really part of her sense of modernism.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:18:19 +0000

Here’s how I scan the first stanza:

LAST, WALK/ ing with STIFF /LEGS as / IF they /CAR-ried /BUN-dles,
Came MOTH /ers, HOUSE/ WIVES, OLD/ WOM-en/ who KNEW / WHY they ab /HORRED WAR.
Their CLOTHES/ BUNCHED a /-BOUT them, / they HOBB/ -led with ANX/ -ious STEPS
To KEEP/ with the STRIDE/ of the MAR/ -chers, e- RECT/ BEAR-ing wide / BAN-ners.

Note L.4 ‘to keep with stride of the marchers, erect’ is anapestic/iambic–which makes sense, since anapestic/iambic is a marching rhythm. ‘Bearing wide banners’ returns to the falling rhythm, weighed down by those banners.

Taggard is loading her lines with the weight of ancient Greek and Latin–far more spondaic than English: note all the spondees in the first three lines.

There’s no way one can make a line ‘march’ with a lot of spondees, and since IAMBIC is a MARCHING rhythm, the default rhythm becomes trocahic/dactylic, and this is what Annie is hearing.

The lines however, ARE arhythmic and halting, which is what Colin is hearing, and thus HE is correct.

And Taggard is trying to make her bundled-down women hobble along to the ear, and so the halting rhythm. So Taggard is correct, also.

It should also be pointed out that spondaic feet (two long) are equivalent to anapestic and dactylic feet (a long and two short) but NOT to iambic and trochaic feet (one long, one short) and mixing up these feet will ALWAYS make a rhythm seem halting and jittery.

Thomas
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:47:43 +0000

Not sure why Colin has this: [x] [x] see below:

[x] [x] Know | ye the land | where the cyp | ress and myr | tle

Poe’s scansion re: the Byron is correct. (See what I posted above, or go to eapoe.org.) Colin’s is not.

There is NO way to HEAR: [x][x], for AS SOON AS the speaker says, “Know,” the poem BEGINS–there is no other way around it. These: [x][x] are the marks of a pedant, signifying nothing…

I agree with Colin re: the Taggard, but Colin (and Annie obviously) are too proud to let themselves be taught by Poe. Which is perfectly understandable. They both were schooled in the ‘Understanding Poetry’ era, when it was fashionable to not only ignore Poe, but to deride him; the reason for the derision was nothing but bad blood, an old quarrel, between Emerson and Poe which was carried on by Emerson’s children: William James & T.S. Eliot…and to those (almost everyone) unaware of the quarrel it seemed the natural ‘way of things’ and thus carried more weight…anyway, thanks to Colin and Annie…fascinating how an issue based on ‘quantity’ alone can so divide us!

Thomas
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By: Colin Ward

Colin Ward — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:53:52 +0000

By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:28:10 +0000

For those of you who are interested in a nice piece of American Literary History, Colin Ward as ‘Kaltica” and Thomas Brady as ‘Tom West’ had a stirring, 18 page debate about prosody on Poets.org just over a year ago. It starts here with Tom West: http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15405&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30&sid=988dbbfe433585a0780a96f36e6012fa

“Kaltica,
It’s always a pleasure to debate you because you are not my mirror; you do not reflect, but challenge every idea I have.

The pages involving a detailed discussion of Hookers by Marco Morales specifically begins here: http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15405&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=105

Lest you accuse me of being ingenuous, I was ‘ACommoner,’ and yes, I am proud of it even though I didn’t make it all the way to the end of the thread. One day that event too might become our Literary History–if we get that far!

Christopher
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:44:23 +0000

Thanks, this is not the poem I was referring to earlier. I’d call this mixed triple meter, anapestic and dactylic lines–not consistently falling meter like the Taggard.

Re the line where you hear anapests, I hear a very regular English accentual-syllabic dactylic hexameter with dactyls, trochees, and a footless ending, all very typical variations in dactylic meter.

NOT for / ME and mine / ONly/ FOR my/ CLASS I have/ COME

The point of scansion in my view is to provide the simplest possible description of the rhythmical coherence in a poem, if the poem has rhythmical coherence. I hear rhythmical coherence in the Taggard poem; you don’t. It seems to me you are hearing with your brain rather than your ear, but you seem to think that about me as well. I don’t know that there is much more point to discussing it. But thanks for the energetic discussion.

All best,
Annie
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By: Colin Ward

Colin Ward — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:17:35 +0000

Annie,

thereafter the dactylics get going to such an extent that I’d be surprised if you couldn’t hear them.

I can hear trinaries, including these two feet of clearcut anapest (among many others, along with the copious amphibrachs I’ve mentioned):

For my class | I have come

My question is: Can you not hear the binaries?

If this is free verse, then free verse is not free verse.

What else would you call something that has an equal number of iambs, trochees, anapests, amphibrachs and dactyls? Note how many of the rhythm strings change in the middle of the line.

“There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.”

– T.S. Eliot

The arrhythmia we see presented as free verse today didn’t begin to dominate until more than a decade after “At Last the Women Are Moving”. That was right about when scansion stopped being taught in schools. Funny, that.

Your hookers looks like free verse with a strong trimeter undercurrent similar to the trimeters Bishop gets into in “The Moose.”

I often give this to students on their first day, asking them if it’s free verse or metrical. (I warn them that if they say the latter they have to scan it for us!) If one of them ever gets it right I’ll know I’m in the presence of the next Algernon Swinburne. When they ask for the answer I tell them that, before the course is through, they will be giving me the answer. (The lengths I go to in order to keep ‘em coming back!)

“Bride of Abydos” looks on quick glance like it starts in iambic tetrameter and changes to iambic pentameter partway through.

Perhaps we’re talking about two different poems. Lest there be any confusion, I’m referring to this one:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime —
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle
Now melt into softness, now madden to crime?
Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine,
And the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,
Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in their bloom?
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute —
Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all save the spirit of man is divine?
‘Tis the land of the East — ’tis the clime of the Sun —
Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
Oh, wild as the accents of lovers’ farewell
Are the hearts that they bear and the tales that they tell.

will check back on tuesday, af

Sounds good. See you then, Annie. Happy 4th!

Best regards,

Colin
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:54:28 +0000

Colin, I’ve posted an audio clip of the poem above. Granted, the dactyls in the first stanza is rough and tentative, but thereafter the dactylics get going to such an extent that I’d be surprised if you couldn’t hear them. If this is free verse, then free verse is not free verse. Your hookers looks like free verse with a strong trimeter undercurrent similar to the trimeters Bishop gets into in “The Moose.”

“Bride of Abydos” looks on quick glance like it starts in iambic tetrameter and changes to iambic pentameter partway through.

Heading out for now but will check back on tuesday, af
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By: Colin Ward

Colin Ward — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:29:52 +0000

Annie,

why spend time making a hypothetical scansion that juxtaposes them?

To show that this is free verse.

I could ask you the same question: Why spend time making hypothetical scansions when S1-L1 is clearly iambic, S1-L4 obviously amphibrachic, and S2-L2 undeniably trochaic?

The fact that it has a lot of trinaries mixed in with whole lines of binary simply makes it what it is: polyrhythmic free verse. If it helps, I could show you a few poems that are much harder to categorize than “At Last the Women Are Moving”. For example, there is the Usenet “filler and killer” classic, “Hookers”, by Marco Morales:

Missing you again,
I embrace shallow graves.
Pale faces, doughlike breasts
help me forget.

A “softball” question: In what meter would you scan Byron’s “Bride of Abydos”?

Best regards,

Colin
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:17:55 +0000

funny, Colin, that’s exactly what I was going to say to you
(- :

Of course, the linguists would say we are both wrong.

However, to continue a bit:

The reason I scan is to describe what is there to my ear. I hear a regular groove going in this poem, and I think anyone who read it aloud would hear it too. The poem is simply, obviously, blatantly, not in free verse; even though the line-lengths vary a bit, the basic rhythm runs through pretty consistently.

THe job of scansion is to figure out the simplest (Occam’s razor) description of what is happening.

We both know that antibacchics and bacchics wouldn’t exist in the same lines–as you say, one wouldn’t occur in an anapestic poem, and one wouldn’t occur in a dacytlic poem– so why spend time making a hypothetical scansion that juxtaposes them?

The poem is clearly in a falling rhythm; even without scanning, one can see that the majority of lines begin with a stress and all end with either a monosyllable or a falling rhythm.

Clearly it’s also in triple rhythm.

Dactyls are an obvious guess, and in fact, there is no foot here that wont fit the model-

i have to go now, but will try to continue later.

over and out,
AF
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:16:02 +0000

Des,

The accents were already attached to the text copied from the Poe essay, which I recommend you read; that Irishman Poe knew more about verse than the whole lot of them put together; study that work, the ‘Rationale,’ for a week, or so, and you’ll be an expert a hundred times over, I guarantee it.

By the way, yesterday, on June 30, 1835, Poe, at age 26, published ‘The Unparralleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,’ one of the first examples of modern science fiction.

If one discovers a gas 37 times lighter than hydrogen, one might use a balloon for lunar travel…

Some are full of hot air and some are…

Thomas
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:04:52 +0000

Dear Thomas,

Yes, absolutely, you are right–dactylic meter in English as in classical languages does use involve many spondees (though in English they come out more like trochees). Just as anapestic meter can substitute iambs frequently and iambic meter can substitute anapests frequently, so dactylic meter substitutes trochees frequently and vica versa.

I love Poe’s long essay on meter–one of the most beautifully written pieces of prosody ever, and perceptive too. Like Nabokov’s brief and brilliant “Notes on Prosody,” or Housman’s fertile footnote about dipodic meters, it makes you wish he’d written even more on the subject.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:58:58 +0000

Arē ĕmblĕms | ōf deĕds thăt | āre dŏne ĭn | thēir clĭme. |

http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/ratlvrsd.htm
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:10:25 +0000

Pretty much, silly.
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By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:04:51 +0000

Hey Tom, how did yu get the stress accents above the letters please?
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:41:17 +0000

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:28:14 +0000

Annie,

I really appreciate the time you are devoting to this subject!

I have no prejudice against noniambic rhythms.

I just feel that no rhythm has been established in the first place by Taggard. I think what she’s trying to do, actually, is write English heroic verse on the Greek model, which features dactyls AND many spondees. As you know, this is very difficult to do in English, and, as you point out, the result is quite rough–but not without interest and even a certain majesty. I do want to thank you for sharing it.

I had no idea of this, and was stunned when you wrote: “it seemed clear that there was no real extant work in print on the scansion and variations of noniambic meter.”

Is this possible?

This is a sad state of affairs, for I love the trochaic and the dactylic rhythms.

Anyway, do I have a treat for you!

The following features one of the greatest critic/prosodists analyzing a NONIAMBIC poem by Lord Byron.

Which is more important when scanning? The line, or rhythmical flow? This is just one question to ponder as one reads the following.

Enjoy:

I shall now best proceed in quoting the initial lines of Byron’s “Bride of Abydos:”

Now the flow of these lines, (as times go,) is very sweet and musical. They have been often admired, and justly — as times go — that is to say, it is a rare thing to find better versification of its kind. And where verse is pleasant to the ear, it is silly to find fault with it because it refuses to be scanned. Yet I have heard men, professing to be scholars, who made no scruple of abusing these lines of Byron’s on the ground that they were musical in spite of all law. Other gentlemen, not scholars, abused “all law” for the same reason: — and it occurred neither to the one party nor to the other that the law about which they were disputing might possibly be no law at all — an ass of a law in the skin of a lion.

The Grammars said something about dactylic lines, and it was easily seen that these lines were at least meant for dactylic. The first one was, therefore, thus divided:

Knōw yĕ thĕ | lānd whĕre thĕ | cyprĕss ănd | myrtlĕ. |

The concluding foot was a mystery; but the Prosodies said something about the dactylic “measure” calling now and then for a double rhyme; and the court of inquiry were content to rest in the double rhyme, without exactly perceiving what a double rhyme had to do with the question of an irregular foot. Quitting the first line, the second was thus scanned:

Arē ĕmblĕms | ōf deĕds thăt | āre dŏne ĭn | thēir clĭme. |

It was immediately seen, however, that this would not do: — it was at war with the whole emphasis of the reading. It could not be supposed that Byron, or any one in his senses, intended to place stress upon such monosyllables as “are,” “of,” and “their,” nor could “their clime,” collated with “to crime,” in the corresponding line below, be fairly twisted into anything like a “double rhyme,” so as to bring everything within the category of the Grammars. But farther these Grammars spoke not. The inquirers, therefore, in spite of their sense of harmony in the lines, when considered without reference to scansion, fell back upon the idea that the “Are” was a blunder — an excess for which the poet should be sent to Coventry — and, striking it out, they scanned the remainder of the line as follows:

—— ēmblĕms ŏf | deĕds thăt ăre | dōne ĭn thĕir | clĭme. |

This answered pretty well; but the Grammars admitted no such foot as a foot of one syllable; and besides the rhythm was dactylic. In despair, the books are well searched, however, and at last the investigators are gratified by a full solution of the riddle in the profound “Observation” quoted in the beginning of this article: — “When a syllable is wanting, the verse is said to be catalectic; when the measure is exact, the line is acatalectic; when there is a redundant syllable it forms hypermeter.” This is enough. The anomalous line is pronounced to be catalectic at the head and to form hypermeter at the tail: — and so on, and so on; it being soon discovered that nearly all the remaining lines are in a similar predicament, and that what flows so smoothly to the ear, although so roughly to the eye, is, after all, a mere jumble of catalecticism, acatalecticism, and hypermeter — not to say worse.

Now, had this court of inquiry been in possession of even the shadow of the philosophy of Verse, they would have had no trouble in reconciling this oil and water of the eye and ear, by merely scanning the passage without reference to lines, and, continuously, thus:

Here “crime” and “tell” (*) are cæsuras, each having the value of a dactyl, four short syllables; while “fume Wax,” “twine and,” and “done Oh,” are spondees which, of course, being composed of two long syllables, are also equal to four short, and are the dactyl’s natural equivalent. The nicety of Byron’s ear has led him into a succession of feet which, with two trivial exceptions as regards melody, are absolutely accurate — a very rare occurrence this in dactylic or anapæstic rhythms. The exceptions are found in the spondee “twine And” and the dactyl, “smile on such.” Both feet are false in point of melody. In “twine And,” to make out the rhythm, we must force “And” into a length which it will not naturally bear. We are called on to sacrifice either the proper length of the syllable as demanded by its position as a member of a spondee, or the customary accentuation of the word in conversation. There is no hesitation, and should be none. We at once give up the sound for the sense; and the rhythm is imperfect. In this instance it is very slightly so; — not one person in ten thousand could, by ear, detect the inaccuracy. But the perfection of verse, as regards melody, consists in its never demanding any such sacrifice as is here demanded. The rhythmical must agree, thoroughly, with the reading, flow. This perfection has in no instance been attained — but is unquestionably attainable. “Smile on such,” a dactyl, is incorrect, because “such,” from the character of the two consonants ch, cannot easily be enunciated in the ordinary time of a short syllable, which its position declares that it is. Almost every reader will be able to appreciate the slight difficulty here; and yet the error is by no means so important as that of the “And” in the spondee. By dexterity we may pronounce “such” in the true time; but the attempt to remedy the rhythmical deficiency of the And by drawing it out, merely aggravates the offence against natural enunciation, by directing attention to the offence.

My main object, however, in quoting these lines, is to show that, in spite of the Prosodies, the length of a line is entirely an arbitrary matter. We might divide the commencement of Byron’s poem thus:

Know ye the | land where the. |

or thus:

Know ye the | land where the | cypress and. |

or thus:

Know ye the | land where the | cypress and | myrtle are. |

or thus:

In short, we may give it any division we please, and the lines will be good — provided we have at least two feet in a line. As in mathematics two units are required to form number, so rhythm, (from the Greek [[Greek text:]] αριθμος [[:Greek Text]], number,) demands for its formation at least two feet. Beyond doubt, we often see such lines as

Know ye the —
Land where the —

lines of one foot; and our Prosodies admit such; but with impropriety; for common sense would dictate that every so obvious division of a poem as is made by a line, should include within itself all that is necessary for its own comprehension; but in a line of one foot we can have no appreciation of rhythm, which depends upon the equality between two or more pulsations. The false lines, consisting sometimes of a single cæsura, which are seen in mock Pindaric odes, are of course “rhythmical” only in connection with some other line; and it is this want of independent rhythm which adapts them to the purposes of burlesque alone. Their effect is that of incongruity (the principle of mirth;) for they include the blankness of prose amid the harmony of verse. –eapoe ‘rationale of verse’

Thomas
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By: Colin Ward

Colin Ward — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:21:50 +0000

…backwards, forwards…
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By: Colin Ward

Colin Ward — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:17:23 +0000

Annie,

Colin, I think the gist of your difference rests on the idea that all metrical lines should be scanned from the back.

And they should, but, as you saw, I was careful to use your forescanning approach throughout. Between us, you and I have scanned this poem backwards, forewards and upside down and neither of us has found a single line of unambiguous dactyl. Iamb? Trochee? Amphibrach? Yes. Dactyl? No.

I suspect that the difference between our approaches is that I prefer a simplifying, unifying prosody while you prefer a complicating, divergent one. As for the many sources you and I could cite back and forth, common sense is not an open book test. If a scansion paints a person into such a corner that s/he needs to pull Greek rabbits (an unrepeated first paeon in English prosody?) out of a hat I submit that it may be time to rethink one’s view of the process.

-o-

“When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras.” – Dr. Theodore Woodward(?)
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