This week: The heart of structured poetry is the meter. It is also the worst part of any poetry course. This week, we try to reconcile the two. Then we have just a couple of footnotes to close out the issue. Let's get to it.
There's a common lament that high school literature class ruins literature. In other words, being forced to study something takes the joy out of the thing itself, whether that's Tom Sawyer or the works of Shakespeare. If we were able to just enjoy the work without having to analyze and discuss every minute detail, if we could just read without needing to do a five-paragraph essay every other chapter, how much better would all of it be? I feel like this is especially true for poetry.
The first poet I really connected with was e.e. cummings. A science-fiction novel I got from the county library1 quoted the final lines from "pity this busy monster, manunkind2" and I was hooked. I got volume after volume of cummings' poetry out of the library and, years later, even read "nobody loses all the time" for a high school event. Somewhere in between this discovery and my high school performance, I had an English class that I didn't like very much.
Eighth grade isn't really a good year for anyone, but for me, it especially sucked because I was on a different schedule from all my friends. And because English, my favorite subject, was being taught by a teacher who just didn't seem to like me very much. Every assignment I turned in was barely acceptable and even asking for help didn't get me much further. Imagine my disappointment then at being told I couldn't use e.e. cummings as my poetry subject because he wrote in blank verse and we had to study poetry with metre3.
That one class nearly killed my enjoyment of poetry. With the brief exception of one unit in my senior year (and the aforementioned performance), I didn't read poetry until I got to college and discovered Bukowski4. All because of meter.
Poetic meter, according to Wikipedia, is:
the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
Cool. Now what?
Let's start with the bane of my eighth-grade existence, the Shakespearean sonnet. By strict definition, this style of poem is written in iambic pentameter, which, according to Your Dictionary is:
a pattern of unstressed, then stressed syllables in a set of five for each line. This means each line has 10 syllables, five stressed and five unstressed.
What we see with iambic pentameter are two key concepts. The first is that the "iamb" is the name of this particular pattern (unstressed then stressed). The second is that the "penta" means five. So, iambic pentameter is, as above, a ten-syllable line in a repeating pattern of five metric feet.
Here's an example from the Your Dictionary entry:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red….
Unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, and so on for a full ten syllables5. This is the basis of a lot of classical poetry and also serves as an example of how other meters work. Change the pattern of syllables, stresses, or other prosodic features and you've replaced "iamb" with trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. Change the number of feet per line and you've replaced "penta" with mono, di, tri, and so on6.
In other words, meter is just the rhythm of the poem. Nothing more, nothing less. But we shouldn't be teaching it as the be-all and end-all of the art of poetry. If for no other reason than it's too dependent on having one particular English accent in order to read or perform it correctly. To put it bluntly, from my soapbox, enforcing the use of meter as a measure of worth or correctness for a poem is a form of cultural imperialism that has no place in modern society. Poetry is a living, breathing art and really needs no defending by me. But if you have a kid in your life who's in school and who is struggling with a poetry unit, maybe let them know that there's a lot more to poetry than iambic pentameter.
Stay curious,
J
Linguistically Yours
Okay, it's a day late as I'm publishing this on November first, but the All Things Linguistic blog put together a really fun little collection of linguistic Halloween jokes. Maybe save it for next year?
I absolutely cannot remember which one, but I'm going to guess it was something by either Heinlein or Spider Robinson.
"We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go"
I'm going to keep mixing up the spelling just to irritate the spelling goblin that lives in my computer.
All credit here goes to Johnette Napolitano, of Concrete Blonde and whom I have never met, but whose transformation of Bukowski's "Singing is Fire" into a song on her "Pretty & Twisted" CD pushed my eyes open just a little bit further at a time when I really needed it.
One of the biggest issues I had, and have, is that so many poets played very fast and loose with their meter and yet textbooks treated it as though it were an absolute. In this one example, the entire meter hinges on reading "mistress'" as two syllables, miss-tress. But there's an apostrophe indicating possessive! Shouldn't that make the reading miss-tress-es? Not if you lived in Shakespeare's time, apparently.
Iambic pentameter is the one we all learn because it's what Shakespear and Milton and a bunch of other early English writers used.