Marriage a-la-Mode
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now
When passion is decay'd?
We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could,
Till our love was lov'd out in us both:
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
'Twas pleasure first made it an oath.
If I have pleasures for a friend,
And farther love in store,
What wrong has he whose joys did end,
And who could give no more?
'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,
Or that I should bar him of another:
For all we can gain is to give our selves pain,
When neither can hinder the other.
The traditional "ballad" verse form in poetry is four lines rhymed ABCB, with the second and fourth lines rhymed and in iambic tetrameter while the first and third line are in iambic trimeter.
The
verse form that Dryden uses in "Marriage a-la-Mode" is a
variation on that form, executed with great skill. It is a polished,
well-crafted poem using a traditional rhyme and meter, but the
metrical feet vary within it, which keeps the poem from becoming
stilted or formal. (Longfellow and Tennyson can be unrelenting in
their strict and stiff adherence to a meter and rhyme-scheme, but
Dryden avoids the dullness that overdone strict metrical repetition
can result in. Tennyson and Longfellow are often criticized for a
"lack of invention" in their verse, but Dryden certainly
avoids that criticism here.)
The
poem consists of two stanzas of eight lines each.
The
lines alternate with odd-numbered lines being tetrameter and the
even-numbered lines being tetrameter.
Both
stanzas begin utilizing iambic feet, but switch to anapestic feet in
the second quatrains. Iambs are two-syllable metrical units, called
"feet", in which the first syllable is unstressed and the
second syllable is stressed. "Anapests" are three-syllable
feet that consist of unstressed-unstressed-stressed syllables.
In
the first stanza, the lines are iambic for the first four lines. The
fifth line transitions from the strict marriage of two syllables to
the freer marriage of three syllables in the line in which the
marriage being discussed breaks down and interest in a new, third
party introduced in the second stanza is foreshadowed. Very cleverly,
the meter mirrors the subject. The first first foot is iambic, the
second anapestic; the third is iambic, the fourth is anapestic: "We lov'd,
and
we lov'd,
as long
as
we could."
[I indicated stressed syllables by use of boldface font and indicated
the feet in which the syllables were connected by underscoring the
words.] The remaining lines are composed of anapests. The last line
of the first stanza might seem like an iamb, but it is functioning as
a catalectic anapest. The first syllable is swallowed up in the "it"
that disappeared into the contraction "'Twas". A catalectic
first or last foot is often used in lines in anapestic trimeter to
give brevity (the soul of wit) and abruptness, which lends itself to
humor or irony: "There once was
a lad from
Cathay...."
There once was a lad from Cathay
Who could never know quite what to say.
He would soon start to balk
When in medias talk--
Like an ass, he would titter and bray.
[Limericks
are properly entirely anapestic, five lines,
trimeter-trimeter-dimeter-dimeter-trimeter. But very often, the first
foot on the first line has two syllables but functions as an anapest.
The limerick, with its brief lines with long, rollicking feet, is well-suited to the kind
of ironic (or off-color) humor one associates with limericks. The
Irish have a wonderful sense of fun in their speech and verse, but
the limerick form is English. There you go, the English blaming the
Irish for their own naughty sins yet again....]
The
term for a foot being a syllable short is "catalexis". A
famous example is William Blake's "The Tyger", which is in trochaic tetrameter, but the final foot is short and renders the line
abrupt and the final word emphasized: "Tyger, Tyger, burning
bright." A "trochee" is a two-syllable foot in which
the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed; it is the
opposite of the iamb.
The second stanza of "Marriage a-la-Mode" proceeds in iambs for the first four lines, and then reverts to anapests for the remainging four lines, with, again, a catalexis at the beginning of the last line: "When neither can hinder the other."
The
sixth and eighth lines of the second stanza close with what is called
a "feminine rhyme". Feminine rhyme is when an extra,
unstressed syllable occurs at the end of the line. At the end of a
line, such a rhyme is not counted (usually) to change the type of
foot. In iambic lines, it is not considered to transform an iamb to
an amphibrach (an "amphibrach" is a three-syllable foot
that is unstressed-stressed-unstressed),
and feminine rhyme does not metamorphose an anapest into some ancient
Greek tetrasyllabic teratologic foot.
"Marriage
a-la-Mode" is witty and ironic, and Dryden has chosen the
perfect form to match the content of the poem...and executed it
skillfully indeed.
In
an earlier post, I pointed out that John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
is not the most skilled of poets. I proposed that the first two lines
of “A Satire Against Mankind” begins with an awkward meter and a
rather poor off-rhyme:
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
Rochester
had talent to do much better than that, but he was clearly too hasty
to strop and whet his verse. He was happy enough with it at an
earlier, duller draft than Milton, Dryden, or Pope (or Johnson) would
ever have allowed.
Just
to illustrate that he didn't have to stay with the errant trochee on
the second line or the failed am—man rhyme, I decided to change the
catalectic first line of the ad hoc, ex tempore limerick I
incorporated above so that the initial anapest would be complete.
Voila! All Rochester had to do was to knapp the rough matter
of the original more finely into form, then polish it a bit.
When a Mandarin came from Cathay,
He'd a struggle to find what to say.
He would soon start to balk
When in medias talk—
Like an ass, he would titter and bray.
Well.
The point being, that Rochester could have done better, and Johnson
knew it. Johnson, like Humpty Dumpty, made words do what he wanted.
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