Wednesday, March 11, 2015

John Dryden's "Marriage a-la-Mode"

 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 amman 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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