Little Feet

Music has analyzed and notated its rhythmic elements with great precision. People all around the world can read musical notation and understand and play a composer's work, regardless of their language background. I once looked over the shoulder of a young man playing a piano at a university in Taipei, and the score was a composition by Scriabin. It was an American edition of a Russian composition played by a Chinese boy using the system of notation native to all three peoples. Poetry, alas, needs translation to cross so many borders.

Poetry's analysis of itself is far less precise and comprehensive. The system of analysis of poetic rhythm is called "prosody".

As musical rhythm is broken down into units of rhythmic counting called "measures", poetry is usually broken up into "lines". Measures and lines are analogues.

A common rhythmic measure in music is 4/4 time; a common line of poetry is iambic pentameter. (I will explain "iambic pentameter" below.)

Measures in music are divided up into "beats". The prosodic analogue for a beat is called a "foot". The nomenclature of prosody dates back to the ancient Greeks, and the words in English tend to trace quite directly back to Greek roots. Roman and Greek prosody used the words "pes" and "pous"--among others--but the Roman pedal tones became the English "feet".

In music, basic counting from which measures subdivide is indicated by the "time signature"; again, a common example would be 4/4 time: a count of four beats per measure, with the beat being indicated by a quarter-note (crotchet). A waltz is indicated by a time signature of 3/4: three beats per measure, with the beat being indicated by a quarter note. A time signature of 6/8 indicates a measure of six beats, each beat indicated by an eighth-note (quaver). The subdivision of line by foot is called "meter".

The most fundamental measure in English is called "iambic pentameter". "Pentameter" means a line of five feet. Other common metrical line lengths are "trimeter" (three feet), "tetrameter" (four feet), and "hexameter" (six feet). An "iamb" is a type of foot.

There are many types of metrical foot, and this is where things become complex or hard to define. Greek and Latin were languages in which vowels in words were differentiated by time--long or short. The term for verse employing metrical count by foot based on vowel duration is "quantitative verse". English is a "stressed" language; vowels in words and sentences are stressed or unstressed.

For a recent popular example of quantitative speech, think of the first Harry Potter movie, in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione were learning to use their wands to move a feather. "LeviO-O-Osa" they'd intone while flourishing their wands, the "o" in "leviosa" held longer than any other vowel in the word. The "i" is held for a much shorter duration than the "o" it precedes.

English, on the other hand, is a stressed or accented language. For example, the word "English" is accented on the first syllable: "ENGlish". Most metered verse in English is measured out in unstressed-stressed verse. Some poets writing in English have counted their verse by vowel-length, but the great majority base their meter on patterns of unstressed-stressed feet. There are many types of foot, and they can be tricky to define, because meaning can influence where stress is placed--and sometimes stresses move. Consider a common word: "umbrella". In many regions, the stress is on the penultimate vowel: "umBRELLa"; but in the Southern U.S., it can be pronounced as "UMbrella", with the stress on the first vowel. Put the word in a verse, and a Southerner might end up with a line that is metrically variant from a New Englander's intent.

An iamb is a foot that consists of two vowels and the pattern of stress is unstressed followed by stressed syllables. The last word of the previous paragraph, "intent", is an iamb: "inTENT". Consider the first sentence of Thomas Wolfe's novel, Look Homeward, Angel: "...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door." The following are iambs: "a stone", "a leaf", "an un-found door", "a door". The word "of" can be viewed as a single-vowel stressed foot "...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; OF a stone, a leaf, a door. (It is a hauntingly beautiful opening to the novel. Not less so because Wolfe hid poetry in his prose.) The "of" could also be viewed as an unstressed syllable connected to the next two, making a three-vowel foot known as an "anapest", which is unstressed-unstressed-stressed, as in "a la carte". I feel the meaning is better served by stressing the "of" very heavily, which makes it clearly the crux of an ironic chiasmus.

The word "iamb" is itself not an iamb, but a trochee--a stressed foot followed by an unstressed  foot.

So let's look at some examples of iambic pentameter. From "A Satire Against Mankind" by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or any thing but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

Droll, but the meter is a bit forced. For example, the second word on the second line, "of"--a word that in this case shouldn't really be stressed--is in a stressed position on the line. It is not an intentional syncopation. If we assume it to be unstressed, "one of those" becomes a dactyl (more on dactyls below) and "strange" becomes an especially heavily stressed, single-vowel foot...which can be done, but is subtle for Wilmot. Rather than knapping out a line of good iambic pentameter, he's syllable-counting: ten syllables make a line.

Although he was working in "heroic couplets" (pairs of rhymed iambic pentameter), the rhymes are not perfect: am--man would not be acceptable to more skilled poets than Wilmot, and animal--rational is not quite spot-on...though 'twill do.

Rhyme will be a discussion for another post or few, but note that the excerpt has a rhyme scheme of AABBBCC, so it is not quite a strict rhyme scheme, either. 'Twouldn't do for Pope or Milton. They'd knapp it into form.

Another example of heroic couplets, more featly crafted, is the following excerpt from the beginning of Abraham Cowley's (Cowley is pronounced "cooly") ambitious epic on the life of David named so as to claim association with, if not the mantle of, Virgil's Aeneid, Davideis:

I sing the Man who Judah's Scepter bore 
In that right hand which held the Crook before:
Who from best Poet, best of Kings did grow;
The two chief gifts Heav'n could on Man bestow.
Much danger first, much toil did he sustain,
Whilst Saul and Hell crost his strong fate in vain.
Nor did his Crown less painful work afford;
Less exercise his Patience or his Sword;
So long her Conque'ror Fortune's spight pursu'd;
Till with unwearied Virtue he subdu'd                       10
All homebred Malice and all forreign boasts;
Their strength was Armies, his the Lord of Hosts--
Thou, who didst David's royal stem adorn,
And gav'st him birth from whom thy self wast born.

On line 9, the word "Conque'ror", while a dactyl itself (a "dactyl" is a three-vowel foot of stressed-unstressed-unstressed accentuation), with the preceeding unstressed "her" is accented as "her KONkerer", a rare tetrasyllabic foot. Those were common in Greek, a language that far more often than English has vowels in sequence without consonants between them, which lent itself to more complex feet and longer lines.

Next is an example of unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is known as "blank verse". These are the very last lines of John Milton's titanic masterwork, Paradise Lost, which closes with our first ancestors, Eve and Adam, exiting Eden, doomed to all that followed thereafter:

  They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
  Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
  Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
  With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
  Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
  The World was all before them, where to choose
  Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
  They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
  Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.