Tennyson, the First Stanza of "The Last Tournament"

This is an excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Idylls of the King.

A couple of notes on pronunciation: I had heard from an early age that in the case of Tennyson's long masterwork on Arthurian themes, the word "Idylls" was to be pronounced as if it rhymed with the family that the Reverend Dodson knew in Oxford, the Liddells. And so I carefully became habited to call it. But then I read somewhere (I don't recall where, I won't search for it today) that Hallam said his father pronounced it in the same way as what a car does at a stop light in the United States--i.e., as "idles".

Gawain can be pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, as is most common: "GaWAIN" with the first syllable sounding schwa, OR with the stress on the first syllable, as I did here. Given the place on the line--and that Tennyson was too skilled to not have been able to compose the line elsehow to fit the meter--I expect that, here at least, Gawain was stressed on the first syllable.

Tennyson has fallen from favor. In part rightly so, in part not. As Ezra Pound said, referring to early in his re-working of the poetic diction of English in the 20th Century, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave". But as a result, we fail now to hear what readers a century and a half ago heard. There is much beauty in much of Tennyson's work. But there is much tedious rumpty-tum, too. Tennyson was the towering figure of the Victorian pentameter that Pound needed to break in Modern poetry. Of all poets, Tennyson was probably, apart from the flocks of bad late Victorian and Edwardian poets that thought they had the aesthetic well in hand, the poet most antithetical to what Pound saw as needing to be done to create a new, Modern, poetry.

In Tennyson's further defense, The Idylls of the King was a long narrative work, and he made it cohere. It was no mean feat, and it is deserving of our 21st-Century attention. [And I had another reason to turn my attention this way recently; an interesting currency to Tennyson in American Modernism that I will discuss elsewhere.] :-)

A "carcanet" is a necklace or jeweled collar. "Fool" means the court jester.

End-of-the-Year Prosody: Setting the Bar for the New Year

A thought in passing:

Poetry should be the most demanding of the ways of writing, not the least. All too often, people think that poetry is a matter of "expressing yourself", and it requires no mastery of any aspect of writing.

That is absurd.

One MUST be able to write a complete, grammatically correct, syntactically appropriate sentence before thinking that one can "write a poem".

The reason poetry is more demanding than prose is that it has the same strictures, but then imposes far more in addition. While adhering to form and metrical pattern, etc., one must write clearly and well.

Writing poorly is not "breaking the mold", it is laxity. Such laxity is not "creative" or "expressive" or "reflective of one's roots". Dialect, ethnic, or regional speech within a poem is appropriate, if it provides the effect one seeks; but if, otherwise, one is not in control, one is not competent. For example, if one is a mechanic but doesn't know how to use the tools in the toolbox or diagnose what needs to be repaired, one is a joke as a mechanic. But in "art", people think things are different.

If one wishes to be good at writing poetry, one needs mastery--not self-expression. Any person's self can be expressed. A poet is not distinguished by feeling, a poet is distinguished by using words to create an effect.

This post is not an apologia for writing passages in unvaried iambic tetrameter, for example, or any other repetitive or "traditional" form. But one needs to be able to do iambic tetrameter--or pentameter, heroic couplets, ottava rima, or sonnets, ballad stanzas, and so on--to learn to control the words within a phrase, a line, a stanza, a poem. Before one can master free form, one needs to master restricted form. Crawling before walking; scales and arpeggios; sketches before oil; etc.

DON'T make the mistake of thinking that Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, or Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott didn't work within form and rule, however "free" their work might seem, and DON'T think that they couldn't turn a well-wrought sentence, complete with correct grammar and appropriate tone, voice, and syntax.

If one can't rhyme perfectly, one can't rhyme competently. If one can't wrestle a form to one's message, one is not a poet. Shakespeare didn't write sonnets because Shakespeare is an old dead white guy and that is just the stuffy way they did things then. Shakespeare wrote sonnets with mastery, and within their artificial form his sonnets speak to us profoundly and affectingly and with powerful authenticity.

People err in thinking that writing well is restrictive and deadening in poetry. Failing to write well, in the end, expresses slack lax ineptitude. Perhaps that is the self that some wish to express; but if that is not the hoped-for result, craft is necessary.

Or, to put it another way:

If you set your sights to the ground, you will hit your target--a very unfortunate success. If you set your sights to the stars, you will fail...but that failure might be glorious.

Declining Readership for Poetry

According to an article in the Washington Post, readership of poetry in the U.S. is down to this appalling stat: Only 6.7% of those surveyed admitted to having read poetry within the last year.

It is time to take to the books and prove these statistics failed.

Excelsior!

"Feminine Rhyme"

For those of us reading "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth, "feminine rhyme" is rhyme in which the final syllable is unstressed.

Most often, feminine rhyme is created by turning an iamb into an amphibrach,* so that an iambic line ends with an extra syllable. (So syllable-counting won't work. A line of iambic trimeter is usually thought to have six syllables. A syllable-counter would see these lines as, perhaps, catalectic, having seven syllables rather than six. Syllable counting misses the flexibility of variable feet within a metrical line.)

The example given in "Lost in the Funhouse" is

What's good is in the Army;
What's left will never harm me.

Barth prefaces the quoted lines with the words "Ambrose's mother sang an iambic trimeter couplet from a popular song, femininely rhymed:". (Barth does not mean that something about the couplet is somehow effeminate. "Feminine rhyme" is the technical term for such verse elements, as stated above.)

Masculine rhyme consists of rhyme in which the final syllable is stressed. To turn the above into an example of iambic trimeter ending in a masculine rhyme, one could change it thus:

What's good is on the farm;
What's left will never harm.

_____
* An iamb is a foot composed of two syllables, with the first syllable unstressed and the second syllable stressed: "What's good". An amphibrach is a foot composed of three syllables with only the middle syllable stressed: "the Army".

Dactyl, Dactyl, Dactyl! [to the cadence of "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!"]

James Joyce pronounced the title of his great work as YOO-lysses, not as the U.S.ian yooLYSSes. Samuel Beckett pronounced his own most famous work as GOD-oh, not as the Frenchian god-OH.

This made Ulysses, like Mulligan, Dedalus, and Ursula, a dactyl. And Godot a trochee.

Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a dactyl followed by a single-syllable stressed foot. So is Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". I think that that is not an accident.*


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Metamorphosis Encrypted:

If you take the letters K-A-F-K-A and keep the vowels as they are, but raise K eight letters counting up from the next letter in alphabetical order, you will get the sequence S-A-_-S-A; if you then count up the same interval from F, the entire cyphered sequence is
S-A-M-S-A.

Kafka concealed himself under the Samsa carapace thereby, slipping in yet another layer--what Ezra Pound called a "ply"--to the richness of the work. It is like Raphael placing his self-portrait among the figures in a crowd scene aside from the attention-focus of the painting.**



* And Beckett's pronunciation makes Waiting for Godot a dactyl followed by a trochee.
** The word "kavka" in Czech means "jackdaw". A jackdaw is a black bird that is a member of the crow family--a kind of metamorphosis built into Franz Kafka's very name: When you call out "Kafka!" on the street in Prague, do you refer to a man? Or a bird? Or a man-bird chimera? How does the word "kafka" signify?...

The Broader Relevance of Prosody

Prosody is primarily a part of the study of how poetry is put together. The term is also used in linguistics to discuss the rhythmic element of speech. But the point in this blog is the use of the term in the field of poetry. Poetry is a subset of the field of writing, and has become a marginalized, specialized outlier in the field of writing. The basics of prosody are for eccentrics or specialists in academic departments.

For most of the history of writing as an academic study, prosody was a fundamental part of the study of literature. Keep in mind that, with a few exceptions, the novel and the short story are recent developments. Prose was not the default for those who were literary and ambitious.

Elegant prose has its own rules, but the old fields of rhetoric and prosody informed the writing of earlier ages and are a part of modern style as well. Familiarity with the basics of prosody can enrich one's study of prose as well as of poetry, and can enhance one's writing of prose, too. It should be obvious that the study of prosody makes sense for poets--though clearly many "poets" and many academics don't really have much fluency with it these days. As I said, it was once an integral part of education.

In earlier posts, I have used examples of prosodic elements in prose. I have pointed out meter hidden in a lovely passage by Thomas Wolfe and I have discussed the role of prosody in one of the most admired chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses. In both cases, the consideration of prosody allowed for a critical focus that colors close reading in a positive way.

Prosody is not so isolate and irrelevant a field of study. It is a part, consciously or unconsciously, of a lot of what is around us. What gives a prose passage or oratory its aural beauty? Sometimes poetic prose or poetic oratory is so because poetic tools are employed. Is this not reason enough to add it to the toolset of the writer's and the reader's crafts?

Protean Prosody

In the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the novel's main characters, young Stephen Dedalus, walks on the beach and wallows in angst and intellection. Stephen is preoccupied with, among other things, prosody. He composes a poem along the way. As he walks and introspects, he tries on different metrical hats, much of it centered around tetrameter.

In drafts, Joyce had named chapters, but in galleys he removed the chapter names. In Joyce studies, the chapters of Ulysses are traditionally referred to by those original names. Hence, the third chapter, which is neither named nor numbered, is known as “Proteus”. Proteus is a sea-god who Odysseus encounters on a beach in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus seeks information from Proteus, but to get that information from the uncooperative divinity, Odysseus will have to seize and hold him until Proteus relents and tells Odysseus what Odysseus wishes to know. But things are never easy on an odyssey, and Proteus has the power to change form, instantly metamorphosing into different animals, each one difficult to hold on to or terrifying in aspect. The parallel in James Joyce's novel is that Steven walks along the beach while his mind explores many issues with his intimidatingly educated and incisive mind, including the terrifying: mortality, the nature of reality, salvation, and the eternal question of “will anyone see me if, here and now, I....”

I will quote the first five paragraphs of Proteus herebelow. The text is as printed in the 1992 Modern Library Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce (Modern 37).

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreet, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

          Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

          Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

          Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

          See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

So now I come to the point: the 1986 Gabler edition of Ulysses (Gabler 31) introduces an error into the above passage—an error based on a misreading that is itself based on an ignorance of prosody. That error has propagated through other editions and electronic versions of the text. If one has an even rudimentary understanding of English-language prosody—an understanding far below that of Stephen Dedalus, let alone that of Stephen's Author—it does not make sense.

I refer to the revision in the Gabler edition (devision is more appropriate in this case) of  the words “A catalectic” to the word “Acatalectic”.

“Catalexis” is a technique in poetry in which a foot at the end or the beginning of a line has a syllable lopped off. It can be used to emphasize a particular word, impose a startling brevity, to unsettle the reader's rhythmic expectations with a syncopation, or to break up a pattern to keep a poem's form from becoming monotonous or predictable.

For instance, if Tennyson had decided to “change up” the incessant ta-tum of iambic tetrameter in “The Lady of Shallot” and changed “On either side the river lie” to “Either side the river lie” or “And through the field the road runs by” to “Through the field the road runs by”, by dropping a syllable from the opening foot, that would be catalexis. William Blake's “The Tyger” is a famous example of end-line catalexis: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”. The meter Blake employed was catalectic trochaic tetrameter. If that line were acatalectic, it would read thus: “Tyger, tyger, burning brightly.”

To reiterate: An acatalectic line has no truncated metrical feet. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) tetrameter has eight syllables, not seven. An acatalectic line of iambic (or trochaic) trimeter has six syllables, not five.

So, for Gabler's change to be appropriate, the lines of verse preceding “acatalectic”--the verses in Stephen's stream of consciousness, so we know what he's thinking about--would have to be acatalectic, not catalectic.

A traditional verse form often used in Irish songs and poetry is the ballad stanza. Ballads are composed of quatrains alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter/iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter.

Here are the two lines of Stephen's verse again:

                    Won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Madeline the mare?

These are two catalectic lines from a ballad stanza—seven syllables/five syllables. Here is what the lines look like with an insertion to make them acatalectic:

                    Oh, won't you come to Sandymount,

                    Oh, Madeline the mare?

Admittedly, the “oh” in both cases is ad hoc, but it clearly delineates (“delines”) what the rhythm would be if the lines were acatalectic. The change of “A catalectic” to “Acatalectic” in the Gabler edition is erroneous.

At the root of this error, and its propagation thereafter, is ignorance of basic English-language prosody on the part of a surprising number of scholars, some of whom are quite eminent.

To re-reiterate, the two lines Stephen recites to himself are both catalectic, a couplet, in ballad form. They are, as he says, iambs marching.

And Stephen himself, following the row of seawrack along Sandymount strand, “delines the mare”--mare being Latin for the sea but conflated with the English word for an adult female horse so that Stephen can refer to meter as “agallop”.

All through this passage, Stephen is engaging in metric play. Let's take a look at the intermediary passage between “Madeline the mare” and “a catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching”:

                    Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.

By calling the passage out isolated and indented similarly to Stephen's lines of verse, it becomes apparent that it is itself tetrametric. But it is not purely iambic: the word “rhythm” is a trochee. “Begins”, “you see”, and “I hear” are all iambs. (“'I am's” is a pun that runs beneath “Proteus” as a tacit organum. Many people are put off by Stephen's introspection throughout Proteus, but a Joycean joke is behind Stephen's angst. The Arranger has Stephen wrestling with prosodic composition; Stephen has no choice as to what he can think about: It is “I am”s all the way down.)

Joycean play is amok through this delightful passage. “Rhythm begins” brings us (by a commodious recirculation) back to Los, the Blakean Demiurge. The music of the spheres is a testament to the rhythm as well as the harmony initiated with Creation. (What Galileo saw, God “hears”.) The conversational “you see” separated by the period from “I hear” turns the period into the crux of a chiasmus. “I hear” is a homonym for “I here”, which is an iamb...so the first-person present of the verb to be inheres: iamb is present, making it “I am here” by yet another commodious circulation—while riffing on Stephen's earlier counterpoint of the modalities of sight and sound: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear”.

An intriguing exercise in tetrameter is in the sound of Stephen's unseen (sea <=> see) footsteps on the seawrack of Sandymount Strand:

                    Crush, crack, crick, crick.

Seewrack heard. But not in iambs--the world speaks to Stephen in monosyllabic feet. It is tetrametric, but in Stephen's slow blind pace. One syllable, one foot, one step. It is an interesting exercise in prosodic composition: To write a metric line in single-syllable, stressed feet. Stephen is trying out his Dedalean wings; a different rhythm to the same beat. And what could be more catalectic than an entire line of missing syllables? After all, the happy patter of little iambs proceeds heel-toe; Stephen's cracking crush on drying wrack is flat: sole, sole, sole, sole.

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Addendum I

This is the poem that Stephen composes in Proteus:

                    On swift sail flaming

                    From storm and south

                    He comes, pale vampire,

                    Mouth to my mouth.

We don't see what Stephen wrote on the strand until Chapter 7, “Aeolus”, when Stephen recalls what he had written on a scrap of paper torn from Mr. Deasy's letter to the editor on hoof and mouth disease (Everyman 132). When Stephen hands in Mr. Deasey's letter at the newspaper, one of the newspapermen, Lenehan, notices that the bottom of the last page was torn off, and jests “Who tore it? Was he short taken.” With “short taken”, the Arranger has given Lenehan a winking reference to Stephen's catalexis. [Gabler here makes a change that holds water, changing the full stop after “short taken” to a question mark (Gabler 109), thereby reinstating the punctuation of the first edition of 1922 (Dover 127).]

Note the last line of Stephen's quatrain. The source for the meter employed in Stephen's poem, and in particular for the last line, is “My Grief on the Sea”, a poem by Douglas Hyde (Gifford 62):

                    My grief on the sea,
                    How the waves of it roll!
                    For they heave between me
                    And the love of my soul!

                    Abandon'd, forsaken,
                    To grief and to care,
                    Will the sea ever waken
                    Relief from despair?

                    My grief and my trouble!
                    Would he and I were,
                    In the province of Leinster,
                    Or County of Clare!

                    Were I and my darling--
                    O heart-bitter wound!--
                    On board of the ship
                    For America bound.

                    On a green bed of rushes
                    All last night I lay,
                    And I flung it abroad
                    With the heat of the day.

                    And my Love came behind me,
                    He came from the South;
                    His breast to my bosom,
                    His mouth to my mouth. (Hyde)

Stephen appropriates Hyde's last line for his own last line, but drops the first syllable, producing a catalectic variant on Hyde's original. Stephen's thinking is focused throughout on catalectic meter. To change “a catalectic” to “acatalectic” is simply wrong.

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Addendum II

In the Oxford World Classics edition of Ulysses, an edited and endnoted edition of the original 1922 text, a note on the question of whether the text should read “a catalectic” or “acatalectic” quotes a letter from James Joyce to Harriet Weaver in which Joyce writes “divide better A catalectic” (Oxford 785). The editor concludes the note, “That ought to settle the matter.” Indeed.

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Works Cited

Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Hyde, Douglas. “My Grief on the Sea”. Poemhunter.com. Poemhunter.com, 1 January 2004. Web. 20 March 2015. <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-grief-on-the-sea/>.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Facsim. 1922 ed. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009. Print.

---. Ulysses. New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Print.

---. Ulysses. Ed. Gabler, Hans Walter, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.

---. Ulysses. Ed. Johnson, Jeri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.