Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse

G. S. Fraser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351631044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1970, this work outlines the principles of English prosody in a way that will enable the reader to recognise and scan any piece of English verse. It illustrates the close relationship between English speech patterns and verse patterns, and the primary importance of the phenomenon of stress. It also discusses the suitability of various kinds of metrical pattern for various kinds of poetic effect.

This book will be of interest to those studying poetry and English literature.

1

Some Definitions and Distinctions

RHYTHM AND METRE

When we stand on the sea-shore, and watch waves breaking on the sand and being sucked out again, there is a basic similarity in the motion of each wave, but no two waves break in a manner that is absolutely identical. This similarity in difference of the motion of waves we could call rhythm. There is a similar phenomenon, not only very obviously in successive lines of verse, but also in written prose and in spoken speech, at all its various levels of formality and informality. In a good writer or a good speaker, we notice something that can be called a distinctive rhythm; but even in clumsy writing and hesitant speech there is rhythm of a sort. Orators and writers of imaginative or emotionally persuasive prose pay a good deal of conscious attention to their rhythms. In plain expository prose, such as this book is written in, both writer and reader are consciously concerned not mainly with rhythm but with sense. Nevertheless, our sense of a prose writer’s rhythm, however little, it is a fully conscious sense, affects our pleasure in reading him and our ease in understanding him. A succession of sentences too much of the same length, or too much in the same pattern, tends to weary us, however clear the writer’s meaning is; on the other hand, a pleasing modulation of rhythms, as in a philosopher like Bishop Berkeley, can help us to follow with pleasure trains of argument that, less gracefully expressed, we might find remote and abstruse.

The difference between verse and prose or speech, therefore, is not that verse has rhythm, and prose and speech have not, but that in verse a rhythmical unit, the line, is superimposed upon the general grammatical unit of all discourse, the sentence. Prose is written in sentences. Verse is written in sentences and also in lines. A succession of lines of the same metrical pattern, a succession of iambic pentameters, for instance, is rather like a succession of waves breaking on the shore. Each has a similar pattern, which can be measured, but none is absolutely identical with any other. Indeed, the same line of verse occurring in different places in a poem – a refrain at the end of a stanza, say, or Mark Antony’s repeated

For Brutus is an honourable man –

is never exactly rhythmically identical. It is scanned in exactly the same way, but it does not sound exactly the same, or it is not performed in exactly the same way. The rules of scansion can, as it were, give us the broad wave pattern but, without a great deal of elaboration and complication in our system of notation, they cannot define the individual wave.

Metrics, in the fairly simple sense with which it is being handled in this primer, is concerned with the recognition and naming of broad wave patterns in lines of verse. A knowledge of metrics can stop us from reading a line of verse aloud wrongly; but it will not necessarily enable us to read a line of verse aloud in the most effective way. It provides, as it were, a sense of a skeletal structure, upon which the good performer has to put flesh and blood.

ANALYSING A LINE OF VERSE

Both prose and verse, then, have rhythm, but the rhythm of good prose is very various, and too much monotony or repetition is a fault in prose rhythm: a writer like Charles Dickens tends to fall into passages of concealed blank verse in his more emotional moments, and the thudding regularity casts doubt on his sincerity. A writer of verse, on the other hand, by setting out his poem on the page in lines announces to us that he is allowing himself much less scope and variety of rhythmical choice than a writer of prose; and he shows his skill by repeating again and again the same broad rhythmical pattern while at the same time avoiding, by all kinds of subtle contrivances, an impression of mechanical monotony.

A line of verse then is a rhythmical unit, which can be analysed in some way, and which sets up an expectation that it will be followed by a number of similar rhythmical units. We can all recognize such units, but writers on metre have disagreed very much about the proper mode of analysis. Let us take two very famous lines from the beginning of a Shakespeare sonnet:

Each of these lines has ten syllables and there are languages, like French and Japanese, in which metrics is based upon syllable count. One should say, in passing, here, that the syllable is a concept belonging to rhetoric or literary discourse rather than to strictly scientific phonetics. In a word like ‘distress’ it does not matter, metrically, whether we divide it syllabically as ‘dis/tress’ or ‘dist/ress’: we are always certain in English where the centre of a syllable is, though we might disagree about its borders. In verse a phrase like ‘man/y a’ or an adjective like ‘fur/ious’ is counted as two syllables, though in speech many of us would think of both examples as three syllables, the middle one very short. A native speaker of English, acquainted with English poetry, has no difficulty in recognizing what he means by a syllable in the metrical sense.

Nevertheless, to describe the two Shakespeare lines as merely ten-syllable lines will not do as a definition. We can prove this simply by altering the order of the words in the lines, without changing the sense:

To a summer’s day shall I compare thee?

More lovely thou art and more temperate.

We have the rhythms now not of verse, but of prose. Many modem poets, as we shall see in a later chapter, are today trying to base their verse on pure syllable count, but I shall argue that their success, when they are success...