Octameter

8 Key excerpts on "Octameter"

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  The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

  • Maureen N. McLane, James Chandler(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Accentual syllabic meters, however, unfold by means of an ideal pattern constituted by the relation between the number of feet, or groups of syllables, in a line and the number of stresses; in any given poem, the actual line may not supply that relation in the expected way, but the reader or listener will bear the ideal pattern in mind. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period we usually, and only retrospectively, designate as the “Romantic” era of British literature, issues of the fixed and living dimensions of meter became inextri- cably tied to questions of the connections between poetic forms and other 53 susan stewart life forms, the possibilities for representing emotion, and the role of poets’ voices in an increasingly literate culture. Although “Romantic” poetry in England, and indeed throughout continental Europe, is often considered in terms of its recurring themes and the important revolutionary historical and political context that shaped them and was shaped by them, these themes were expressed in meters and forms of great variety – some reach back to antiquity, others were newly invented, and many were put to new occa- sions and uses. If meter tends to be a rather marginal aspect of the study of Romanticism today, we might remember that for eighteenth- and nineteenth- century poets themselves, characterizing their work often meant organizing books for publication under the headings of “sonnets,” “eclogues,” “metri- cal tales,” “monodramas,” and other forms, and they also often placed the name of the form directly in the title of the work. This is not to say that at the onset of the eighteenth century, genre distinctions for poetry were very clear.

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  The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry

  2nd Edition

  • Rhian Williams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  William Blake ‘Little Girl Found’ (1794), ll. 17–20. The Poetry Toolkit 160 Four-foot line: tetrameter (seen in ballad stanzas; In Memoriam stanzas; mad-song stanzas; rime couée, Burns stanzas) Example: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wandered bore To his own native shore. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘To Helen’ (1845), ll. 5–9. Five-foot line: pentameter (seen in blank verse; sonnets; heroic couplets and quatrains; Venus and Adonis stanza; rime royal; ottava rima; Spenserian stanza) Example: Through weeds and thorns, and matted underwood I force my way; now climb, and now descend O’er rocks, or bare or mossy, with blind foot Crushing the purple whorts; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Picture’ (1802), ll. 1–4. Six-foot line: hexameter (or Alexandrine in English, usually specified as iambic, and seen in Spenserian stanzas) Example: Bending the ear of the hedgerow with stories of fire and sword James Fenton, ‘Wind’ (1983), l. 8. Example: The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Adonais’ (1821), l. 468. Prosody 161 Seven-foot line: heptameter (if it is iambic it is called a fourteener, after the number of syllables) Example: His heart is warm, his hand is true, his word is frank and free; Eliza Cook, ‘The Gallant English Tar’ (1838), l. 21. Eight-foot line: Octameter Example: Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (1832, revised 1842), l. 160. Foot variations in metrical lines We saw in the Southey example that poems can vary the number of feet per line; poets may also vary the type of feet in each line. When this happens regularly a looser terminology is sometimes used that refers only to the number of feet: so the poem is ‘in hexameter’ or ‘in tetrameter’, depending on the dominant pattern.

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  The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry

  • Andrew Hodgson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Lines of six feet tend to snake along, and feel elongated, even dragging – they are sometimes insinuated into pentameter poems, often as the closing line of a stanza. By the time a line extends out to seven feet, either you have to dampen the rhythmical emphasis so the line starts to sound like prose, or it risks collapsing under the weight of its own stresses and resolving into separate three- and four- foot units (but see Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad on page 21 for a rare handling of the form that marries fluency and impetus, escaping the sing-song tendencies of the line). A fluent but regular eight-foot line, such as Naidu’s in the example above, is a rare accomplishment. To describe the metre of a line, we combine the label for its metrical pattern with the label for the line’s length. Since the lines above by Prior follow an iambic (x /) pulse, and there are four of those iambic feet in each line, we can describe them as being in iambic tetrameter. We observed above that most poems fall into either four- or five-beat rhythms. How can we square this with the various line lengths I have just described? The answer is that, aside from pentameters and the hexameters (which are rare in English), most line lengths can be heard in terms of a four-beat sequence. However many feet in a line, and however many unaccented syllables within those feet, our ears seem predisposed to hear rhythms in sequences of four evenly spaced beats. Poems entirely in monometers are understandably rare. And when they do occur, there is not much rhythm to hear along the line – the ear naturally groups lines into longer chains. The example always given is Robert Herrick’s ‘Upon His Departure Hence’ (1648): Thus I Pass by, And die: As one Unknown How Can We Describe the Rhythms? 79 And gone: I’m made A shade, And laid I’ th’ grave: There have My cave, Where tell I dwell.

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  The Prosody Handbook

  A Guide to Poetic Form

  • Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  modify emotion at the same time as it seems to express it. Meter seems appropriate to emotional and imaginative expression not only because it suggests and stimulates feeling, but also because it makes the language in which it appears unlike the language (and experiences) of everyday. Meter introduces a note of the consciously planned, the symmetrical and artful, and thus makes our experience of reading verse an experience greatly different from our direct involvement in ordinary discourse and from our participation in an actual emotional situation. In other words, meter can be a means of obtaining what is often called “aesthetic distance” or “psychic distance.”

  Considered in itself, a regular beat—whether it be a drum beat, a rhythmical stamping of feet, or an iambic pentameter—evokes and seems to express strong feeling. It unquestionably has connections with the primitive, the emotional, the instinctual, aspects of our nature. In verse, however, meter does not exist independently, but in a context of words; it is conjoined with images and ideas, with a grammar and a rhetoric. And since the determinateness of the beat is “artificial”—a formality, an artifice, a quality not characteristic of ordinary discourse—meter tends to remove poetic discourse from the realm of the ordinary. It creates an aura of distance and indirectness and yields all the pleasures that we derive from such a remove from the direct and the familiar. It satisfies our love of formality, ritual, detachment. Simultaneously, the note of urgency, the hint of the primitive or of intense response, is never quite lost. Metered poetry thus makes a simultaneous appeal to two distinct sides of the personality, and this no doubt is one reason for the continuing appeal of meter from generation to generation and age to age. It is a paradigm of civilization: Bacchus dancing with Athena.

  Aesthetic distance is what softens the blow of calamity. It is what keeps us from completely accepting the calamities in King Lear as real-life calamities happening before our very eyes, so that we do not rush out of our seats to knock Cornwall down when he starts to stamp out poor old Gloucester’s eyes. In real life, sorrow makes us feel sorrowful; on the stage, or in a great lyric poem, the expression of joy or serenity or sublimity can bring tears. In a Shakespeare play we project ourselves imaginatively into the unfolding situation and its characters—but never completely forget that what we are seeing is an illusion, a re-creation, and not a real situation. What keeps us in this back-of-the-mind awareness? First of all, active memory, of course. And the marginal consciousness of the theatre and the rest of the audience. But there is something about a Shakespeare play itself that creates aesthetic distance. For one thing, our faint but never quite extinguished sense of the unreality, the impossibility, of such eloquence and synchrony for real people in a real situation. For another, all those aspects of the play that are deliberately symbolic and nonrepresentational, rather than realistic, such as condensed time, and the cutting out of the lags and redundancies and inexpressive locutions inevitable in everyday conversation and behavior. And for another, the meter, the blank verse . Meter—even the normally loose meter of dramatic blank verse—is just artificial (or studied or formal) enough to keep in the realm of poetry the relentless torture and suffering and defeat of the good in Lear.

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  Shakespeare's Metrical Art

  • George T. Wright(Author)
  • 1988(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  It is especially when iambic poetry is cast in pentameter that these sources of complexity fully emerge. This is largely because pentameter is itself the most problematical line-length, and the mark of this is its resis-tance to simple division: it does not divide readily into two shorter rhyth-mical units. We tend to perceive other long lines as breaking in two: six-or eight-beat lines into two equal parts, seven-beat lines into one segment of four beats and one of three followed by a pause which is felt as a fourth beat: 6 beats When I was fair and young, | and favor graced me Of many was I sought, | their mistress for to be (Poem by Queen Elizabeth I, in Hebel and Hudson, 54) 7 beats As I in hoary winter's night | stood shivering in the snow, Surprised I was with sudden heat | which made my heart to glow (Southwell, The Burning Babe, in Hebel and Hudson, 238) 8 beats Do not, to make your ladies game, | bring blemish to your worthy name, Away to field and win renown! | with courage beat your enemies down! (Humphrey Gifford, For Soldiers, in Hebel and Hudson, 101) 4 The Iambic Pentameter Line In the last quoted passage, the internal rhymes make doubly clear how decisive the midline break is. It appears that lines of more than five stresses have only a provisional reality. 4 Even when the midline break is accorded minimal value, we are still likely to perceive the lines as compound in nature and to hear distinctly the shorter lines of which they are composed. Four-foot iambic lines, on the other hand, though they constitute a significant resource for poets writing in English, lack the amplitude of the five-foot line and seem as a rule unable to survive the absence of rhyme, a defect which partly limits their power to seem convincingly speechlike. The same is even truer of forms made up entirely of shorter iambic lines. Pentameter, then, is the most speechlike of English line-lengths, es-pecially when it appears without rhyme.

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  Poetry

  • John Strachan, Richard Terry(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  Thus, for example, in the blank verse, ten-syllable unrhymed line, you will often see deviation in number of syllables, most notably in hypercatalectic fashion: But peace to vain regrets! We see but darkly (Wordsworth) To be, or not to be, that is the question (Shakespeare) Whilst the extra syllable is most common in the iambic line, the curtailed line tends to be most common in trochaic verse. Shakespeare’s octosyllabic poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ demonstrates the catalectic line in action: Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together To themselves, yet either neither Simple were so well compounded That it cried ‘How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, reason none, In what parts can so remain’. Here every line in the first stanza is acatalectic, whilst each line in the second is catalectic. Students confronted by lines which appear to have a syllable 80 Poetry missing have been known to scratch their heads at these ‘defective feet’. In fact, the term itself is misleading, given that it implies that the likes of Shakespeare and Shelley are innumerate, misplacing syllables like amateur ish car mechanics forgetting to bolt on a hub-cap. Truncating a foot is a matter of poetic choice rather than poetic incompetence. 4.5 feet We shall now concentrate on the key rhythmical terminology used in metrical analysis, beginning with the various kinds of foot. There are seven principal feet in English verse and we shall address each individually. In descending order of importance, these are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapaest, spondee, pyrrhic and amphibrach. The first four provide the basis for entire poems, whilst the last three are used only for modulatory substitution rather than to furnish the base metre of individual poems. There are other kinds of feet (cretic, ionic and so on) than the ones addressed below and, for reference purposes, the Glossary of poetical terms below includes the rarest ones.

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  Form in the Menschheitsdämmerung

  A Study of Prosodic Elements and Style in German Expressionist Poetry

  • Robert P. Newton(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Of the more normally metrical poems eome two-thirds are pentametric and hexametric, primarily the former. Predominantly hexametric poems are 3 — 1, 5, 8; 4—2, 11; 7—2; 11-4; 14-2; 16-6; 18-16; 21-2. Even longer are: 3 -3 , which has seven to eight trochaic feet, with caesura; 3—6, alternating seven and six foot verses; 8—5, which consists of rhymed quatrains with six to eleven iambic feet. There are numerous other poems which mix verses of from five to eight, or more, feet: for example, 3—9; 8—5,10 — in general, of course, Stadler uses quite long iambic lines. We see also from the numerous poems by Däubler (poems above numbered 3) his preference for long lines. What is even more surprising than the hexametric and longer verse, is the disappearance of what were previously considered the standard verse lengths. There are three times as many poems with five foot verse in the Menschheitsdämmerung as there are with three to four foot lines. The former are infrequent (3—4,10 ; 10 — 11 ; 11-8,9,10,12; 16-5; 19-27; 21-3,4). Dimetric verses (Sie bilden selten ganze Gedichte 141 ) appear only in 1 — 13 and 7—3. It is not easy to make a comparison with the poems in free rhythms, but, if we assume that free verse averaging four major stresses per line is roughly equivalent in length to a pentameter meter normally accen-ted, then, in those free-rhythmic poems in the Menschheits-dämmerung which characteristically tend to hover around an average linear stress-number, this pentameter-equivalent line length is also found dominant. Even if we accept only free-rhythmic verses averaging five stresses as being real pentameter equivalents, they will still constitute almost a half of the free verse poems. These are considerably longer than the lines of 'classical' free verse — Klop-stock, Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Heine and Nietzsche — and longer than much Naturalistic free verse (where Whitman is not being imitated).

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  A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry

  • Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14 we may observe that silent stresses normally intrude themselves at the end of lines with an odd number of accents, but not at the end of those with an even number. Trimeters and pentameters, for example, have a silent stress, but not tetrameters. If, therefore, we add the silent stress on to the number of vocalized stresses in each line, we reach the conclusion that all metres, even those apparently odd, are actually based on an even number of stresses per line. A pentameter can be regarded as a hexameter with one stress silent, and so on. The double measure (corresponding to the traditional ‘dipode’) is a basic unit of metre.

  To test this, read through the following extracts, and note how a pause seems to be required between trimeters or between pentameters, but not between dimeters or between tetrameters. Again, tapping in time with the stressed syllables may aid the perception of silent stresses.

  Recognizing the existence of silent stresses can help us to appreciate further connections between verse and music. Just as the simpler song and dance forms of music tend to break down into four-bar, eight-bar, and sixteen-bar sections, so many verse forms are constructed out of the basic rhythm units by multiples of two. Each of the three popular metrical patterns set out below has the symmetrical structure of a square, being composed of four sections of four measures each. These sections do not in every case correspond to verse lines, which are separately indicated (by the symbol 1 ):

  If, as I hope, the reader has been able to decipher these formulae without too much difficulty, they may well be recognized as [a] the metre of Old Mother Hubbard, [b] the limerick metre, and [c] the popular ballad metre of The Ancient Mariner and many other poems. This way of displaying the metrical pattern shows a regularity obscured by the normal line-by-line arrangement. In more sophisticated stanza forms, this mathematical symmetry of pattern is generally less marked, but it may be part of the set of expectations we bring to English verse.

  Whilst on the subject of duality, we may notice that there is a curious ambivalence between single measures and double measures, which is parallel to the ambivalence of two-time and four-time in musical time-signatures. It is easy to interpret the same piece of poetry as consisting of either two measures of two syllables, or one measure of four syllables; which interpretation suggests itself most strongly is largely controlled by the speed of delivery. Kipling’s four-syllable (pæonic) metre, as we saw earlier, requires recitation at a rather fast, cantering speed:

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