Read the following three pieces of verse aloud.
14. Old clock 15. Watch is ticking 16. Twenty to nine,
Tick tock, Seconds flicking, Running on time,
Strikes eight: Skipping, hopping, Gathering speed
I’m late. Never stopping; Down the incline.
Quarter chime: Minutes scurry, Struggle hard
Breakfast time. Skitter, hurry. Up the slope,
Half past: Slowing down:
Eat fast. Can’t cope;
Strikes nine: Engine coughs,
School time. Pressure drops,
Steam’s gone:
Train stops.
How many feet are there in each line?
Obviously every single line is two feet long. How is it, then, that the pieces seem to have such different rhythms, and that the pace and engine noise vary in (16)? If you put in the foot boundaries, the variation becomes visually clear.
14. | Old | clock 15. | Watch is | ticking 16. | Twenty to | nine,
| Tick | tock, | Seconds | flicking, | Running on | time,
| Strikes | eight: | Skipping | hopping, | Gathering | speed
| I’m | late. | Never | stopping; | Down the in | cline.
| Quarter | chime: | Minutes | scurry, | Struggle | hard
| Breakfast | time. | Skitter | hurry. | Up the | slope,
| Half | past: | Slowing | down:
| Eat | fast. | Can’t | cope;
| Strikes | nine: | Engine | coughs,
| School | time. | Pressure | drops.
| Steam’s | gone:
| Train | stops.
It is easy to see that although all the lines are technically the same length, and take the same time to say, all the feet in (15) have two syllables each, whereas all but two of the feet in (14) have one syllable each. If you read aloud a few lines of (14), immediately followed by (15), you will hear the change of pace: the second piece sounds much faster than the first. The more syllables there are in a foot, the faster they are spoken, giving the effect of speed. If you now read (16) aloud, you will find that it confirms this rule. At the beginning there are three syllables in the first foot of each line, which suggests the easy haste of a steam engine coasting downhill. In lines five, six and seven and again in nine and ten, there are only two syllables in the first foot, giving a slower speed as the engine chugs up the slope. In lines eight, eleven and twelve, every foot has just one syllable, echoing a slow, laboured progress.
Here is another example of how the syllable-count creates particular rhythms. Read this aloud.
17. The horse is trotting down the lane:
Ignoring rider’s pull on rein
She canters now with drumlike beat
Upon her swiftly moving feet;
Galloping, galloping, faster and faster,
Hurrying home so you’ll never get past her.
I hope you can hear the changing rhythm of the horse’s gait. Now let us put in the foot boundaries and count the syllables.
17. The | horse is | trotting | down the | lane
Ig | noring | rider’s | pull on | rein;
She | canters | now with | drumlike | beat
U | pon her | swiftly | moving | feet;
| Galloping, | galloping, | faster and | faster,
| Hurrying | home so you’ll | never get | past her.
In the first four lines every foot has two syllables. Count from one foot-boundary to the next, even when this means carrying on from the end of one line of verse into the beginning of the following line. (Ignore the unstressed word “the” at the very beginning.) In the last two lines of the stanza, the first three feet have three syllables each: it is this increase in the number of syllables per foot and per line that creates the speed and rhythm of the gallop. (I shall explain why the trotting and cantering lines sound rather different, in spite of having the same syllable-count, in Chapter 7.)
Incidentally, the fact that there are four feet per line is significant, too. To have only two feet per line, as in (14), (15) and (16), gives too chugging or marching a rhythm: the easy, fluent movement of a horse is better caught in the longer run of four feet in a line. You might suppose that a longer line still, would be even more appropriate. Perhaps a six-foot line would work, although this would not be quite so easy to write. A five-foot line would be less effective, as you need a sense of regular balance, an equal weight in each half-line, a sense of rocking from one side to the other, to catch the steady movement of the horse’s legs.
I now need to explain why it is that so much English verse has two, three, four, or five feet per line, and much more rarely has six, or more than six, feet. If you recall the snatches of speech we listened to in Chapter Four, and add a few more examples, together with some names, you will hear that English speech is naturally organized in such a way that grammatical units (phrases, clauses, interjections) tend to occupy most commonly two feet, quite often three feet, less often one foot. Here are some examples.
ONE FOOT (plus, perhaps, a few preceding weakly stressed syllables)
| Hi | Hel | lo | | Thanks |
How | are you? | In | London | St | Albans |
|Cheltenham | | Possibly |
TWO FEET
| How d’you | do? | | How are | you? |
Nice | day to | day. | | Lovely to | see you.|
| Where do you | live?| | Gloucester | shire |
The | Home | Counties | | Edin | burgh |
| Pride and | Prejudice | | Animal | Farm |
| Jane | Austen | | George | Orwell |
| T.S. | Eliot | | Eliot’s | poems |
| Three pounds | fifty | | Three | pounds |
THREE FEET
| How are | you to | day? | How | very | nice to | see you |
| Three pounds | fifty | please | | What a | lovely | day! |
| Thomas | Stearns | Eliot | | T.S. | Eliot’s | poems |
LONGER UTTERANCES USUALLY BREAK DOWN INTO UNITS OF ONE/TWO/THREE FEET
| Yes: I | like | Eliot.| 1 + 2
I | like | reading | Eliot’s | poems. | 2 + 2
| Let me | know when it’s | time to | go. | 2 + 2
| Let me | know if | I can | help at | all.| 2 + 3
| Jenny | won the | race, | as we ex | pected. | 3 + 2
| Jenny | won the | race, but | Ann came a | close | second. | 3 + 3
| Yes, | Jenny | won the | race.| 1 + 3
As I said before, two-foot phrasing is most common in English speech, closely followed by three-foot phrasing. This explains why the Shakespearean line of five feet (most often 2 + 3 or 3 + 2) seems so “conversational”, and why we can listen to a Shakespeare play for two hours on end without it sounding awkward or artificial. Four-foot lines (2 + 2) are bouncy, marching or sing-songy, and often occur in nursery rhymes: frequently the rhythm of a basically four-feet-per-line poem, or of a poem with pairs of two-foot lines, is smoothed by the introduction of a three-foot line at regular intervals, as in Little Jack Horner (see Chapter Three.) It is quite difficult to utter a succession of three-foot phrases spontaneously, although this more weighty effect is sometimes created deliberately in prose, especially on serious topics: six-foot lines in poems are not common in English. Very rarely, seven-foot lines of verse occur, but all too often these turn out to be pairs of lines alternately of 4 and 3 feet, written out as longer lines simply to save vellum or paper.
Now that we can count feet and syllables easily, we need to move on to the notion of syllable length. For some reason, many people find this much harder to hear than either the beat or the number of syllables in a foot. Good spellers are not always aware that their grasp of English spelling rules depends to a large extent on their recognizing stress and syllable length, even if they are not conscious of this. Poor spellers can usually hear stress, but may not be so good at hearing syllable lengths. Many dyslexics have difficulty identifying both stress and syllable lengths. Learning about the phonetics of metre not only makes verse more enjoyable, but may help us to improve our spelling as well!