By the early medieval period, Latin verse — still being written throughout most of Europe, for Latin was the international language of the Christian Church and of scholars — had become purely accentual. We know this because of the large number of instruction books containing chapters on verse-writing in the earlier period, and because of complaints by later clerics and scholars about the new-fangled verse, where the old rules concerning quantity (i.e. syllable lengths) were being ignored.
It is clearly confusing to label English verse with a terminology (such as iambic, trochaic) that has been used to describe a variety of metrical types in the past, and which is especially associated in most people’s minds with classical Latin metres. We do not need to make our poetry seem respectable by lumbering it with a critical apparatus and labels culled from the Golden Age of Greek and Latin literature, as so many writers of the past, especially in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, felt obliged to do. (For a note on a few original thinkers about English versification, whose work has largely been ignored, see Bibliography.)
Forgetting, then, any confusing nonsense we may have been taught about metre by those conventional pedagogues who unquestioningly hand down to their pupils what they learnt at school, without regard for its inadequacies and incoherence, let us hear for ourselves the nature and effect of varying syllable lengths in verse, just as we earlier heard for ourselves the beat, or regularly recurring stress.
Between stressed or beat syllables there may be one or more lighter syllables, or there may be none at all. In impassioned speech, where the beat syllable is very heavily stressed, it may be followed by a large number of scurrying unstressed or light syllables. Here are one or two extreme examples:
From the late medieval period until the time of Hopkins, however, most English poets went in for syllable counting. They preferred a measured tread, hardly ever allowing more than three syllables altogether in a foot, most commonly putting two. Dramatic verse has always been more free than lyric and narrative verse in this respect, but even here the norm is two syllables per foot. Chaucer’s five-foot lines generally contain ten syllables; less frequently there are nine or eleven syllables. The same is true for most pre-twentieth century sonnets, Paradise Lost, Pope’s long poems and the earlier verse-drama of the sixteenth century, including Shakespeare’s first plays. Even poets often thought of as innovators, such as Donne, Milton in Samson Agonistes, or Browning, have the two-syllable foot as their basic pattern. Let us, then, consider the structure of a two-syllable foot.
Theoretically, in a foot containing two syllables, there are three possibilities: the first syllable is longer than the second; the first syllable is shorter than the second; both syllables seem to be the same length. As a matter of fact, in speech and in verse and prose read aloud, by far the most frequent of these is the long-short pattern; the next most frequent is short-long; least common of all is the foot with syllables perceived as being of even length.
I shall begin with the two types that are perhaps easiest for the inexperienced listener to hear, although they are not the commonest.
DISYLLABIC FOOT: short-long (marked ° — ).
Some vowels are naturally short, some are naturally long. If you
can prolong a vowel sound as long as you have breath, then it is
technically long. Examples are the “oo” [u:] sound in
“shoe”, the “ee” [i:] sound in “sea”,
or the “ay” [ei] sound in “may” in RP (that is,
Received Pronunciation, the accent of educated southerners, or
what is sometimes called BBC English). The symbols in
square brackets are those of the IPA or International Phonetic
Alphabet and indicate the precise pronunciation of the vowel sounds
cited.
If, even after taking a deep breath, you cannot sustain a vowel sound, then it is technically short. Examples are “a” [æ] as in “cat”, “i” [ɪ] as in “tin”, or “u” [ʌ] as in “cup”. (In some British regional accents and in English spoken in America, Australia, or other countries outside Britain, the vowels in these words may not be the same as in RP and may even be long.)
Now, suppose you have a disyllabic word in which the first syllable is stressed, carrying the beat of the foot, and, furthermore, the first vowel is short and the second is long. Suppose also, that there is only a single consonant sound between these vowels. Logically you should have a foot which is short-long. Here are some examples from RP. (Remember that a doubled consonant letter is often used to represent a single consonant sound after a short vowel, whereas two or more different consonant letters together usually indicate a consonant cluster, that is two or more separate sounds one after the other.)
The formula for short-long is:
a disyllabic word with stress on the first syllable, of the form:
(C) VS C V (C)
[ C = a consonant, V = any vowel, VS = a short vowel, ( ) = optional ]
° — ° — ° — ° — ° —
short-long: ever sunny hopping finish travel
DISYLLABIC FOOT: even-foot (marked ^ ^ )
The formula for even-foot is:
a disyllabic word, with the stress on the first syllable, of the form:
(C) VL (C) V (C) or (C) V C C (C) V (C)
[ C = a consonant, V = any vowel, VL = a long vowel, ( ) = optional ]
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^
even-foot: always sunlight tended steamboat poplar neighbour trio
DISYLLABIC FOOT: long-short (marked — ° )
The formula for long-short is:
A stressed final (or only) syllable of a word, followed by a light
syllable which begins (or is) a new word. This can be more neatly
described as a beat syllable plus a light syllable, with a word
boundary between them.
— ° — °
long-short: | What a | shame The | sun has | set.
— ° — °
It’s | time for | bed. The ac | count was | closed.
If you find it difficult to hear the differences between these three types of feet — and you need to be able to in order to appreciate the musical effects of good poets — perhaps the following verses may help, if you read them aloud. By the time you reach the fourth line of each piece, you should be aware of how different it feels in mood and rhythm from the companion exercises. Read to make sense, not thinking about the sounds of the words, but do not try to put too much expression into each: just rattle them off fairly briskly. Read them a second time — again for sense — but trying to hear the rhythms and feeling them in your mouth.
In each exercise there are the same number of lines and the same number of feet in each line; the last foot of each line is the same, a long-short foot in every case — except for the final feet of each stanza, each of which contains one stressed syllable. The reasons for these variations are to do with the structure of English: it was not possible to write grammatically at such length in so rigidly determined a phonetic programme without making some concessions. In particular, I wanted to avoid the problem of having to end lines of short-long or even-feet in mid-word.
Because of the number of short words in English, it is very easy to write exercises full of long-short feet. They are the commonest type of foot in English verse from the later Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The next most easy to write was runs of short-long. Although you rarely find two or more together in verse, there are obviously many words in our vocabulary which fit this pattern. Runs of even-feet are grammatically very difficult to manage, hence the stylistic awkwardness of this part of the exercise. These feet are the rarest in syllable-counted verse. I shall look in the next chapter at the effect of studding verse whose feet are generally long-short, with short-long and even-feet at appropriate moments.
Now read aloud:
EXERCISES DEMONSTRATING TYPES OF DISYLLABIC FEET
Short-long ° — (C) VS C V (C)
Even-feet ^ ^ (C) V C C (C) V (C) or (C) VL (C) V (C)
Long-short — ° word boundary
1. With long vowels in the beat syllables:
2. With short vowels followed by single consonants in beat syllables: