The poems I want to look at next raise several interesting theoretical problems about scansion. Although we have already considered lines by dead poets, difficulties about pronunciation have not yet arisen. For all practical purposes, we can simply read the poems in our own normal accent and judge syllable lengths from that. However, poets presumably write in “their own voices”: they must imagine their words as spoken either by themselves, or, at the very least, in a dialect current in their own lifetime.
The further back in time we go, the more difficult it is to be sure exactly how the words of poems would originally have been spoken. Even when we think we do know a good deal about past pronunciation, that, for example, Shakespeare had far more long vowels than most English speakers do nowadays, we then find that we have a new set of problems. Should we try to pronounce Shakespeare’s words as he might have done, and bamboozle a modern audience? Should we read Shakespeare as we would a modern poet and inevitably change the subtleties of his verse music? Should we attempt some kind of compromise by reading in essentially a “twenty-first century” voice, but introducing a few longer vowels or other modified pronunciations where we feel that too much of the original rhythm is lost?
With Chaucer and other medieval poets it is customary to attempt a medieval pronunciation, as far as we understand it. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the convention seems to be to speak as usual, except that the past participial suffix -ed is frequently pronounced where the metre seems to demand it, along with the occasional disyllable for the abstract noun suffix -ion. Vowel lengths are not normally modified. (If you need evidence of the effect of pronouncing Shakespeare with differing vowel qualities, record some friends from eastern Scotland reading a scene from one of his plays and then some Americans or Devonians reading the same scene: listen to the different rhythmic patterns. Eastern Scots usually have fewer long vowels in their speech than people in southern England have; English speakers of south-western dialects and many Americans are closer to Shakespeare's own dialect, with more long vowels than in modern RP.)
Let us begin with verse that is nearer to our own time and work back to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The poetry of T.S. Eliot presents us with a few interesting surprises. In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Eliot’s rhymes are generally very true. When he rhymes “lawn” with “gone” in Mr Mistoffelees, words where both the quality and also the length of the vowels are nowadays not alike in RP speech, Eliot signals the fact that he wants the older-fashioned, declining pronunciation of “gone” by actually spelling it out.
There are still a few elderly people who pronounce “gone” as “gawn”, and most southerners over the age of fifty can probably recollect hearing in childhood such a pronunciation by an elderly relative or by film actors or BBC broadcasters. Eliot demonstrates a poet’s awareness of the variation and constant change in the way we speak.
Look again at The Lady of Shalott in Chapter 7. It is possible that some of you pronounce the word “Camelot” with only the first syllable stressed: | Camelot |, whereas Tennyson (like modern American or English west-country speakers) has two stresses: | Came | lot |. In the same stanza the first syllable of “unhail’d” carries stress: for many modern RP speakers, this negative prefix is almost always unstressed. (If we are making a special point of the negative aspect, nowadays we normally substitute “not” for “un-”. |“That’s un | fair”| is less accusatory than “That’s | not | fair”| .)
If we now slip further back in time to the age of Keats, we will encounter other syllables carrying stress which has subsequently been lost: for example, in the word “loitering”. Bearing this in mind, let us now consider the first stanza of Keats’ well known romantic ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
If you now try to put in foot boundaries, you will find several puzzles. The first line is fairly easy: there are four very clear beat syllables. If you accept my suggestion that the final syllable of “loitering” was likely to be stressed in Keats’ day, you will have four possible beat syllables in the second line, too. It may, however, seem a little strange to allow the “ing” syllable to carry a full stress, since it is naturally somewhat lighter in force than “lone”, “pale” and “loi”. If you look at other stanzas in the poem, you will find confirmation that four feet is the norm for the second line: here are some examples:
Similar searches through the whole poem will confirm that the third line has four feet and the fourth line two. We could now scan the stanza in the following fashion:
O | what can | ail thee, | knight-at- | arms,
^ ^ ^ ^
A | lone and | palely | loiter | ing?
° —
The | sedge is | withered | ´ from the | lake,
^ ^
And | no birds | sing.
The extraordinary sense of lassitude of the knight is emphasized by the sound (and sense) of two even-feet “palely loiter-” in the midst of a run of the dominant long-shorts. Although | -ing | occupies the time allowed for a lomg syllable in a long-short foot, there is no need to lay heavy stress on the syllable: it tails away into quiet inactivity. The extent of the wintry bleakness is further emphasized by yet another change in the rhythm. The word “withered” withers away swiftly, the short beat syllable being followed by a long light one. (The symbol ´ marks a syncopation, which will be described in the next chapter.)
The word “no” is heightened by being stressed and also by appearing in an even foot. This looks at first sight like a long-short foot, because of the word boundary in it, but if you listen carefully, you will hear that the necessary secondary stress on the noun “birds” requires the phrase “no birds” to be pronounced almost as one word, with even lengths, as happens in the terms “no one”, “nowhere”, “know-how”, “blackbirds”. (The spellings in one word or with a hyphen signal the fact that some of these compounds are now recognized as sounding like one word, to all intents and purposes. “No one” will probably remain as two words in writing, because of the awkwardness of having two “o” letters together that do not represent the sound “oo” [u:]: “nobody” has long been written as one word.)
In Lycidas Milton weights the first line of his lament for the death of Lycidas in much the same fashion, by repeating the phrase “once more”, which also sounds like a single even-foot on its first occurrence:
^ ^ ^ ^
Yet | once more, | O ye | Laurels, and | once | more
^ ^ ^ ^ ° —
Ye | Myrtles | brown, with | Ivy | never | sear,
° —
I | come to | pluck your | berries | harsh and | crude ...
(“Laurels” probably had two long vowels for Milton: this and the three even-feet give the first two lines rhythmically stately, funereal tones.
Sir Philip Sidney’s deceptively simple poem My True Love Hath My Heart gains much of its charm from the way in which the basic long-short rhythmic pattern is varied either by the occasional extra syllable or by the use of key words in even or short-long feet. The expression “true love” itself, which occurs three times, is an even foot like Keats’ “no birds” and Milton’s “once more”. If you speak the following, you will find that apart from the repeated “true love”, the other words brought to your attention by the rhythm are: “By just exchange one for another given”, “mine he cannot miss”, “there never was a better bargain driven”, “sences” and “cherish”. These words encapsulate the message of the whole poem.
^ ^
My | true love | hath my | heart and | I have | his,
— ° — ° —
By | just ex | change | one for an | other | given:
° —
I | hold his | deare, and | mine he | cannot | misse,
° — ° — ^ ^ ° —
There | never | was a | better | bargaine | driven.
^ ^
My | true love | hath my | heart and | I have | his.
His | heart in | me keepes | him and | me in | one,
^ ^
My | heart in | him his | thoughts and | sences | guides:
He | loves my | heart, for | once it | was his | owne,
° —
I | cherish | his be | cause in | me it | bides.
^ ^
My | true love | hath my | heart, and | I have | his.