NINE

SYNCOPATION

In the last chapter I suggested in a note that one line contained syncopation. Let us now consider this possibility.

In La Belle Dame Sans Merci Keats has as his third line: “The sedge has withered from the lake”. The word “withered” is a short-long foot; the words that follow it make up the last two feet of the line. It could be scanned thus:

                  °  —           
The | sedge is | withered | from the | lake ...

If you read Keats’ line as if it were prose, without any predetermined notion of how many feet there should be, you will almost certainly stress only three actual syllables: “sedge”, “with-” and “lake”. However, you are unlikely to say:

      The | sedge is | withered from the | lake

      The | sedge is | gone from the | lake.

This is partly because “withered”, unlike “gone”, is a colourfully descriptive word, not a dull, factual word: you feel obliged to give it some emphasis by lingering momentarily, thus allowing the very slightest pause or rest after it. Also, if you read as: “ | withered from the | lake”, not only does the clutter of four syllables in a foot detract from the appropriate highlighting of the important word “withered”, but the sudden polysyllabic flurry creates a sense of speed and activity (remember the exercises in Chapter Five), whereas passivity, decay and stillness are the chief characteristics of this scene. It would be more natural in speech and prose, as well as in Keats’ verse, to allow the time for a silent beat between “withered” and “from”, rather like marking a short rest at the beginning of a bar of music:

     The | sedge is | withered | ´  from the | lake.

This could almost be represented musically as:

This is not to assert that verse can be read in strict musical time (in this case three-four) but rather that, as in early carols like O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, minims and crotchets represent longer or shorter notes relative to each other. As the line is the key unit in verse, experienced verse speakers normally allow the same apparent time to elapse for all lines that have the same number of feet in them. Silent beats or rests are common in their performance. (This is especially true of actors who have much experience in speaking Shakespeare’s dramatic verse.)

As the pause in which you feel the pulse of the beat between “withered” and “from” is so very short, the effect is rather like syncopation in music: that is what I propose to call it here.

In Keats’ Ode to Autumn, written in five-foot lines, we find another case where the word “from” seems to me to be syncopated, to follow quickly after the pulse of the beat:

            ^    ^        °  —                  ^  ^         
     The | red-breast | whistles |  ´ from a | garden | croft.

There are further lines in the same poem where prepositions come in after or on the tail of the beat:

                               to | set | budding | more

             ^    ^       ^ ^      ^ ^
     And | still more, | later | flowers | ´  for the | bees;

             ^   ^       ^  ^
     Thy | hair soft- | lifted | ´ by a | winnowing | wind;

                                    °  —
     And | gathering | swallows | twitter | ´  in the | skies. 

Milton’s syncopations are, perhaps, less debatable. We have already looked at the first line of Lycidas. Line 15 begins the second paragraph of the poem and runs: “Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well”. The basic metre of the poem so far beats out five feet per line. It seems unlikely that a musician such as Milton would allow the preposition “of” to carry full stress here, so presumably there is syncopation in the third foot:

     Be | gin then, | Sisters | ´  of the | sacred | well.

     | Under the | opening | eye-lids | ´  of the | morn.

     Of | man’s | First Diso | bedience | ´  and the | Fruit

     Of | that For | bidd’n | Tree.

                     | Thou from the | first

     Wast | present, | ´  and with | mighty | wings out | spred

     | Dove-like satst | brooding | ´  on the | vast A | byss.

Because of Milton’s blindness his later verse was dictated to relatives and friends, who transcribed it for him. Yet even before he became blind, Milton clearly wrote for the ear rather than the eye. In my experience, even when commenting that they do not fully understand everything they have heard, audiences almost always say how much they enjoy the sound of Milton’s poetry. Syncopation is often an important part of his verse-music.

To those who may find what I have written in this chapter surprising or at odds with their own perception of what happens in verse speaking, I want to reiterate two important points. First of all, for hundreds of years the English have incuriously tried to mark scansion with a system borrowed from the Romans, whose own metre was not based on stress. (See further details in the Introduction.) It has become customary to expect a norm of two syllables per foot in most verse composed from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, and arbitrarily to scan the words according to a theoretical assumption of regular rhythms (with occasional licensed variations) such as di-dum, di-dum (once called “iambic”), or dum-di, dum-di (once called “trochaic”). If words like “of” or “and” or “from” happen to appear in the expected stress position, they are often marked as stressed without further thought. It is time that allegiance to this bizarre practice was forsworn: it bears no relation at all to the way intelligent performers speak English poetry. (There are even papers in learned journals where linguistics specialists suggest that what you actually hear in a good reading creates a “tension” (a favourite word of literary critics on slippery ground) with a stylised metric pattern notionally beating away in the listener’s brain, the inference being that this “tension” is all that the poet strives to achieve.)

My second point is that verse is an art form based on exploiting the phonetic realities of normal English speech: often, of course, impassioned speech, as so much poetry is full of deep feeling. What I say may conflict with what you have previously been taught about verse, but I hope that you will at the very least spend some time listening to what actually happens in everyday talk around you and to recordings of intelligent poetry readings. You can hear poets reading their own verse (not always brilliantly, but presumably with the intended rhythms) in www.poetryarchive.org. The more you understand the tunes of everyday English, the basic material of the poets’ art, the more you will enjoy the music of verse.

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