More than half a century ago, at school and in drama examinations, I learned to scan verse in terms of iambs, trochees, dactyls and anapaests. This terminology reflected the rhythms of classical Latin verse appropriately enough, but I was well aware that it did not fit the English poetry that I enjoyed reading aloud, especially dramatic verse: in English lessons it was an irrelevant, mark-scoring exercise. My sadness at discovering that teachers still parade this bizarre untruth to further generations of students prompted me to write this book in which I shall first of all explain the basic mechanics of English verse, and then begin to explore some of the more interesting musical effects created by poets. It is dedicated to everyone who enjoys listening to poetry.
I shall show how the sounds of verse are rooted in the phonetic nature of English speech. (This may, to begin with, seem drily theoretical if you have never considered phonetics before, but persevere: I shall not be too technical!) I shall discuss the essential metrical differences between dramatic verse and other genres, explain how free verse works, and say a little about Anglo-Saxon and medieval verse traditions as well as those of more modern times.
First of all, however, for anyone indoctrinated with the system of iambics, trochaics, and so on, I shall show why this system is misguided and inadequate. If you have never heard of such things, feel free to skip to the beginning of Chapter One.
Trochee, iamb, dactyl, anapaest, spondee and amphibrach are Greek terms. They were borrowed by the Romans and, later still, by English scholars who tried to apply Roman metrical theories to English verse. The difficulty is that Ancient Greek verse is generally agreed to be accentual: the number of beats in the line is the basis of metre. Classical Latin verse, however, was quantitative: a line had to be composed according to accepted patterns of long and short syllables. Clearly the Romans themselves were already confusing the issue by using for their quantitative verse the terminology created to describe accentual verse. As English is accentual, you might think that the Greek system of description would be appropriate for English. The trouble is that the scholars who adopted the terms took them from Latin books about grammar and rhetoric, so they often cheerfully discussed what they called “long” and “short” syllables in English verse, when they clearly meant accented and unaccented syllables. This not only makes for a ridiculous muddle, but obscures the fact that both accent (or stress or beat) and syllable-length (or quantity) are important in English: we need terms to handle both. Even poets themselves have subscribed unthinkingly to the confusion. (Gerard Manley Hopkins is a welcome beacon of common sense on versification.)
Here is a rhyme of Coleridge’s, still used as a mnemonic:
The line is the most easily recognized unit of verse-structure and is therefore marked in most written copies of verse. A line may contain a regular number of beats: Shakespeare’s blank verse has five beats per line, for example (sometimes called “pentameter”). It is not true, however, that Shakespeare wrote “iambic pentameter”, by which Latin-imbued scholars meant a succession of lines each containing the rhythm: di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum. According to this notion, King Lear’s famous line: “Never, never, never, never, never,” (which runs: dum-di dum-di dum-di dum-di dum-di) is completely irregular. Could Shakespeare be so slovenly? Or are we perhaps wrong in expecting his lines to follow, with only minor variation, the di-dum pattern?
Some people think the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence has a trochaic (dum-di dum-di dum-di) first line and an iambic (di-dum di-dum di-dum) second line, according to “the rules”, but differ as to how to scan the rest of the lines — if they can make up their minds at all. How would you describe the rhythm of the following lines?
The sonnet Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? is said to be “iambic”: do the first two lines really go di-dum di-dum all the way through?
` / ` / ` / ` / ` /
| Shall I | compare | thee to | a sum | mers day? |
` / ` / ` / ` / ` /
| thou art | more love | ly and | more tem | perate.|
Not until you reach the line:
` / ` / ` / ` / ` /
| Rough windes | do shake | the dar | ling buds | of Maie,|
do you find a rhythm that in any way approximates to what has been called “iambic” (in English).
If you are reluctant to budge from the belief that Shakespeare did write in iambic pentameter, in spite of the vast number of lines, especially in his later plays, that, according to this doctrine, are obviously highly irregular, I ask you at the very least to suspend belief in what you have previously been taught and disbelief in the thesis presented in this book, until you have followed the argument through to the last page, tried the exercises and read aloud several times the quoted lines of verse.