The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (11 page)

Prose does not have meter. Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses. If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.

S
TRESS
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HYTHM IN
P
OETRY
: M
ETRICS

English meter in the earliest days was “accentual,” which means people just counted how many stresses per line. The metrical unit in such poetry is the line or the half-line. Each unit has the same number of stresses; but there is no set number of syllables in the line and no set arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Seamus Heaney’s translation of
Beowulf
reproduces the four-stress line that breaks into two half-lines:

Down to the waves then, dressed in the web

of their chain-mail and warshirts, the young men marched.

By Chaucer’s day, English poets had taken to counting syllables along with stresses, and to thinking of the line as divisible into feet. Some poets still argue that you can’t put English stockings onto Greek or Latin feet, but most find the concept of the metric foot a useful one. All who do agree that the foot that goes the farthest in English has two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed: ta TUM—the iamb.

“Te he!” quoth she, and clapt the window to.

That line from Chaucer is iambic pentameter, “five-beat iambic.” English poetry has over the centuries favored this particular meter. (It has been suggested that this may be because five heartbeats relate to a comfortable breathing rate, so that iambic pentameter fits nicely with the living-breathing-speaking voice.)

Metrical poetry has a regular pattern, yet many, many lines of poems in iambic pentameter do not actually go,

Te HE! quoth SHE, and CLAPT the WINdow TO—

ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM

(or as it’s usually written,

—a dash for the unstressed syllable, a stroke for the stressed syllable, and a slash to separate the feet).

The pattern is endlessly varied by “substituting” feet—a TUM ta here, a ta ta followed by a TUM TUM, an unstressed syllable dropped or added. (All these variant feet have names of their own—trochee, pyrrhic/spondee, anapest.) The innate stresses of the words, manipulated by the syntax, play against the demand of the regular beat, setting up a syncopation, a tension between expectation and act, which is surely one of the essential ploys of art.

Here are three lines of Shakespeare, who was, no question about it, good at this sort of thing:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.

If you force a pure iambic/ten-syllable line pattern onto these lines you’ll get:

Thus CONscience DOES make COWards OF us ALL

And THUS the NAtive HUE of RESoLOOSHN

Is SICKlied O’ER with THE pale CAST of THOUGHT.

Clearly this won’t do. “Of” and “the” are not stressable words. Besides, we aren’t rocking in a rocker, we’re reading poetry. The natural stress of the words within the sentence, and the syntactical phrases or meaning-groups they fall into, are in active tension with the ideal pattern. They fit it, yet they fight it.

I’d speak the lines more or less this way:

Thus CONscience / does make COWards / of us ALL,/

And THUS / the NAtive HUE / of REsoLUtion/

Is SICKlied O’ER / with the PALE CAST / of THOUGHT./

This puts only three stress-beats in the first line, with three unstressed syllables in a row. The second line is regular except for its extra final syllable. The third uses the two-foot variation of two unstressed followed by two stressed syllables.

The poetic heart never follows the metronome. The rhythm of these lines is complex, subtle, and powerful, and that power comes from its syncopation with the ideal or underlying regular pattern.

The first of these lines also demonstrates why the idea of the foot will always be problematic in English. My scanning of it above would give:

that is, five feet, iambics alternating with pyrrhics; but reading it as I would speak it aloud, I scan it into three elements or phrases that are not usefully describable as feet at all:

So I introduce here the idea of “bars.” When I scan either poetry or prose by reading it aloud and listening for the beats, I find it falls into short syntactical groups, which I call bars. I mark them with a vertical slash: |. The intervals between bars may be very slight, or even imperceptible if one is reading or speaking very fluently, but I think they exist; I think they clarify both the thought and the emotion, and are as essential to the rhythm of the poetic line or sentence as stress is. But I’m not certain anybody else would agree with me, or would mark off
the bars as I do, so I simply mention it, and hope someone, sometime, who knows more about the subject will tell me what they know.

The
line
is a vexed subject in modern poetry. Many poets argue for reading poetry aloud without any pause at all at the end of lines. But it seems to me the line is part of the pattern, the rhythm, of the poem. In reading free verse, if the voice gives no indication, however slight, of the line end, the hearer cannot know where it is. This reduces the lines to mere typography. The regularity of metrical verse may signal the ear where a line ends, but still it needs some support from the voice. Speaking Shakespeare is a constant compromise between the natural run-on of the voice in dialogue and the beat of the pentameter lines that underlies it. If in search of natural tone the actor completely ignores the lines, the poetry is being read as prose.

Here’s a wonderful example of what a poet can do with line: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool:”

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

die soon.

And another from John Donne:

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise

From Death, you numberless infinities

Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go.

The syntactical phrases break out of the pentameter lines, creating a strong tension. The technical name for a phrase that runs over into the next line is
enjambment.
It is a form of syncopation.

What happens to the rhythm and to the meaning if we take the enjambments out of “We Real Cool”?

We real cool.

We left school

We lurk late . . .

No, I can’t go on. We can also desecrate Donne’s quatrain by following the syntax and abandoning the pentameter: the same words exactly, but without the rhythmic tension given by enjambment:

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners,

blow your trumpets, Angels,

and arise, arise from Death,

you numberless infinities of souls,

and to your scatter’d bodies go.

Not only is the structure weakened by the loss of the emphatic rhymepattern, but the tense, powerful beat of the lines has gone flabby.

I did not desecrate Brooks and Donne only to show the power of the line in poetry, but also as an indication of why poets may seek strict, formalised patterns to work in. The observation of a pattern, even an arbitrary pattern, can give strength to words that would otherwise wander bleating like lost lambs.

This is why it can be harder to write prose than to write poetry.

S
TRESS
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HYTHMS IN
P
OETRY
: F
REE
V
ERSE

Free verse has no regular meter; but there are stress-patterns in most free verse, just as there are often plenty of rhymes and other rhythmic devices, though not in predictable places. Finding the flexible, changing
patterns in free verse is a matter of listening intently, using your own ear to catch the poet’s beat.

For example, in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” you’ll find the hypnotic, gentle beat of that title line recurring, here and there, changed and varied, throughout the long poem: TUMtata TUMta / TUMtata TUMta. . . .

Free verse that avoids stress patterns and doesn’t use the line end as a pause may compensate by other rhythmic devices, other kinds of pattern and recurrence. One is the regular repetition of lines or parts of lines. Left to its own devices, English poetry seems to do this only in refrains; but it has imported exotic forms, such as the sestina and the pantoum, which not only set up a pattern by strict repetition, but control the range of emotion and meaning by restricting the choice of words.

The ideal of free verse is that the poem itself will find/create its own internal pattern, as unpredictable and inevitable as any fir tree, any waterfall.

S
TRESS
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HYTHMS IN
P
ROSE

Tentatively, I propose the following statement: There are two elements to stress-rhythm in prose: first, actual syllabic stresses; second, syntactical phrases or word groups, following syntax, punctuation, sense, stress, and breath. These groups are what I call “bars.”

By reading a passage of prose aloud you will hear both the syllabic stresses and the slight pauses or rise-and-fall of intonation that break the sentence into bars. Almost certainly none of us will read or hear or “scan” it in the same way. That doesn’t matter. Prose has a whole lot of latitude.

The thing to remember is that good prose does have a stress-rhythm, subtle and complex and changing though it may be. Dull prose, clunky narrative, hard-to-read textbook stuff, lacks the rhythm that catches and drives and moves the reader’s body and mind and heart.