The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (12 page)

There are no rules for finding and feeling the rhythm of prose. It is a gift, but it is also a learnable skill—learned by practice. Probably the
best practice is reading out loud. You know how an uncomprehending reader reads out loud, a scared fourth-grader, stumbling and missing the beats? A poor reader can’t dance to the prose.

But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

The only rule of prose “scansion” I know is: listen to what you are reading (or writing) as closely as you can, listen for its beat, and follow your own ear. There is no right way. The way that sounds right to you is the way. (Tao Rules, OK?) Don’t worry if you mark the stresses differently at different readings. Don’t worry if others disagree.

Don’t WORry if OTHers disaGREE

DON’T WORry if OTHers DISagree

Don’t WORry if OTHers DISaGREE

With repetition and emphasis, a regular beat tends to establish itself. My last reading of that casual prose sentence, with just a wee bit of elision, is iambic tetrameter. We are rhythmical animals. But prose refuses to give us predictability. If in prose one sentence is an iambic tetrameter, all you can predict is that the next one won’t be. True prose rhythm is always just ahead of us, elusive, running ahead, leading us on.

S
CANNING
P
ROSE
: E
XPERIMENTS IN
S
TRESS
P
ATTERNS

Prose rhythm is made up of many elements, repetitions of sound, parallels in syntax and construction, patterns of imagery, recurrences of mood, but just now I am sticking to the stress, the brute beat of it.

I think that if Virginia Woolf (in the quotation that opens this book) is right, that style is all rhythm—and I think that she is right, and that yes, she is profound—then even just the brute beat of a sentence might tell you something about what the sentence is and does. Do certain kinds of prose have certain characteristic stress-rhythms? Do authors have a characteristic beat of their own?

What follows are some very crude and simple investigations into the stress-rhythms of some bits of prose narrative. Mostly I just
wanted to find out what would turn up if I counted the stresses. I had some expectations. I thought I might find clear, immediate differences in the stress-rhythm of different types of prose. And I wondered if I would find measurable differences in the stress-rhythms of different authors.

What I am counting here are
oral
stresses. These are the
rhythms of the voice
—not of silent reading, which is a mysterious activity far too fleet and delicate for my coarse net. It is my strong belief, however, that all prose worth reading is worth reading aloud, and that the rhythms we catch clearly in reading aloud, we also catch unconsciously when reading in silence.

As there are no rules of scansion in prose, anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s. My method consists of reading the sentences aloud; the second or third time through, I start marking the stresses (an accent mark over stressed syllables).

In many cases you will probably disagree with where I put the stresses. I probably do too. Also, there are (alas) degrees of stress. Some are unmistakable, TUM! some are arguable,
TUM
; some are weak, a substress, a mere tumlet to get one through a long series of tatas. I may or may not mark these feeble ones. There are many inconsistencies. I have been over these samples many times, but have never arrived at a final judgment in many places; my mind will never be easy about some of my decisions. Anyhow, if you haven’t already skipped this section, you can disagree with me by striking out my stresses and putting in your own.

The selection of samples is whimsical. I picked writers whose style interested me and whose books were handy at the moment, and let my finger fall on a passage without any real selection, though I did avoid passages with back-and-forth dialogue. “The Three Bears” is included as an oral touchstone. Twain, Tolkien, and Woolf are here because I admire them as stylists. The textbook was chosen because it is a well-written one, not a horrible example of academic mumble. Darwin is here because I wanted some good mid-Victorian narrative, Austen
because I wanted some good pre-Victorian narrative. Stein is here because I thought she’d come out wildly different from all the others, which she didn’t.

The stresses are indicated by bold type.

The pauses or subdivisions I call bars are indicated by a vertical slash. A slash means a minimal pause or change of voice quality, a double slash indicates a longer pause. Longer pauses mostly coincide with punctuation, and indeed punctuation is almost always a guide to phrase grouping. In marking these bars, again my decisions were made reading aloud, not silently.

In the Stein passage, punctuation is an urgent necessity; without it the words would fall into a mumble-jumble in which the reader would be hopelessly lost. I had no hesitation in marking the Woolf passage, which to my ear fell inevitably into its brief, melodious elements. I dithered endlessly over the Austen, finding it as hard to chop into bits as a river flowing. Every time I look at it again I mark it differently. This scansion by bars is an even more subjective matter than stress-scansion, and you may find it quite useless. To me it serves to show visually some elements of the rhythmic structure of the prose—the triple patterning of the folktale, and sometimes a hint of metricality, the “bar” becoming a “foot.” Also it shows visibly whether the passage uses mostly short, discrete phrases, or longer, more fluid ones, or a mixture and variety.

The passages are of
one hundred syllables
to the dagger (anything past the dagger is not counted). I wanted the samples to be of the same length so I could count and compare various elements.

“The Three Bears” (folktale, oral tradition)

Once
up
on
a
time
| there were
three bears
: | a
great, big Pa
pa
Bear
; | a
mid
dle-sized
Ma
ma
Bear
; | and a
lit
tle
ti
ny
wee Ba
by
Bear
. || The
Three Bears lived
in the
for
est, | and in
their house
there
was
: | a
great, big bed
for
Pa
pa
Bear
; | a
mid
dle-sized
bed
for
Ma
ma
Bear
; | and a
lit
tle
ti
ny
wee bed
for the
Ba
by
Bear
.
|| And
at
the
ta
ble | there was a
great, big chair
for
Pa
pa
Bear,
| and a
mid
dle-sized
chair
for
M
ama † Bear |. . . .

Sentences: 3

Bars: 13

Words: 79

Words of one syllable: 61

of two syllables: 15

of three syllables: 3 (counting “middle-sized” as one word; if it is counted as two words there are no words of more than two syllables)

There are two series of 3 unstressed syllables, one broken by a bar line (a comma).

There are four series of 3 stressed syllables. (These TUM TUM TUMs are mostly connected with ponderous Papa Bear, while Mama and Baby Bear get a lighter beat.)

Stresses: 49

Mark Twain: “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

Well
, ||
thish
-yer
Smi
ley | had
rat
-tarriers, | and
chick
en cocks, | and
tom
cats, | and
all
them
kind
of
things
, | till you
could
n’t
rest
; || and you
could
n’t
fetch no
thing for
him
to
bet
on | but he’d
match
you. || He
ketched
a
frog one day
, | and
took
him
home
, | and
said
he
calc
’lated to
ed
ucate him; || and
so
he
nev
er done
no
thing for
three months
| but
set
in his
back
yard | and
learn
that
frog
to
jump
. || And
you bet
you | he
did
learn
him, |
too
. || He’d
give
him a
lit
†tle punch . . .

Sentences: 4

Bars: 19

Words: 85.5

Words of one syllable: 72

of two syllables: 11 (10.5)

of three syllables: 3 (I count “rat-tarriers” as one word; “thish-yer” and “couldn’t” are each two one-syllable words conventionally combined in spelling, or unconventionally in the case of “thish-yer,” so that the ratio of monosyllables could go even higher. “Calc’lated” is a four-syllable word cut down to three.)

There are three series of 3 unstressed syllables, but each series is divided by a bar line (comma or period), so mumbling is neatly avoided.

There is one series of 3 stressed syllables.

Stresses: 44

J. R. R. Tolkien:
The Lord of the Rings

They
now mount
ed their
po
nies | and
rode off si
lently
in
to the
eve
ning. ||
Dark
ness
came down quick
ly, | as they
plod
ded
slow
ly
down
hill and
up
a
gain
, | un
til
at
last
they saw
lights
|
twink
ling some
dis
tance a
head
. ||

Be
fore
them
rose Bree hill | bar
ring the
way
, || a
dark mass
| against
mis
ty
stars
; | and
un
der its
west
ern
flank
|
nest
led a
large vil
lage. ||
Towards it
they
now hur
ried, | de
sir
ing
on
ly to
find
a
fire
, | and a
door
be†tween them and the night.

Sentences: 4 plus a paragraph break

Bars: 15

Words: 72

Words of one syllable: 45

of two syllables: 24

of three syllables: 2 (“towards” in Tolkien’s English is one syllable, but “evening,” which I count as two, might be three)

The single series of 3 unstressed syllables is divided by a bar line (comma).

I mark one series of 3 stresses, “
came down quick
ly,” which might be disputed, as might my series of 4, “
rose Bree hill bar
ring”—to my ear these phrases do not break down into lighter and heavier stresses,
but insist on being read with a strong, even beat. Also questionable is my reading “a
dark mass
against
mis
ty
stars
,” where “against” is deprived of its normal stress by—to my ear!—the overriding rhythm of the phrase.

Stresses: 47

Virginia Woolf:
Between the Acts

Then
something
moved
in the
wa
ter; | her
fa
vorite
fan
tail. || The
gold
en
orfe fol
lowed. ||
Then
she had a
glimpse
of
sil
ver—|| the
great carp
him
self
, | who
came
to the
sur
face | so
ver
y
sel
dom. || They
slid on
, |
in
and
out
| be
tween
the
stalks
, |
sil
ver; |
pink
; |
gold
; |
splashed
; |
streaked
; |
pied
. ||

“
Ourselves
,” | she
mur
mured. || And re
triev
ing some
glint
of
faith
| from the
grey wa
ters, |
hope
fully, | with
out
much
help
from
reas
on, | she
foll
owed the
fish
; || the
speck
led,
streaked
, and
blotched
; || † seeing in that vision beauty, power, and glory in ourselves.

Sentences: 6 plus a paragraph break

Bars: 24

Words: 75

Words of one syllable: 53

of two syllables: 19

of three syllables: 3

There are two series of 3 unstressed syllables, one broken by a bar line (period).

The unusual series of 7 stressed syllables with only 1 unstressed syllable in it is marked clearly to be stressed by the comma and semicolons (“
stalks, sil
ver;
pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied
”). It probably raises the stress-count in this selection higher than Woolf’s norm. Stresses: 47