Rhythm Rhythm is of prime importance in versification. What constitutes rhythm? Rhythm", says Wikipedia, "is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. ... When governed by rule, it is called meter. It is inherent in any time-dependent medium, but it is most associated with music, dance, and the majority of poetry." If you understood that right away, well and good; if you didn't, maybe you need to look at an example and read it again. The bird will fly no more! Can you detect the rhythm of this line? Try tapping your foot while speaking the line. If you started tapping at 'The', then you're doing it wrong, and it'll feel odd. Your foot should come down at the words 'bird', 'fly', and 'more'. Why? Because these words are accented, or stressed. On the other hand, the words 'The', 'will', and 'no' are not. So the line comes out as: The bird will fly no more! with the stresses on the words in bold. These stresses come at regular intervals- on every second word. We can say that this is a rising rhythm. Now in this case, each word has only a single syllable. In words with two or more syllables, some of the syllables are stressed and that others are not. For example, in the words 'only', and 'candy', the first syllable is stressed, and the second is unstressed, whereas in 'alone', and 'without', the reverse is true. Now can we make up a line with falling rhythm? Of course we can. And how about we make one so that there are two unstressed syllables after each stressed one? Okay, here we go Only some candy can cheer me up. As mentioned in a book I was reading, this is Waltz rhythm. Pom pom pom Pom pom pom... Only some candy can cheer me up. A brief introduction to the notation used- As yet, I've marked stresses by bolding the accented syllables. Normally, in writing, these are marked by putting a '_' right on top of a long or accented syllable, and a small 'u' (actually a flatter and slightly stretched u) on top of a short or unaccented one. But when we want to show a general sequence of long and short syllables, without using any specific ones, we can use the '/' (for accented syllables), and 'x' (for unaccented ones). Of course it is a usual practice to use the other notation too, but I'll be using this one here. Using this, the first line can be marked as: x / x / x / And the second as: / x x / x x / x x Meter I don't know what it is with me today, but I seem to be attached to the trimeter or something. Usually it is the tetrameter that is natural for me, and, I think, to everyone. But observe that both these lines are trimeters. What's that? A line with three accented syllables. The bird will fly no more! Only some candy can cheer me up. See? Now it's time to introduce the foot. You already have an idea of what a foot is, just not the name. A foot is like a unit in a verse. I said that these two lines we trimeters. This means that they consist of three feet each. In the first line, the first syllable is, as we saw, unstressed, and the second is stressed. This makes up a foot. 'The bird', 'will fly', and 'no more' are each a foot. In the second line, the first syllable itself is stressed. So we start with that and proceed till we come to the next stressed syllable. All the syllables until that one together constitute one foot. So 'Only some', 'Candy can', and 'cheer me up' are each one foot. In general, any given verse can be broken up into a collection of basic feet. Opinions differ as to how many of these basic feet should actually be regarded as part of English versification. But let's look at six of them here. Two I already introduced. These are the Iambus (plural Iambi) or, simply, Iamb,and the Dactyl. Now let's look at the accent markings of the lines again: x / x / x / And / x x / x x / x x It's quite easy to separate the feet here. For the first line, one foot consists of 'x /'. This is the Iamb. We say that the line is Iambic. And since there are three Iambs in the line, it is said to be an Iambic trimeter. 'Dirac', is an Iamb. For the second, one foot is '/ x x'. This is the Dactyl. The line is Dactylic, and since this one, too, is made up of three feet, it's a Dactylic trimeter. 'Schrödinger', is a Dactyl. There are four more feet. The Trochee, '/ x', is the reverse of the Iamb. 'Newton', is a Trochee. The following lines are in Trochaic tetrameter- When I last did look the sun was Falling down the sloping valley. A sense of 'falling' is conveyed by the Trochee. It has a falling rhythm, while the Iamb has a rising one. The Anapest (also Anapaest), 'x x /', is the reverse of the Dactyl. I can't think of any Physicist whose name is Anapestic. Can you? Possibly some Frenchman whose name goes LaLaLaa. A couple of lines in Anapestic tetrameter- The retreat of the forces was cheering to see, And the gallop of horses was thrilling to hear. It is a "galloping" foot. A very special foot is the Spondee, '/ /' - two long syllables. 'Einstein', is Spondee. Needless to say, no poem (at least, no decently good poem) consists entirely of Spondees. In the first place, it's not practically possible, if you want to make some sense. And then, it would be too monotonic. You could, maybe, write an extremely short poem, but then it probably wouldn't qualify as a poem at all. The following line is in Spondaic tetrameter (You probably won't hear of such a thing, except in Greek poetry, perhaps, and even there, though we may use that term, it wouldn't be purely Spondaic; and furthermore, this isn't even a poem)- Long sounds move slow The Spondee can be used when we need to create an impression of slowness. And last, we come to the Pyrrhic (also called the Dibrach). It consists of two short syllables- "x x". Edgar Allan Poe does not regard the Pyrrhic as a valid foot. He has given good reasons too, and I'm inclined to agree with him. I'm not going to debate that, however. And I'm mentioning it here just so you know what a Pyrrhic is. You may come across it in many writings on prosody. But I cannot give an example of a Pyrrhic line. A pure Pyrrhic line does not exist, for one thing. And when it supposedly appears as a deviation from the regular meter of a verse, you can always classify it as a two other types of feet side by side. As in the following case, which was given in a website as an example of alternating Pyrrhic and Spondees: And the white breast of the dim sea Which has the following pattern: x x / / x x / / This can, of course, be seen as Pyrrhics and Spondees. There is even a notable pattern ( Pyrrhic Spondee Pyrrhic Spondee) when we do so. But we may also say it's Anapest (x x /) Dactyl (/ x x) Spondee (/ /). And in almost all imaginable cases where a Pyrrhic may be said to appear, this can be done. For example if it was even / x x x x / We could still scan them as a Dactyl and an Anapest back to back. So there is no real need for a Pyrrhic to come in when trying to determine a meter. Now what if there was one more short syllable in there? Then we can use the Caesura to explain it away. But more of that later. So the major feet of prosody are these Iamb - x / Trochee - / x Anapest - x x / Dactyl - / x x Spondee - / / Pyrrhic - x x We can build many meters out of these feet- Monometer (though that too, Poe holds, does not exist, and again, with good reason), Dimeter, Trimeter, Tetrameter, Pentameter, Hexameter, Heptameter, Octameter, and perhaps even more. I hope these don't require more explanation. Further reference: Meter, in Wikipedia - A summary of the prosody of various languages, and related information The Rationale of Verse, by Edgar Allan Poe - a discussion of scansion by Poe
Thanks for the nice explanation! So rock and roll is iambic. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I can get the vowels with macrons and breves from my Mac browser ā ă ē ĕ ī ĭ ō ŏ ū ŭ because they're used in the Pinyin Chinese romanization system. If you need them you should be able to cut and paste them from here. Technically, accent is always on the last syllable in French words, but it's such a mild stress compared to English that we barely notice it. Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) is the only French physicist who springs to mind, he of the Poincaré Conjecture. There are plenty of composers (e.g. Debussy) and artists (the whole Pissaro family). It's easy to find anapestic names in Russian since the various forms of the inflection -ev/-ov are accented: Gorbachev, Romanov. We're so accustomed to the Germanic trochaic structure of our native Anglo-Saxon words that when faced with names like Einstein I daresay most of us put an accent on the first syllable. That's the way any German speaker would pronounce it. This is why we routinely mispronounce Russian names like staLIN, leNIN, gorbaCHEV and rachmaninOV; our collective unconscious forces them into the Anglo-Saxon model. In popular or folk music, where there must always be at least one unaccented beat separating two accented beats, we have no trouble demoting some of those syllables to unaccented. As a musician, when I read that line it automatically comes out in dactylic meter: LONG sounds move SLOW. Again, as a musician I don't hear it that way. You don't list a name for a foot with four beats of which only one is long, but in my head that line goes x x / x . x x / x , and sounds very much like the first line of the classic song by Cream: "In the white room with no curtains." A textbook rock-and-roll eight-beat: one-and-TWO-and-three-and-FOUR-and. Music places additional constraints on poetry. Shakespeare is noted for having generally standardized on iambic pentameter: "a HORSE a HORSE my KINGdom FOR a HORSE."
Iambic is a natural tendency in English. So it makes sense to heighten it to give a pleasurable pattern that is also relatively natural. Perfect for dramatic verse.
This is actually a thread I created long long back, in Art & Culture, hehe. Didn't get much response back then. Fraggle Rocker, you replied with Hehe.
To my ear, the tonal languages - say Mandarin - seem to lend themselves to spondees. If so, do they also lend themselves to a true pyrrhic foot ?
