Meter, Rhythm, & Cadence

[UnderYourSpell]

pissed off? ....................sorreeeeeeee

 

[Tzara]

Actually lit. refuses posts with fewer than 5 letters. I spent a while considering what to do. I rejected a transparent letter as too devious and a longer post as a waste of pixels. Ultimately I decided to simply repeat a letter. I considered "buump" but thought that double vowels a bit too precious. "bummp" has a nice look about it but it seems to empasize the "bum" and this is the clean side of the forum. "bumpp" just seemed wrong on so many levels so .... bbump it is.

You are overthinking things, dm. Surely a simple period (or do you Northerners call that punctuation a "full stop" in the manner of our UK friends?) appended to the word would suffice, e.g.:

Bump.​

That colour strains my eyes, by the way, as well as my aesthetic sensibilities.

 

[Tzara]

alterately - ba-da-bump. or does that make it iambic duometer?

Definitely (at least to my ear) dimeter, though not iambic. Cretic, I think.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Definitely (at least to my ear) dimeter, though not iambic. Cretic, I think.

That's what I love about you (well, one of many) you're a fount of invaluable knowledge.

 

[Tzara]

That's what I love about you (well, one of many) you're a fount of invaluable knowledge.

Oh, my dear, I am merely conduit. Wikipedia (and other googleizable web resources) supply the knowledge, invaluable and otherwise.

Besides, I hope that I am prized for my raffish wit.

 

[Tzara]

I just finished, none too successfully, a very stressful proof of techology project in Nowhere, USA. Being stressed in Nowhere is somehow more stressful than being stressed in Somewhere. Why, I'm not sure. Food and access to bookstores, I think.

But now I'm back in Seattle and on vacation and, frankly, bored. So maybe I'll spread that boredom around a bit by yammering on about this meter (or, I suppose, metre) thing some more. Feel free to ignore me.

In my last lectorial episode, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about this poem.

Fuck copyright. I'm posting the thing:

The villanelle is what?

Enter Mr Jno. Ford (the Elizabethan one) as King Edward the Fourth.

I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
This monarch business makes a fellow hungry.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

What happened to the kippers left from breakfast?
Or maybe there's a bit of cold roast pheasant.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.

A civil war is such an awful bother.
We fought at Tewksbury and still ran out of mustard.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

Speak not to me of pasta Marinara.
I know we laid in lots of boar last Tuesday.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.

The pantry seems entirely full of Woodvilles
And Clarence has drunk two-thirds of the cellar.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.

If I ran England like I run that kitchen
You'd half expect somebody to usurp it.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is​

I love this poem. It's funny, at least to me, and "funny" is, like, really important aesthetically. Well, to me. Yeah, yeah, art is important, but funny is priceless and rather more rare.

So, first of all, is this poem a villanelle, as claimed?

Well, refrain-wise, yeah. But it doesn't follow the rhyme pattern, and in fact doesn't rhyme at all. So, maybe. If you're flexible 'bout the form, anyway.

What makes this poem, though, besides it being funny, is its rhythm. Rhythmically, its got a groove goin' on.

Let's just look at the refrain lines:

I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.​

These show the rhythmic variation in a nutshell. Both lines are (roughly) iambic pentameter. The first ends on an "extra," unstressed syllable, said to be a "feminine" ending.

This is not unusual. Consider what is perhaps the most famous single line of "iambic pentameter" in the English language: To be, or not to be: that is the question. This line not only has a feminine end (QUESTion), but inverts an iamb in the middle of the line (to BE or NOT to BE: THAT is the QUESTion).

So, OK. If effing Shakespeare can do it, it should be jake for poor Mike Ford, eh?

Now. Why I like the rhythmic chant of this poem. Look at the refrain lines:

I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.​

Both are basically iambic pentameter, but the emphasis as one reads the lines is quite different, at least to my ear.

I hear them something like this:

I am the KING now, and I want a SANDwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.​

There is more than a simple stressed/unstressed thing going on here. The first line of the refrain is essentialy iambic, but is laid over with a dimeter stress based on the two really, really stressed syllables: King and Sand(wich). By contrast, the other refrain line is very even in its stresses, very dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH.

So, ultimately, what makes the poem interesting (more than, as said before, that it's funny) is the variation in rhythm. This is especially so as the poem has no enjambment whatsoever (at least as I read it). You basically read a line and stop, read a line and stop.

What keeps this from being stultifying is the rhythm.

I know. I'm babbling.

So, good night.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

But you babble so well and so convincingly

 

[XXplorher]

I’m sorry to say that I still haven’t thought of a good way to do that, so what you’re gonna get is me pontificating about the topic with the sincere hope that people will manage to turn this into a discussion despite me.

You put that very paragraph into a cadence and completeness that rhymes for you. You probably added, or reduced, a word or two so that it felt right. Right?

If it didn’t feel properly balanced, you would probably edit it. Right?


I am absolutely certain that an affecting writer uses a certain rhythm that’s either appropriate to the tale, or compelling enough to forward a reader. And a very average occurrence, can always be greatly enhanced by the manner in which it got spelled.

I’m not going to read your lecture, or any of the responses, because I am absolutely secure in my ‘meter’. I’m definite about it. But I very much want to credit the importance of cadence, rhythm… the river of words.

It’s not just for poetry.


Appreciate your own words enough to make them melody…

 

[XXplorher]

lolz...


Apparently I was alone in that. (bummer)