For champagne1982

[twelveoone]

from:
http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/15/feb97/ransom.htm

You can appreciate the genius of Ransom’s rhythms by artificially marking out the first two lines as if they followed the strict iambic pentameter meter. The first line has the expected ten syllables; the second is the same, with an extra unstressed syllable giving the line a feminine ending:

x / x / x / x / x /
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward,
x / x / x / x / x / x
Under the towers of your seminary . . .

That stilted and deliberately tin-eared scansion gives the norm, the base meter against which Ransom, and all the other great metricists—including Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, Yeats, Frost, and Auden—work. (To readers with a well-developed ear, as well as anyone who has ever read Paul Fussell’s little gem, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, this is all commonplace. I apologize to them: they are few in number.) Here’s how the line really goes. (I am using the mark , to represent a secondary stress, accented to be sure, but not emphatically):

/ x x / / x x /
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
/ x x / x x x / x x
Under the towers of your seminary,
/ / x x x / x / x / x
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
x / x / x x /
Without believing a word.

Part of the beauty of the first line lies in the spondaic effect of “blue skirts” followed, after the caesura or pause, by the additional accent that occurs in the first syllable of “travelling,” the last two syllables of which a good reader wants to elide for the sake of the phrasing. The line is a little rhythmical unit with two almost identical phrases, each beginning with the same consonant sound and each suggesting a triplet rhythm, like a measure of music with a triplet laid across the 4/4 meter. (The first line of the second stanza echoes that rhythm, though not exactly, with “white” and the first syllable of “fillets” echoing “blue skirts,” and “then” providing the accent that begins the second half-line.) The third line attacks strongly, its imperative emphasized by the spondee in the first foot: “Go listen,” and ending with the graceful feminine ending on “seminary”—an old-fashioned name for a private school, incidentally, not necessarily suggesting a school of theology. The last line has a very strong anapestic (x x /) feeling. Here’s the second stanza unsullied by scansion markings: ....

does this make sense to you?

 

[champagne1982]

It begins to. I think what the writer of the essay is trying to tell me is that when we choose words even a simple, very human thing, such as a slur can change the way our verse is heard. Where we take our breath and the syllables we pause on also lend extra weight to the verse.

I think, in English language poetry, this happens naturally, especially if this is our mother tongue. I've been reading fluently since I was about 5 years old (yes, really) and enjoying poetry in spite of Dr Seuss, or maybe because of him... I am the Lorax... anyway.

Thanks for the thought provoking article, but in all honesty, I strive to make things sound good, but I truly don't know the names of the techniques I'm using. I play by ear. The information is being assimilated, but I don't know exactly when the true eureka, aha moment will hit me.

Perhaps I'll take a bath.

 

[FifthFlower]

x / x / x / x / x /
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward,

No matter how I try, I cannot read the first line as iambic pentameter, that is, in a meter where all the syllables are counted and the dips are all one syllable long:

twir-LING your BLUE skirts, TRA-vel-LING the SWARD

I think it was intended to be read as the author later suggests as the following:

TWIR-ling your blue SKIRTS, TRA-velling the SWARD

And with this more natural reading, this line, alone, could be scanned using alliterative meter, with lifts and dips and half-lines to describe the meter. In this case the "T" sound links the two half lines, both of type E (if I understand it right).


This thread seems like a conversation that has started elsewhere. Hope you don't mind my butting in. I think champagne is right to just "play by ear". The theory just helps one understand why something might sound nice so the technique can be imitated.

 

[Angeline]

No matter how I try, I cannot read the first line as iambic pentameter, that is, in a meter where all the syllables are counted and the dips are all one syllable long:

twir-LING your BLUE skirts, TRA-vel-LING the SWARD

I think it was intended to be read as the author later suggests as the following:

TWIR-ling your blue SKIRTS, TRA-velling the SWARD

And with this more natural reading, this line, alone, could be scanned using alliterative meter, with lifts and dips and half-lines to describe the meter. In this case the "T" sound links the two half lines, both of type E (if I understand it right).


This thread seems like a conversation that has started elsewhere. Hope you don't mind my butting in. I think champagne is right to just "play by ear". The theory just helps one understand why something might sound nice so the technique can be imitated.

Twir-LING/your-BLUE/skirts-TRA/vel-LING/the SWARD.

You can read it that way, but it's forced and unnatural. I think to write in form successfully, one has to worry less about being true to the metrical conventions and more about how the lines read naturally. If that means you have to enjamb, that's fine by me, too. I know some people argue that some forms, like the sonnet, don't really work in these modern times (present times), but I think that's how you make em work: You focus on the words over the metrics. So doing it "by ear," by the way we speak naturally now, just makes more sense.

 

[twelveoone]

Rock on you three


you'll know I never bought that on-off, stressed-unstressed bullshit...although I keep reading Paul Fussell...

 

[twelveoone]

No matter how I try, I cannot read the first line as iambic pentameter, that is, in a meter where all the syllables are counted and the dips are all one syllable long:

twir-LING your BLUE skirts, TRA-vel-LING the SWARD

I think it was intended to be read as the author later suggests as the following:

TWIR-ling your blue SKIRTS, TRA-velling the SWARD

And with this more natural reading, this line, alone, could be scanned using alliterative meter, with lifts and dips and half-lines to describe the meter. In this case the "T" sound links the two half lines, both of type E (if I understand it right).


This thread seems like a conversation that has started elsewhere. Hope you don't mind my butting in. I think champagne is right to just "play by ear". The theory just helps one understand why something might sound nice so the technique can be imitated.

for some reason alliterative metre (to me) seems to overide typical scansion - good call, excellent observation!