During the academic year 1959-1960, while I was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Donald Justice, I overheard a conversation between my classmate Robert Mezey and his printer / publisher Harry Duncan. We were at adjacent tables in a coffee shop, perhaps the Student Union, and they were discussing a verse-writing system they called “dipodics,” of which I had never heard. I had, however, begun work on The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, and I was always on the alert for information, so I began to take notes while I eavesdropped.
Harry and Bob were talking about dipodics not as Greek “dipody,” but as an accentual prosody, basically Anglo-Saxon, but modified by the Norman invasion of England in 1066 which brought into English literature the French syllabic verse prosody. Over the subsequent centuries syllabics and accentuals merged until, in Chaucer and the “Scottish Chaucerians,” a new prosody, accentual-syllabics, emerged in which there were regular numbers of syllables, both stressed and unstressed, alternating regularly with one-another to form “verse feet.” Early Renaissance poets like Philip Sidney and George Puttenham (an ancient cousin of mine) attached classical terminology from the Greek system of “quantitative” verse to these English verse feet, which really was not accurate or descriptive, but we have lived with this situation for several centuries.
Between Geoffrey Chaucer’s death in 1400 and the early verse published at the beginning of the English Renaissance a century later, people forgot the metrical system invented by John Gower and Chaucer and fell back into a semi-accentual system of writing that kept French riming although it also kept alliteration and some of the other effects of Anglo-Saxon prosody.
Of course, all this information I researched later on, I didn’t hear it from Mezey and Duncan who were speaking on a level more technical than historical. When I went home I began to ponder “podics,” and of course I began writing poems in this “new” system. One of the first was this one, for the subject of which I chose my young wife’s pregnancy:
NURSERY RIME
(Listen to Lewis Turco read Nursery Rime)
What shall I say of my son,
That he is firm, fair of skin?
That he rides his backside and can't know
He has not yet let the outside in?
There squalls a storm just begun.
I stand fast; he lies low.
What may I say of this bone
Wound in flesh partly mine —
Warp of my woof, thread of my skein —
He has come so supple to sup and dine,
To tangle the nets we have thrown
To veil the waters that won't drain.
He would swim where I recline.
Toss him a hook. Fish his schools:
He will lure us down, take us in.
He will build us a weir for fools —
He is no man's yet he is mine.
He is a death sign and a bulletin.
Below I have scanned the first stanza using these symbols: X=strong stress; (x)=secondary stress; •=caesura (a pause in the center of a line); x =an unstressed syllable. The rules-of-thumb regarding stressing are simple and few:
1. In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress. Scansion marks are always placed over the vowel that appears in each syllable. If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.
2. Important single-syllable words, particularly verbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.
3. Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse.
4. In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will be counted as a stressed syllable.
5. In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will be counted as an unstressed syllable.
6. Any syllable may be rhetorically stressed by means of italics or some other typographical ploy.
Thus, in the scanned lines above, there is no normative pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, so neither the stanza nor the poem is written in standard accentual-syllabic verse; rather, it is written in STRONG STRESS VERSE, that is to say, “podic prosody.” Here are the first five lines scanned:
X (x) x X x x X
What shall I say of my son,
x Xx X • X x X
That he is firm, fair of skin?
x x X x X X x X X
That he rides his backside and can't know
x x X (x) X x X x (x)
He has not yet let the outside in?
X X x X X x X
There squalls a storm just begun.
X (x) X • X (x) X
I stand fast; he lies low.
Getting rid of the words, we are left with the scansion marks:
Xx xX xxX = 7 syllables
xX xX •X xX = 8 syllables [the compensatory caesura = (x)]
xxX xX (x)x XX = 9 syllables
xxX (x)X xX x(x) = 9 syllables
()X Xx XX xX = 7 syllables
()X (x)X •X (x)X = 6 syllables (not counting the compensatory caesura)
If we attempt to discuss these marks in terms of the metrical feet of accentual-syllabic prosody rather than podic prosody, line one consists of a trochee, Xx, in which the second syllable is demoted from strong stress to secondary stress, thus equaling an unstressed syllable; an iamb, xX, and an anapest, xxX. The second line is four iambs in a row, the third of which has its first syllable compensated for by a caesura, •X; the third line has an anapest, xxX, an iamb, xX, a trochee, Xx, and the last foot is a spondee, XX, two strong stresses in a row. The first foot of line four is an anapest, xxX, and the last three are iambs, the first of which has the first syllable demoted from strong stress and standing in place of that strong stress. The fifth line is particularly problematic and can perhaps best be scanned as a headless iamb ()X, followed by a trochee, Xx, a spondee, XX, and an iamb, xX. Line six is another headless iamb, ()X, followed by three iambs, the second of which has a compensatory caesura in the first syllable, (x)X /•X/ (x)X.
All of which is to say that the poem cannot be scanned in terms of accentual-syllablc verse because there is no running foot — no particular verse foot that predominates in all the lines of the poem; nor are the syllable counts of the line regular, so it is not a poem written in syllabic prosody. It is accentual or strong stress verse, called “folk meters” or podic prosody by many, but “stress hierarchy” by The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics in its discussion of “dipodism, dipodic verse” which is, “In the older sense of the term, used in Classical prosody. ‘Dipodism’ refers to the fact that metrical feet in Greek and Latin are double the length of what they later became in the European vernaculars…. But primarily the term is now used to refer to a distinctive feature of ballad meter, namely stress hierarchy.” It is sometimes called ballad meter because it is the prosody in which many Scottish border-ballads were written during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Likewise, now and again podic prosody is called “nursery rhyme verse” because many old children’s poems were written in it.
For much more information about the various prosodic systems mentioned in this essay, the reader may refer to The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco (Dec 13, 2011) at Amazon.com.
Comments