Odd and Invented Forms

Folk Meters

 

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.

 

 

 

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale

John Skelton (1460-1529) was the last English poet of any note before the 19th century priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (Skelton was also a priest) to use alliterative stress verse, but his podics were idiosyncratic: he made lines of the hemistichs of Anglo-Saxon prosody, as in many nursery rhymes, but rhymed them insistently until he suddenly shifted to another rhyme.  We have come to call this obsessive form Skeltonics, in his honor, or "tumbling verse."

Although Skelton was a priest, he was a highly unusual one who, among other things, evidently proclaimed himself the first Poet Laureate of England. He has been called the last of the English Medieval poets by some, and by others the first of the English Renaissance poets.  No doubt he was both, for he wrote not only in podic prosody, like the anonymous English poets and balladeers since Chaucer, but in accentual-syllabic prosody as well, like the Scottish Chaucerians, Chaucer himself, and almost all other English poets up through the 19th century.

Skelton’s intention in this satire was not to say something deep, nor really to characterize the girl of the title who remains an abstraction rather than a person, but to make fun of his fellow clergy ("clerks" means clergy) who, unlike Skelton, were womanizers, for Skelton had a common-law wife and at least one child, for which he was punished by the Church. In the last stanza, Skelton may be asking his fellow priests to marry him to his “wife,” thus making his marriage “legal,” which they certainly would not be permitted to do, which is why Skelton’s marriage was of the common-law variety. Priests took the vow of celibacy, but not necessarily of chastity: the two terms are not synonyms, and Roman Catholic clergymen have seldom practiced the latter.

In this poem Skelton’s primary method was to use the music of the language to mock, for a good deal of the satire lies in the sounds of the poem, particularly in the refrain:

 

Aye, beshrew you, by my oath,

These wanton clerks are never loath!

Be off! Be off, my popinjay,

What, will ye do nothing but play?

Tilly vally, straw, let be I say!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

By God, ye be a pretty toad,

And I love you a whole cart-load,

Straw, James Fodder, you play it shrewd,

I am no hackney for your rod:

Go watch a bull, your back is broad!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Surely you deal discourteously;

What, would ye frumple me? Now fie!

What, shall you be my piglet’s sty?

By Christ, ye shall not, not hardly:

You’ll not bejape me bodily!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Just walk away, you cost me naught;

Now I have found what I have sought:

The best cheap flesh that ever I bought.

Yet for His love that all hath wrought,

Wed me, or I’ll die at the thought.

Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!

Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

— John Skelton

This version is copyrighted by Lewis Turco 1973, 2011 and may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author.

The Mathematical Secrets of Verse

 

 Erasmus Darwin, 

29 December 1804 – 26 August 1881

Today, Thursday, October 7th, is National Poetry Day [in the United Kingdom], a fact that once would have been of much interest to scientists. In the 1700s several poems appeared that passed on a scientific message. The best known is The Loves of the Plants, by Erasmus Darwin, who in 1791 set out in verse an account of the sexual habits of the vegetable world. He used heroic couplets, in which the rhyme pattern is AA, BB, CC and so on (for the sensitive plant, for example, he wrote that "Weak with nice sense the chaste Mimosa stands,/ From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;/ Oft as light clouds o'erpass the summer glade,/ Alarm'd she trembles at the moving shade"). Byron, a rather better poet, liked the form ABABABCC and in his epic Don Juan even manages to squeeze in a mention of Newton ("And this is the sole mortal who could grapple/ Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.")

Overblown as Erasmus Darwin's verses might seem nowadays, the point of poetry was pattern; to use a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme as a framework for words of passion or pedantry that would become fixed in a reader's brain. Robert Frost put it neatly when he wrote that "Poetry without rules is like tennis without a net".

 Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how one can arrange particular groups of objects, numbers or letters according to stated laws. As early as 200 BC, writers on Sanskrit poetry asked how many ways it is possible to arrange various sets of long and short syllables, the building blocks of Sanskrit verse. A syllable is short, with one beat, or long, with two. In how many ways can a metre of four syllables be constructed? Four shorts or four longs have just one pattern for each, while for three shorts and a long, or three longs and a short, there are four (SSSL, SSLS, SLSS, and LSSS, for example). For two of each kind of syllable, there are six possibilities. Do the sum for metres of one, two, three, four and more and a mathematical pattern emerges. It is Pascal's Triangle, the pyramid of numbers in which the series in the next line is given by adding together adjacent pairs in the line above to generate 1, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 3 3 1, 1 4 6 4 1, and so on.

As in a great poem, hidden within that elegant structure are deeper truths that touch on apparently unrelated things; on fractal patterns, on the theory of numbers, on primes, and of complexities too deep to be accessible to mere mortals untrained in the mathematical art. One useful property is that Pascal makes it possible to ask in how many ways it is possible to arrange a group of objects, be they footballers in a league, or lines in a poem.

The French writer and amateur mathematician Raymond Queneau took advantage of that in his 1961 book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. It consisted of a series of 10 sonnets of 14 lines, each with exactly the same structure of rhythm and rhyme and with each line printed on separate strips of card that could be rearranged. They are eccentric but engaging: one begins, in translation, "The Parthenon horse looks nervous on the frieze,/ Since Elgin seems to think the nose de trop,/ Just as the Turk is deeply mired in sleaze,/ The 're' in all his songs came out as 'doh'".

Another starts: "When all that's left is sorrow and disease,/ When undertakers peer and say O-ho!/ The timid mutter into their goatees,/You hear your spouse pay off the medico". The lines are then reordered at random to generate new poems – to give, according to the Law of Pascal, 10 to the 14 possible combinations. At 12 hours a day, it would take around 300 million years to read them all (which is about the time it took us to evolve from reptile to human).

And, speaking of reptilian poets, it has just been announced that a cache of letters from Philip Larkin to his mistress Monica Jones has been found (The Daily Telegraph published a selection last week). I look forward to reading more of them, for who can afford to miss the writings of the man who produced the most genetical poem in the English language? I quote the second verse, for his views on Mum and Dad in the first are not suitable for the chaste Science page of this newspaper: "Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf/ Get off as quickly as you can/ And don't have any kids yourself". Happy Poetry Day!

By Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, U.K.

Experiments with Amphibrachs

SOME VICTORIAN AFTERTHOUGHTS

 an experiment in amphibrachic monometer

 

Remember

September — ?

He said he

would wed me

not grieve me

and leave me

forsaken —

alone.

In sorrow

I borrow

from Time but

a rhyme, not

too tragic

but magic

for making

my moan.

 

If ever

that clever

young fellow

in yellow

should happen

to stop in

and ask for

my hand,

I'll give him

the back of it —

(I've gotten

the knack of it);

he'll never know

for evermo'

the pleasures

we planned.

 

So there, you!

How dare you — ?

If you think

you'll hoodwink

this lady

with shady

proposals,

you're wrong.

I've given you

the best of me

you shan't have

the rest of me.

Be off in

your coffin —

Go far, and

so long!

 

Ruth F. Harrison

 

 

Ruth,

 

You've inspired me to an epigram written in amphibrachic dimeter titled,

 

MARRIAGE

 

I’ll love it and hate it

Then kiss it and mate it.

 

Lew

 

 

Thanks!  Good one!  I've ventured a trimeter sample--

 

Whatever comes of it, don't knock it 

Good marriages keep in your pocket.

 

Ruth