Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Ray Brown wrote:
(snip much discussion of French metrics)
> Right, so what distinguishes it from prose? I think that's what I've never
> really figured out.
Subject matter? "Lofty" vocabulary? Rhyme certainly.
There seem to be similar problems in formal Spanish poetry, where both
syllable-count and word-stress (and vowel-elision), 1- or 2-syl line
endings, all seem to be important.

(Lorca) Vóces de muérte sonáron (8 syl)
Cérca del Guádalquivír... (7)

(Traditional) Triste estaba el rey David... (9 official sylls. but read I
think as 7 "tríst'estáb'el réy Davíd"

>And I seem to recall reading many years ago something
> about a caesura in the middle of the Alexandrin.
Philippe C. discussed this in one of his replies; but then he also referred
to "long" and "short" syllables, which doesn't gibe with "all syllables are
of equal weight". Hmmm??

> Yes - is rhyme really the only thing that distinguishes verse from prose?
> Was my old headmaster right, then, when he dismissed 'vers libre' as just
> "chopped up prose"?
>
I guess it depends on how willing one is to accept it as poetry.  "One knows
it when one sees it" sort of thing :=)

Cf. the recent spate of little "poems" that have been extracted from some of
Mr. Rumsfeld's more gnomic pronouncements-- e.g. the one about "There are
things known, and we know we know them; there are unknowns, and we know we
don't know them; but there are unknowns that we don't know we don't know" or
some such.  With luck, in the UK you aren't exposed to these things......

A better example-- back in the 40s, someone published a little book of poems
extracted from the novels of Thomas Wolfe, who in his giddier moments
launched into full iambic pentameter mode, even though it was prose. Some of
those passages were divided into lines, and turned into quite respectable
poems.  One of his better known ones (though free verse) prefaces "Look
Homeward, Angel"---

A stone, a leaf, a door....
Of a stone, a leaf, a door...
And of all the forgotten faces.
---(lines I forget )---
Which of us has looked into his brother's heart?
---(etc.)---

Or this, from his last novel, "You Can't Go Home Again"--

Something has spoken to me in the night,
Burning the candles of the waning year...
Something has spoken to me in the night,
And tells me we must die.... ---(or something like that)---
and so on; it's cryptic but IMO beautiful and effective as poetry.