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Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Monday, February 9, 2004, 22:18
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.