Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Ray Brown scripsit:

> I wish my knowledge was greater also - it's confined basically to
> ancient Greek & Latin and is rather more sketchy when it comes to my
> own language
I strongly recommend Joseph Malof's _Manual of English Meters_ for anyone
who wants to understand English meters in detail.  Try interlibrary
loan, as the book costs at least US$48 at abebooks.com.  It gives a full
explication, with many examples, of foot-verse, stress-verse (including
simple stress-verse, OE alliterative verse, and the Native Meters),
and the much rarer syllabic verse.

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> The "king" of verses in French is the "alexandrin", which means
> each verse is twelve syllables *exactly*, no more no less.
English alexandrines are also 12 syllables, but they can also be described
as six-stress, or most precisely as iambic hexameter (six feet of the form
slack+stress).  In metrics, terminological buccaneering is a way of life.

> With all our silent final -e's, this means that words which in
> writing are two syllables are just one syllable in speaking, i.e. one
> foot. Something like "pierre": stone may be syllabified as two syllables
> "pier-re", but in speaking it's just one syllable /pjER/, and thus
> one foot. But that's something that English speaking people should
> understand, their spelling being full of those silent final -e's too
> :)) .
But we never reckon a silent final -e as a syllable:  "moon" and "tune"
have the same number of syllables, namely one, and we are deeply confused
when a francophone tells us that "pierre" has two syllables, since we
can plainly hear that it has only one!

> So once you've understood that French metrics are based on the number of
> syllables in a verse and nothing else, you've understood everything about
> them! No wonder most of French poetry is based on the rhyme rather than
> the rhythm :) .
Most of the classical French stanzaic forms exist in English as well,
but with the exceptions of the sonnet, the triolet, the villanelle,
and marginally the sestina, they seem to lend themselves better to light
(or even comic) verse than to serious poetry.

The chant royal, for example, was much used by Clément Marot, most of
them on religious or other solemn themes: a typical English example,
however, is "Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!"  by Henry
Cuyler Bunner, online at http://www.bartleby.com/104/14.html .
Warning: mildly anti-{British,Irish,Semitic} references.

Needless to say, most serious poetry nowadays eschews fixed metrics and
stanzaic forms of any sort.

--
Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings sent from far     John Cowan
coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that      www.ccil.org/~cowan
O'Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word  www.reutershealth.com
to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All      jcowan@reutershealth.com
she there told him, ruing death for friend so young,
algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay.   _Ulysses_, "Oxen"

Replies