It’s a tough sell to convince a class of twenty-first-century college students that they should care, and care greatly, about poetic meter. For people who are twenty years old and eagerly awaiting an illustrious career in engineering or neuroscience, something like iambic pentameter—or even worse, dactylic hexameter—could appear as the pinnacle of irrelevance. Even a class full of English majors might look askance at the topic, given that many poets these days are decidedly uninterested in metrical craftsmanship. And the term “free verse,” denoting poetry lacking both rhyme and regular verbal rhythm, implies that said poets are glad to be “freed” from the burden of metrical composition, or perhaps from the artistic constraints of meter itself.
Today is not the day to debate the merits or demerits of free verse. I will, however, point out that this situation—the rapid proliferation of unmetrical poetry—is, from a historical perspective, anomalous in the extreme. A couple weeks ago, I wrote this:
We give form to pre-existing elements, and though this occurs in diverse modes, the history of our civilization shows that artistically formed language—poetry in the strict sense—surpasses all others in sociocultural, psychological, and spiritual importance. The epics of Homer and Virgil, the mythology of Hesiod and Ovid, the dialogues of Plato, the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, the parables and sermons of Christ, the liturgical compositions and chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, the awe-inspiring eschatology of Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the countless songs and folktales that in every village of Europe revealed the magic, mystery, and transcendent meaning of human existence—over thousands of years our poets have, rather like the God of Genesis, made a world in which we live.
In the passage above I included some texts that are poetic in more of a rhetorical or musical mode, and which therefore are not metrical as formal verse is. Nevertheless, it remains true that the culture of the West is and has always been a thoroughly and profoundly metrical phenomenon. From Antiquity through the seventeenth century and beyond, the expression of our most intense feelings and most cherished truths, the recounting of history’s greatest moments, the exploration of life’s most enduring mysteries, the distillation and revelation of human nature in its most captivating complexity—all this was inseparable from the verbal rhythms of poetry. We are, quite simply, a metrical civilization. And that’s one reason why everyone, in my idealistic, unpopular, and sure-to-be-ignored opinion, should learn a good deal about poetic meter.
Today’s topic emerged from a recent conversation, carried out in the comments section of this post, about Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Roman Catholic priest who was also a poet at a time (namely, the nineteenth century) when Roman Catholicism was veering toward a definitively unpoetic understanding of itself. Before we dive into Hopkins’ work, though, some theoretical discussion of meter is in order, because the key to Hopkins’ superb poetry is precisely his metrical craftmanship. Hopkins was an innovative—I’m actually using that word in a positive sense!—metricist who wrote not only in but also about poetic meter, and who coined the term “sprung rhythm” to describe the rhythmical character of his verse.
Let’s start with a definition: meter is
any specific form of poetic rhythm, its kind being determined by the character and number of recurring units of rhythm (especially feet) within the verse.
The most famous meter in English literature is iambic pentameter. The first word identifies the type of “foot,” and the second identifies the number of feet. Imagine yourself walking from the beginning to the end of a line of words. Your steps will have a fairly regular tempo, and you’ll need a certain number of steps (depending on how long or short you make your stride) to cover the “distance” of the line, and you could put your foot down in different ways—toe first, heel first, etc. In other words, you will walk with meter, and you can choose different metrical forms by changing the number of steps (analogous to the number of poetic feet) per line and the details of each footfall (analogous to the type of poetic foot).
Iambic pentameter is a metrical form in which the feet are iambs and there are five iambs (Greek pente = “five”) per line. An English iamb is a foot in which one unstressed syllable is followed by one stressed syllable (“my LIFE is LOST withOUT my LOVE”). Other types of feet include the following:
trochee: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (“PEter PIper PICKED a PECK of…”)
spondee: a stressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (“Yet do thy worst, OLD TIME, despite thy wrong”; this line, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19, has a spondee in the middle, with two iambic feet before and two iambic feet after the spondee)
dactyl: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (“LIST to the MOURNful traDItion still SUNG by the PINES of the FOrest,” from Longfellow’s Evangeline)
anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (“let it FALL till the WALL has come DOWN on us ALL”)
paeon: one stressed syllable combined with three unstressed syllables. Aristotle saw the paeon as a rhythmic unit for oratory rather than poetry. Few poets writing in English have made use of it in their verse; Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of them.
Now that you’ve chosen your foot, you need to decide how many feet your lines will have. Three feet per line is called trimeter, four is tetrameter, five is pentameter, six is hexameter, and seven is heptameter (though in the English tradition heptameter lines are often called “fourteeners,” which refers to the number of syllables rather than the number of feet).
I realize that some people don’t find this information particularly thrilling. I admit that it gets a bit technical, and involves difficult terminology, and feels somewhat ancillary in an age of widespread sociopolitical dysfunction and mediocre cuts of beef that cost ten dollars a pound. So let’s move on to the big question: why does this matter?
It matters because we are human beings, and we cannot survive as human beings—as thinking, feeling, dreaming, believing, desiring, worshipping, creating, philosophizing, death-fearing individuals—without the beauty, truth, goodness, companionship, social cohesion, emotional restoration, and spiritual elevation provided by the fine arts. Poetry, as I argued above, is the queen of the fine arts, and in the historical culture of the West, poetry and meter are inseparable.
But that doesn’t really answer the question of why meter matters, because it doesn’t explain why poetry needs meter. In theory, Homer could have written the 27,800 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey in vivid, evocative, metaphorical yet unmetrical language, and I don’t think anyone would fault him for being lazy. But he didn’t. He made his task vastly more difficult by conforming his thoughts and words to the constraints of dactylic hexameter. Clearly, the ancients perceived some great and mysterious power in rhythmical language, and were willing to sacrifice much to attain it.
Likewise, Shakespeare could, in theory, have composed his plays entirely in prose (though the artistic standards of the time would hardly have allowed for this). After all, Shakespeare’s unmetrical work was, as T. S. Eliot observed, some of the best English prose ever written. But I doubt that the thought ever entered Shakespeare’s mind. Even he could not have imagined his plays without the resonant, enchanting rhythms of iambic pentameter. Milton also, though he had no great love for rhyme, perceived meter as essential. Rhyme, he says with haughty disdain, is
no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, … but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter.
Rather, the “true musical delight” of poetry
consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings.
In other words, on the level of sound and to some extent also of meaning, the beauty of poetic language resides above all in meter.
More needs to be said, then, about poetic meter—how it communicates, how it creates meaning, how it affects us. And that’s why we must continue this discussion on Tuesday.
As a poet of 68 years I find that I and many of my contemporaries use accentual lines of a certain number of beats without regard to syllable count. We were all schooled in both canonical English verse and the free verse that emerged in the 20th century. I personally think there is a deep human connection to rhythm as evidenced by the universality of music. Controlling rhythm allows poetry to partake of the soul-deep power of music. It also contains a link to the roots of the English language, to the Anglo-Saxon and the closely related Old Nordic recorded primarily in Iceland. If we abandon meter entirely you get a poetry purely directed at the eye and intellect. I find Pound and Eliot fascinating but the 20th Century poet I am most strongly drawn to is Wallace Steven who understood equally the image and the sound: rhythm, assonance and alliteration. So much modern poetry lacks that foundation.
I always assumed meter began as a memory aid, like how I can always learn and remember words of songs easily, but blocks of ordinary words with no obvious rhythm, with difficulty. Maybe that’s not right. Eager for next installment!