You’ve Got Rhythm

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by Roman Sympos

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To jump to Part 2, click here.​​

 

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Part 1

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True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.

 

                        Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope

 

 

I thought of titling this essay “Scansion for Dummies,” but on further consideration it struck me that the word “scansion” would scare some people off and "dummies" would insult the rest. What I meant was that scansion—the skill, art, or science of identifying the meter of a line of poetry—is for dummies. It really is. It’s something to do if you have nothing more important, useful, or intellectually challenging at hand. Honestly, it doesn’t require much heavy lifting. You can read and enjoy poetry without knowing a thing about it or caring to know.

 

Scansion is good for only one thing. It forces you to pay attention to the difference between the recurring beat, or “meter,” of a line of poetry and its varying rhythm. As in music, these are not the same thing. The rhythm is what you hear. The beat is what you feel. The rhythm changes. The beat, the meter (what musicians call the “time signature”) stays the same. It's what makes you want to clap your hands or tap your toe over and over and over again.

 

Rhythm and beat sometimes coincide, but not often. You can feel the beat even during a musical rest, when there is no sound to accompany it. It’s something lurking, persistently, behind or below the audible surface of rhythm, like an anchor that lets rhythm do pretty much whatever it wants without fear of drifting away or losing shape entirely.

 

I've been using the words "beat" and "meter" interchangeably, but there's a difference. The meter of any passage of music or line of poetry is irreducible to a single beat, which is also known as a "pulse." You can’t create a pattern out of a singularity. The bass drummer’s series of “booms” begins, not with the first hit of the mallet, but with the second. Otherwise, there’s no series. You need that second “boom” in order to establish a pattern: a tempo or pace, for one thing, but also anything of interest beyond the simplest, unvarying “boom.” Loud and soft or long and short—in poetic terms, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables—offer us a path beyond metrical monotony. Another path would be a repeated pattern of three beats with one stressed beat included somewhere.

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When we use the word "beat" to refer to a repetitive pattern of stressed and unstressed individual pulses,we mean the same thing as "meter."

 

In English poetry [1], as in most music the world over, there are two basic meters on which nearly 99% of all verse is built: duple, or two-beat, and triple, or three beat. We associate duple meters with marches—two steps equally emphatic or with more emphasis on the first—and with skipping—a small step followed by a hop on the same leg for greater emphasis. Triple meters remind us of waltzes—more emphasis on the first step of three—and of mazurkas—a three-step Polish folk dance with the second step emphasized, usually by prolonging it.

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In scanning English verse, we count each syllable as a single beat, while emphasis or “stress” is conveyed by greater volume. Nearly every conceivable meter in regular English poetry is some multiple or sum of duple and/or triple meter. That’s just how the rhythms of English shake themselves out. Poetry without a regular beat is called “free verse” or “prose poetry,” but that’s another subject.

 

Before proceeding, it’s important to note that the dance of meter hardly ever corresponds to the groups of syllables we call words. The three syllable word “tomorrow,” for instance, could appear in a line of duple or triple meter, depending on the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables surrounding it. (Here and throughout I use vertical lines to show where each triplet or doublet--also known as a "foot"--begins and ends, and a hyphen for the missing or dropped syllable—in musical terms, a "rest"—at the end of the line.) 

 

A straight series of “tomorrow”s would sound like a mazurka, with the stress falling on the natural accent of the word’s second syllable.

 

            To mor mow, | to mor row, | to mor row, | to mor row,

 

But so would a line like this:

 

            To mar ket, | to mar ket, | to buy a |fat pig (-).

 

Notice that the three-syllable metrical unit, or “foot,” here comprises more than one word: either two words (a monosyllable plus a two-syllable word), or, in the third foot, three separate words (all monosyllables): “to buy a.” 

 

The three-syllable word “tomorrow” can also fit snugly into a line of skipping duple meter, once we break it down into separate syllables, as in Macbeth’s famous soliloquy.

 

To mor | row and | to mor | row and | to mor | row (-),

Creeps in | this pet | ty pace | from day | to day,

And all | our yes | ter days | have light | ed fools

The way | to dus | ty death.

 

 

You have to wait, perhaps all the way to the end of the first line, before those alternating stressed and unstressed syllables manage to establish a duple pattern, in part because the stresses on “mor” and “and” aren’t quite equal. And the stress on “Creeps” in line 2 may throw you off for a moment. But from the word “this” to the last word in this sentence two lines later—“death”—the Bard’s stressed syllables skip along without a single misstep.

 

I’ve said the beat or meter is something you feel and rhythm something you hear, not because you can’t hear the beat. You often can, but not consistently. Sometimes the music stops entirely, maybe just for a split second, as at the end of the first line of Macbeth’s soliloquy. But “the beat goes on.” People who can’t hear at all respond powerfully to the regular beat of rock music because they can, literally, feel it in their bones. Once set in motion, meter becomes, to a large extent, ideational, something in the background of rhythm. We don’t have to hear or feel it to know (to “feel as if”) it’s there.

 

Poetry was, originally, meant to be sung or read aloud, not read silently. Reciting a poem lets you hear and feel both the meter and the rhythm simultaneously. That’s the best way to detect where and how they differ, which is where a poet’s most creative play with the sounds of language usually takes place.

 

Let’s take that couplet of Alexander Pope’s in the epigraph above as our first test case. (And by the way, “Nature,” in Pope’s day, meant more than trees and mountains and hills alive with the sound of birdsong. It included human nature and the nature of things generally—in short, the world as we know it.)

 

What’s the meter, the fundamental beat, of Pope’s first line? How does it feel to you? Does it remind you of marches and skipping, or waltzes and mazurkas? Let’s try reciting it, each of us in our own quiet room, and find out. You may hear it differently. We can compare notes when we’re done.

 

This is what I hear when I speak the line out loud:

 

            True wit is | na ture to | ad (?) van tage | dress’d (?)

 

To the naked eye, and ear, the line seems to begin in triple meter, doesn't it? Like a waltz. But as I’ve indicated by my question marks, it ends up tripping over itself. The stress in the third foot isn't "in step" with the accented syllable of “advantage" that comes after it. Has the waltz suddenly become a mazurka? And the fourth foot has been reduced to a syllabic stump.

 

How did Pope, arguably the most accomplished metrist in the history of the English language, get so confused?

 

He didn’t. I have (and maybe you have, too) by ignoring the first rule of reciting poetry (or prose, for that matter): always respect the assigned accent of any word of more than one syllable. Assigned accents are the unalterable fixed points of meter, the stars in the night sky by which you navigate your way through the rhythm and beat of the line. Here, there are only two words that have assigned accents: “nature” and “advantage.”  Hang on to them tightly and you’ll begin to notice things loosening up elsewhere.

 

For instance, why does a stress have to fall on “true” and not “wit”? Why not equally on both? Some of you might even have recited it that way to begin with. Or, if Pope’s talking about “wit” as opposed to something similar but less sophisticated, like puns or acronyms, why shouldn’t “wit” take the stress over “true”? “True wit,” rather than mere wordplay, can be recognized by the way it enhances our appreciation of Nature.

 

Before we know it, we’re thinking of marching or skipping, aren’t we? A duple meter. Let’s try it out.

 

            True wit | is na | ture to (?) | ad van | tage dress’d.

 

Recite the line with the stresses appearing as indicated and, voila! You can hear the skipping pattern emerge quite clearly, from beginning to end, with the minor exception of the third foot, where neither syllable is (apparently) stressed. Scansion has a word for that quiet kind of duple foot, which occurs more often than you might think in English verse: pyrrhic.

 

If you remain in any doubt, even after reducing your two big question marks to one (and a much less urgent one at that), just continue to the next line and you’ll find your impression of skipping confirmed:

 

            What oft | was thought | but ne’er | so well | ex press’d.

 

Now, no good poet, let alone a great wordsmith like Pope, would disturb the metric regularity of his verse just to avoid monotony. He would have a reason for doing so. So why the pyrrhic “to ad-“?

 

If you look again at the distribution of stresses in the first line of our couplet, you’ll notice that suppressing the stress on the second syllable of the third foot creates a silent division between the two identical skipping patterns that lie before and after it, each pattern comprising two feet. Pope has created a symmetry or, more properly speaking, a balance between them, as if to make the second a qualification of the first: “True wit is just the world as we know it, but decked out in her finest duds.”

 

Deviating from the regular meter of a line, as Pope tells us elsewhere in his Essay on Criticism, can help make the sound of the line, including its rhythm, “seem an echo to the sense,” its meaning. By making the third foot of his line pyrrhic, Pope has also made its sonic shape “echo” the shape of its logic.

 

Duple meter is less rigid than triple and allows more flexibility in deviating from metrical regularity when a poet wants to make the sound echo the sense more noticeably. That’s why so much more English verse is written in duple rather than triple meter. When you move the stress around in three-beat patterns, the metrical units begin to lose their shape, creating a jumble of stressed and unstressed syllables that seem to defy organization.

 

The in-built rigidity of triple meter, however, is what makes it so apt for nursery rhymes and comic verse, like the limerick: “There was a | young man from | Nan tuck et,” and so on. There’s just not much opportunity here for rhythmic creativity or spontaneity, and the resulting sing-song regularity often sounds childish or simple-minded. But triple meters have served quite other ends in poems on more serious topics. Take the opening of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” where following orders is an important theme. Here the triple meter echoes not only the cadence of a brigade of cavalry galloping straight into withering cannon fire, but also their incremental struggle to gain ground in what amounts to a suicide mission:

 

Half a league, | half a league, | half a league | on ward (-),

In to the | val ley of | death rode the | six hun dred.

 

In a case like this, any deviation from order would amount to cowardice, insubordination, or even treason.

 

In the nomenclature of scansion, metrical deviations like Pope’s are called “substitutions.” In the third foot of his first line, Pope has “substituted” a pyrrhic foot—the marching equivalent of marking time—for the expected skipping foot, which goes by the name of an iamb. The other two types of marching feet are the trochee, where only the first syllable of two is stressed, and the spondee, where both syllables are stressed roughly equally. Three-beat units have their special names, too. Our waltz unit, which Tennyson has repurposed for a military assignment, is called the dactyl and the mazurka the amphibrach. (The other two variations, with stress on the last syllable or on none, are the anapest and the tribrach, respectively.)  

 

But so much for triple meter and its terminology. Our focus from this point forward will be on duple substitutions, because that’s where most of the fun happens in English verse.

 

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Part 2

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Now that we’ve established the difference between meter and rhythm and explored some of the possibilities for creating rhythmic patterns by substitutions, let’s look a bit more closely at how a poem’s rhythm can change in response to other poetic elements besides the assigned accent of polysyllabic words or a line’s semantic context.

 

Let’s begin with another couplet of Pope’s, this time taken from his light-hearted satire, The Rape of the Lock. In this mock-heroic mini-epic in five cantos, Pope gently ridicules the fancies, foibles, and superficial values of England’s upper classes as he depicts, in language more suited to Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid, the “rape”—in its archaic sense, the abduction—of a “lock” of hair from the empty head of a vain and flirtatious young woman named Belinda. Her adversary is a young man, a baron, in search of a trophy. His weapon of choice? A “forfex”—a pair of scissors.

 

In Canto 1, Pope describes Belinda’s preparations for the tea party where, unbeknownst to her, the Baron is lying in wait. She’s sitting at her dressing table and applying make-up like a warrior strapping on his armor. In the passage that follows, I've boldfaced the assigned accents in addition to italicizing the stressed syllables:

 

Now aw/ ful Beau/ ty puts/ on all/ its arms;
The fair/ each mo/ ment ri/ ses in/ her charms,
Re pairs/ her smiles,/ aw a/ kens ev'/ ry grace,
And calls/ forth all/ the won/ ders of/ her face;
Sees by/ de grees/ a pur/ er blush/ a rise,
And keen/ er light/ nings quick/ en in/ her eyes.  

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Notice, first of all, how the assigned accents distributed throughout this passage (in boldface) help anchor the duple iambic rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables (in italics).  (“Awful” here means “awe inspiring,” not wretched.) Notice, secondly, how the stressed monosyllables are nearly all nouns and verbs, the most important parts of speech: “puts,” “arms,” “fair” (a modifier used as a noun meaning “fair one”), “charms,” “smiles,” “grace,” “calls,” "face," "sees," and so on. In general, the less important monosyllabic parts of speech, the modifiers and prepositions, tend to hang back, eschewing the spotlight, resulting in another kind of substitution (underlined) here: three pyrrhic feet, of two unaccented syllables each, replacing iambs at “ses in,” “ders of,” and “en in.” [2]

 

The pyrrhics are of particular interest in this passage, appearing with regularity at exactly the same point in the second line of each rhyming couplet, as the fourth foot of five. (Lines of five feet, like these, are called “pentameter,” from the Greek word “penta,” meaning “five.”) The first two of these pyrrhics, “ses in” and “ders of,” thus prepare us for the third, a tour de force of sound echoing sense whose full impact cannot be appreciated without paying close attention to one more feature of Pope’s sonic legerdemain: the way he plays with pace.

 

In that passage from An Essay on Criticism where Pope insists that “the sound must seem an echo to the sense,” he gives us an idea of what he has in mind by describing a warrior in Homer’s Iliad named Ajax, an ox-like strongman who, even weaponless, can hurl huge boulders at his enemies.

 

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too la bours, and the words move slow;

 

How does Pope contrive to make sound echo sense in these two lines? How does he make them “strive” and “labour,” only to “move slow” after all?

 

Some of you will already have noticed the spondee (two accented syllables) substituted for an iamb in the second foot of the second line: “too la/”.  But isn't "too” a modifier? Yes, but it also has a long vowel, “oo,” that makes you slow down and linger on it, almost as though it were pronounced more loudly, like an ordinary stress. Consider a short-voweled alternative and you’ll feel the difference:

 

The line will labour, and the words move slow.

 

The short “i” lets you move forward more effortlessly, doesn’t it? It helps here that “will” begins with a “w,” a pseudo-consonant combining two vowels ("oo" and "uh"), known as a diphthong, which doesn’t impede forward motion to the same degree as the “t” in "too." "Will" also ends with “l,” which blends seamlessly into the “l” at the start of “labour.” And to top it off, the line ends with another spondee, “move slow," containing another pair of long vowels and a voiced consonant, "v." (More on voiced consonants in a moment.) Consider replacing “move” with “are” in addition to “too” with “will” and you’ll hear the difference a long or short vowel can make:

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            The line will labour, and the words are slow.

 

Now look at the line before it. Try speaking it out loud. Notice how four out of the five stressed syllables in this line have long vowels. Notice, too, the consonant clusters: “x str,” “ves s,” “cks v,” “st w." Reciting this line is like swimming through a pool of molasses.

 

Pope understood, instinctively, that long vowels and consonant clusters tend to slow down the speed at which a line can be spoken and, as a result, the pace at which we hear it moving through our minds when reading it silently.

 

Now let’s return to The Rape of the Lock, and Belinda applying makeup in front of her mirror, where she

 

Sees by/ de grees/ a pur/ er blush/ a rise,
And keen/ er light/ nings quick/ en in/ her eyes.

 

Why start this couplet with a trochee? Pope certainly had the talent and proficiency to begin with the standard iamb. The answer is, briefly, to slow the pace. He’s already got a good start with three long vowels in a row, two of them identical: “ees,” “y,” and “ees.” But by moving the stress in the first foot to the first syllable, he also enhances our sense that Belinda’s “purer blush” [3] “arises” gradually, in increments, which is to say “by degrees” and not all at once. Despite its long vowel, “by” is a preposition, a less important part of speech than “sees” and “degrees,” making it sound unstressed in comparison to the two “ees” lying to either side, thereby adding to the delay of the unstressed “de.”

 

Now listen to the play of long and short vowels throughout this brief couplet. Every vowel but “a” and “o” (which have already had a vigorous shaking out in the previous four lines) gets a turn: long “e” and short (“ees” and “een,” “de” and  “er” and “en”), long “u” and short (“purer,” “blush”), long “i” and short (“rise” and “light” and “eyes,” “quick” and “ings” and “in”). Until we arrive at “lightnings quicken in her eye.” Can you hear how the pace of the line speeds up as we pass from the bright, lingering greams of “keen” and “light” to the flickering crackle of short “i”s in “ings,” “quicken,” and “in,” and that solitary short “e,” on our way to the blinding flash of "eyes"? 

 

And we've only glanced at Pope’s deployment of voiced consonants. In English, every unvoiced consonant has its voiced counterpart, which requires that the speaker vibrate their vocal cords. “S,” for instance, becomes a “z” sound when voiced, just as “t” becomes “d,” “k” becomes “g,” and so on. Voiced consonants, like long vowels, have the effect of slowing things down, making you linger a fraction of a second longer on a syllable. Here the voiced “s” in “Sees” and “degrees” begins the process, as we’ve noticed, by registering in sound the gradations, the “degrees,” of Belinda’s “purer blush.” This lingering effect is carried forward with the voiced “s” in “arise” at the end of the line before reaching, at the end of “lightnings,” a momentary sizzle before exploding in the long-voweled “eyes.” The effect is like watching a flash of lightning unfold itself as it crackles (“quickens,” or comes to life) across the sky.  

 

Some of you may be asking yourselves (since I’m not immediately available for questioning), “What good is all this analysis and Greek jargon and metrical fol-de-rol? How can it enhance my enjoyment of poetry?"

 

My answer (since yours are probably “None” and “It can’t) is two-fold.

 

First, all this analysis and jargon and fol-de-rol calls your attention to features at work in the way poetry sounds that you may not have recognized because you weren’t listening for them.  Second, it can help you appreciate the beauty of those newly discovered features by adding another layer of pleasure on top of your immediate delight. If you doubt this is true, imagine the difference between watching a diving competition or listening to an opera or enjoying a soccer game (the World Soccer competition is underway as I write this) with and without an understanding of its rules or standard forms, practices, and requirements.

 

There’s an inherent beauty, even sublimity, to the reverse 3½ somersault in the pike position that Greg Louganis performed flawlessly in the 1986 World Aquatics Championships. It needs no supplement to please and awe us. But our pleasure and awe are enhanced by knowing that this dive would have lost him points if his entry to the water had deviated the slightest bit from perfect verticality. Who's the greatest operatic soprano of the twentieth century? Callas? Sutherland? Price? Nilsson? Well, what are your criteria and your preferences? Agility? Tone? Range? Are we talking Wagnerian or Bel Canto? To appreciate the differences and enhance the pleasure of listening to each of these performers, you have to know what those criteria are. And even a soccer ignoramus (like me) can delight in the uncanny intuition and agility on display in a Lionel Messi field goal. But my delight is increased by an understanding of the rules and tactics and strategies of the game, which I was fortunate to receive, last week, from my brother-in-law.

 

More than any other genre of literature, poetry exploits the sonic possibilities of the spoken word, placing accent and stress, long and short vowels, voiced and unvoiced consonants, and the hierarchy of importance among the parts of speech—all of it—in the service of the pas de deux between meter and rhythm as they dance toward meaning.

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Join the dance!

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Notes:

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1. Different rules apply to unaccented languages. 

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2. We’ve seen, however, that modifiers can insist on being stressed if the context demands it. In that line from Pope’s Essay on Criticism that we began with last month, “True wit” challenges, not the claims of false wit, but the claims of things other than wit, like cleverness or irony. Repeated long sounds can also highlight otherwise unimportant parts of speech, e.g., the "aw" in "awful" in this passage appears twice more in the modest monosyllable, "all."

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3. Note the irony of “pure” as applied to something artificial and not natural.