Accentual Verse - Old English poems were written in accentual verse. The poems made their rhythms through the way each line handled the stress of language, the timing of the line, and the device of alliteration. Old English poems did not rhyme or have a set meter, like iambic pentameter for an example. The number of accented/unaccented syllables can vary somewhat. Breath & intuition determine where the central pauses (caesurae) go. Accentual-Syllabic Verse - Verse that depends for its rhythm both on the number of syllables to the line and on the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. THe basic meters in English poetry are accentual-syllabic. Anaphora - One of the devices of repetition, in which the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two ore more lines, clauses, or sentences. It is one of the most obvious of the devices used in the poetry of Walt Whitman, as these opening lines from one of these poems show: As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok. Another example of anaphora is the Old Testament. Blank Verse - Unrhymed, but otherwise regular verse, usually iambic pentameter. This form, generally accepted as that best adapted to dramatic verse in English, is commonly used for long poems - whether dramatic, philosophic, or narrative. The freedom gained through the lack of rhyme is offset by the demands for variety, which may be obtained by the skillful poet through a number of means: the shifting of the caesura, or pause, from place to place within the line; the shifting of the stress among syllables; the use of the run-on line, which permits thought grouping in large or small blocks (verse “paragraphs”); the variation in tonal qualities by changing the level of diction from passage to passage; and the adaptation of the form to reflect differences in the speech of characters and in emotion. Blank verse appears to have found general favor in England first as a medium for dramatic expression, but with Milton it was turned to epic use; has since been used in the writing of idylls and lyrics. The distinction of the first use of blank verse in England is customarily given to Surrey, who used it in his translation of parts of the Aenid (before 1547), the earliest dramatic use of it in English was in Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc in 1561; The earliest use in didactic poetry was in Gascoigne’s Steel Glass in 1576; but it was only with Marlowe (prior to 1593) that the form first reached the hands of a master capable of using its range of possibilities and passing it to Shakespeare and Milton to develop. After suffering something of an eclipse during the 18th century, blank verse enjoyed a robustness in the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning during the nineteenth century. Some of the songs in Tennyson’s The Princess - “Tears, Idle Tears,” “O Swallow, Swallow,” and “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” - belong to that extremely rare and engaging category. In the twentieth century, memorable blank verse has been written by Yeats, Robinson, Pound, Eliot, Frost, and Stevens (who had particular distinction and dignity). Caesura - A pause or break in a line of verse. Originally, in classical literature, the caesura characteristically divided a foot between two words, usually near the middle of a line. Some poets have sought diversity of rhythmical effect by placing the caesura anywhere from the beginning of a line to near the end. Had we but world enough, // and time This coyness, lady, // were no crime We would sit down, // and think which way To walk, // and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; // I by the tide Of Humber would complain. // I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, // refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. Caesura, in another sense, is an instrument of prose rhythm that cuts across, and, by varying, modifies the regularity of accentual verse. The interplay of prose sense and verse demand can be observed in the preceding selection. Metricists who follow the classical distinctions use caesura to indicate a pause within a foot, and dieresis to indicate a pause that coincides with the end of the foot. This distinction is seldom made in English metrics, where caesura is employed as the generic term. Some lines in a poem may have no caesura, while others may have two or more. Couplet - Two consecutive lines of verse with end rhymes. Formally, the couplet is a two-line stanza with both grammatical structure and idea complete within itself, but the form has gone through numerous adaptations, the most famous being heroic verse. In French literature, couplet is sometimes used in the sense of stanza. It is customary but not essential that the length of each line be the same. Couplets are usually written by octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines. Shakespeare always ends his sonnets with a couplet, and often will use a couplet to signal the end of a scene that is otherwise in prose or blank verse, as at the end of act 2 of Hamlet: I’ll have grounds More relative than this. The play’s the thing. Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. Free Verse - Ezra Pound once quoted T.S. Eliot as saying, “No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.” Vers libre equals “free verse”, so the same maxim applies. No verse is free if it uses a common language because every human language is an overweening system of regulation and bondage that no speaker can escape without landing in unintelligibility. Verse may be relatively free, especially if we take pains in specifying what it is free of. It seems that the quantitative or alliterative verse of the ancients - speakers of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and all Old Germanic languages - was already so lax in its requirements that nobody thought of trying to emancipate verse. Once, however, rhymed verse in accentual-syllabic qualitative measures was established, the noose must have felt a bit too tight, for poets began looking for some relief. Surrey’s innovation of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in the mid-sixteenth century offered a measure of freedom in one dimension. By the eighteenth century, a few farseeing poets could manage without rhyme, meter, or regular rhythm, and Christopher Smart and William Blake could write a verse qualifying for the term “free”. Several poets of the nineteenth century continued the tradition; among them Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman were foremost. In much of the newer free verse, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the old shackles of rhyme were thrown off but, in some cases, new chains (such as Whitman’s reliance on parallelism and anaphora) quickly took their place. Even today, very little of published verse is truly free in every respect. Hemistitch - A half-line in poetry. Line Break - the termination of the line of a poem and a beginning of a new one. End-stopped: Lines in which both the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion at the end. The absence of enjambment, or run-on lines. An example of end-stopped blank verse from Antony’s funeral oration: He was my friend, faithful and just to me; But Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honorable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, WHose ransoms did the general coffers fill. Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept; Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honorable man. Enjambment - The continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a line on to the next verse or couplet. Enjambment occurs in run-on lines and offers contrast to end-stopped lines. The first and second lines from Milton given below, carried over to the second and third, illustrate: Or if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook, that flow’d Fast by the oracle of God…. Prosody - The principles of versification, particularly as they refer to rhyme, meter, rhythm, and stanza. Meter - The recurrence in poetry of a rhythmic pattern, or the rhythm established by the regular occurrence of similar units of sound. The four basic kinds of rhythmic patterns are: 1.) Quantitative - where rhythm is established by patterns of long and short syllables, this is the classical meter. 2.) Accentual - in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by stress or accent determines the basic unit regardless of the number of unstressed or unaccented syllables surrounding the stressed syllable. 3.) Syllabic - the number of syllables in a line is fixed, although the accent varies; much Romance and Japanese versification employs this meter. 4.) Accentual-Syllabic - both the number of syllables and the number of accents are fixed or nearly fixed. When the term meter is used in English, it often refers to accentual-syllabic rhythm. The rhythmic unit within the line is called a foot. In English accentual-syllabic verse, the standard feet are: Iambic. Trochaic, Anapestic, Dactyllic, Spondaic, and pyrrhic. The number of feet in a line forms another means of describing the meter. The following are the standard English meters: monometer, one foot; dimeter, two; trimeter, three; tetrameter, four; pentameter, five; hexameter, six (also called the Alexandrine); heptameter, seven (also called the fourteener when the feet are iambic). Foot - The unit of rhythm in a verse, whether quantitative or accentual-syllabic. The names by which the various feet are known in English are borrowings from classical antiquity, which had only quantitative verse. The result has been substantial confusion. Prosodists consider the fundamental character of regular verse in Middle English and Modern English to be a rhythm consisting of units of accented and unaccented syllables, arranged in patterns called feet. The line of verse usually consists of a definitive number of specific feet. The most common are: -iamb -trochee - anapest -dactyl -spondee Anapest - Metrical foot consisting of three syllables, with two unaccented followed by an accented one. The following lines from Shelley’s The Cloud: Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. Dactyl - A foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented, as in mannikin. Iamb - A foot consisting of an unaccented syllable and an accented. The most common rhythm in English verse. Spondee - A foot composed of two accented syllables. The ideal form is rare in English, because most polysyllabic words carry one primary accent. Spondees are usually composed of two monosyllabic words, as all joy. Poe in writing of the subject found only three or four instances ( one of which was football) in English where real spondees occurred in a single word. Untermeyer finds a longer list (really compounds composed of monosyllabic words) and cites heartbreak, childhood, bright-eyed, bookcase, wineglass, and Mayday. In Milton’s line: Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou deep, peace! “Deep, peace” is a good spondaic foot. Despite the paucity of perfect spondees, English contains thousands of usable approximations involving pairs of syllables with some degree of stress. The spondee, like its converse, the pyrrhic, cannot seriously be used as the only foot in a poem, but most poets have been able to vary predominantly iambic poetry with spondees and other feet for substitution. Here are two lines with spondees and other feets, but no iambs, even though the lines come from iambic poems: Hot sun, / cool fire, / tempered with / sweet air On the / bald street / breaks the / blank day Trochee - A foot consisting of an accented and unaccented syllable, as in the word happy. Trochees are generally unpopular for sustained writing, because they soon degenerate into rocking rhythm. Long rhymed trochaic poems are extremely rare, because all the rhymes would have to be feminine, and such rhymes are relatively few and can be monotonous. Long unrhymed trochaic poems are less rare than the rhymed. Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha is in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter. This poem, along with Longfellow’s Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish - both in dactylic hexameters - are virtually unique in being long works in a regular unrhymed measure that is not blank verse. Browning’s One Word More is a 200-line poem in unrhymed trochaic pentameter. Quatrain - A stanza of four lines. The possible rhyme schemes vary from an unrhymed quatrain to almost any arrangement of one-rhyme, two-rhyme, or three-rhyme lines. Perhaps the most common form is the abab sequence; other popular rhyme patterns are aabb, abba, aaba, abcb. Robert Frost’s “In a Disused Graveyard” consists of four quatrains, in iambic tetrameter, each in a different rhyme scheme: abba, aaaa, aabb, abab. W.H. Auden’s Leap Before You Look rhymes abab, bbaa, baab, abba, aabb, baba, in effect turning itself inside out. Scansion - A system for describing conventional rhythms by dividing lines into feet, indicating the locations of binomial accents, and counting the syllables. Three methods for scansion of English verse exist: the traditional graphic one; the musical, employing musical notations; and the acoustic, developed by linguists using complex machines. Only the graphic one is readily comprehensible without much specialized knowledge. Sonnet - A poem almost invariably of fourteen lines and following one of several set rhyme schemes. The two basic types are the Italian or Petrarchan, and the English or Shakespearan. Italian: distinguished by its division into the octave and the sestet, the octave rhyming abbaabba and the sestet cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce. The octave presents a narrative, states a proposition, or raises a question; the sestet drives home the narrative by making an abstract comment, applies the proposition, or solves the problem. The octave-sestet division is not always kept; the rhyme scheme is often varied, but within the limitation that no Italian sonnet properly allows more than give rhymes or rhymed couplets in the sestet. Iambic pentameter is usual. Certain poets, have however, experimented with other meters. English or Shakespearean: four divisions are used: three quatrains (each with a rhyme scheme of its own, usually rhyming alternate lines) and a rhymed concluding couplet. The typical rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet complicates the Shakespearean form, linking rhymes among the quatrains: abab bcbc cdcd ee. This form is very rare; among modern poets of any distinction, Richard Wilbur is virtually alone in using the form. The sonnet developed in Italy probably in the thirteenth century. Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, raised it to its greatest Italian perfection and gave it, for English readers at least, his name. The form was introduced into England by Thomas Wyant, who translated Petrarchan sonnets and left more than thirty of his own compositions in English. Surrey, an associate, shares with Wyant the credit for introducing the form to England and is important as an early modifier of the Italian sonnet. Gradually the Italian sonnet pattern was changed, and, because Shakespeare attained fame for the greatest poems of this modified type, his name has often been given to the English form. Among the most famous sonneteers in England have been Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, D. G. Rosetti, Meredith, Auden, and Geoffrey Hill. Longfellow, Robinson, Frost, Cummings, and Berryman are generally credited with writing some of the best sonnets in America. Certain poets following the example of Petrarch have written a series of sonnets linked to one another and dealing with a single, although sometimes generalized, subject. Such series are called sonnet sequences. Some of the most famous in English literature are Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Sydney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti, Rosetti’s House of Life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Meredith’s Modern Love. John Berryman, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden and Marilyn Hacker have done distinguished work in the sonnet sequence in this century. In the last decade of his life, Robert Lowell wrote scores of fourteen-line poems that, without rhyming or adhering to any very strict pattern of rhythm, manage to preserve the appearance of sonnets, along with something of their spirit, passion, and personal focus. Octave - An eight-line stanza. The chief use of the term, however, is to denote the first eight-line division of the italian sonnet as separate from the last six-line division, the sestet. In this sense it is a synonym for octet. In the strict sonnet usage the octave rhymes abbaabba, serves to state a position resolved in the sestet, and comes to sucha complete close at the end of the eighth line as to be marked by a full stop. Sestet - The second, six-line division of an Italian sonnet. Following the eight-line division (octave) the sestet usually makes specific a general statement that has been presented in the octave or indicates the personal emotion of the author in a situation that the octave has developed. The preferred rhyme scheme is the cdecde (following the abbaabba of the octave), and the next best is cdcdcd or any other that avoids the pat rhymed couplet and uses not more than a total of five rhymes for the poem as a whole. Technically, any six line poem or stanza is a sestet. Volta - The turn in thought - from question to answer, problem to solution - that occurs at the beginning of the sestet in the italian sonnet. The volta sometimes occurs in the Shakespearean sonnet between the 12th and 13th lines. The volta is routinely marked at the beginning of line 9 (Italian) or 13 (Shakespearean) by “but,” “yet,” or “and yet.” The design of Hardy’s “Hap” is perspicuous: Line 1: If… Line 5: Then… Line 9: But not so… Stanza - A recurrent grouping of two or more verse lines in terms of length, metrical form, and, often, rhyme scheme. However, the division into stanzas is sometimes made according to thought as well as form, in which case the stanza is a unit like a prose paragraph. Strophe is another term used for stanza, but one should avoid verse in this sense, because the word has so many other meanings. For convenience, stanza is limited to units that are regular, rhymed, and recurrent; other subdivisions are called strophes.
