Prose, Verse, Poetry
Although everyone is accustomed to the opposition between prose and
poetry, the distinction between prose and verse is more elementary.
Fundamental to this distinction is the nature of the line, whose integrity may
be said to be the defining characteristic of verse. In prose a line extends
from the left-hand margin of the page or column, or from the paragraph
indentation, to the right-hand margin of the page or the column; its length is
arbitrary and depends on such factors, independent of meaning, as the sizes
of page and type; moreover, all that is capitalized in the prose line are first
words of sentences, proper nouns, and other words and abbreviations (e.g.,
Dr., Jr.) that are capitalized in accordance with regular English usage. To
understand prose one must understand the grammar of its sentences; there is
no interplay between the sentence and the line.
It is far otherwise in verse, whose defining characteristic, again, is the line.
(Ben Jonson praises Christopher “Marlowe’s mighty line” [sometime around
1623].) Conventionally, every line of verse begins with a capital letter
whether or not it begins a new sentence. Sometimes the words line and
verse are synonyms: the statement, “I can recite the first sixteen lines of
Richard III from memory,” means the same thing as, “I can recite the first
sixteen verses of Richard III from memory.” More often, however, we use
the word verse, not for the single line, but rather for a whole composition
whose lines are strictly measured and regulated by (1) number of syllables,
(2) number of stresses, (3) number of syllables and number and position of
stresses, or (4) quantities of syllables, the duration of their sounds. A
calculation of these elements yields the meter (Br. Metre) of the line, from a
Greek word meaning measure.
In syllabic verse the number of syllables in the line is fixed, as in much verse
in Romance languages. From “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” the
first line of The Inferno, to “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” the last
line of The Paradiso, almost every line of Dante’s Divine Comedy contains
eleven syllables.
In accentual verse the number of stresses in the line is fixed, though the
number of syllables will vary. (Stresses are syllables that are dominant in
pronunciation relative to slacks; dominance is an effect of loudness,
duration, and pitch.) Old English verse and Middle English verse before
Chaucer, as well as verse in other Germanic languages, have traditionally
been regarded as accentual.
In accentual-syllabic verse the number of syllables in the line and the
number and position of stresses are fixed. Most verse in modern English,
including that of Shakespeare (but with notable exceptions in the 20th
century), is accentual-syllabic. Lines of accentual-syllabic verse are
measure in feet, combinations of one stress and one or two slacks, of two
stresses, or of two slacks. Each line of verse can be described according to
the kind of foot that is dominant within it and the number of feet it contains.
The principal feet in English accentual-syllabic verse are these:
Iamb (iambic)
slack-stress: re store
Trochee (trochaic)
stress-slack: ser pent
Anapest (anapestic)
slack-slack-stress: con de scend
Dactyl (dactylic)
stress-slack-slack: des o late
Pyrrhic (pyrrhic) slack-slack: of a (no English disyllable can be a
pyrrhic)
Spondee (spondaic)
stress-stress: black bird
Amphibrach
slack-stress-slack: in fer no (also called a
feminine iamb)
The number of feet in the line is expressed in the following words:
monometer
dimeter
trimeter
tetrameter
pentameter
hexameter
heptameter
one foot
two feet
three feet
four feet
five feet
six feet
seven feet
The most important English meter by far is iambic pentameter. Lines of
unrhymed iambic pentameter are also called blank verse (invented by Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, for his translation of two books of Virgil’s Aeneid
in the 1540s). Also important is iambic tetrameter. An iambic hexameter
line is also called an alexandrine.
To read verse properly, and to scan it (analyze the line by showing stresses
with acute accent marks [/] over them, slacks with x’s over them, and feet by
dividing them with verticals), one must decide what syllables are stresses
and what are slacks.
This is usually a simple matter provided that one observes three conditions:
word accent, how a word is normally pronounced; rhetorical accent, the
importance of a word (so that a noun like “man’s” will almost always be
stressed relative to a preposition like “of”; and metrical accent, conformity
to an established pattern. Note that elision occurs frequently; whereas a
dictionary will show that “disobedience” has five syllables (dis o be di ence),
normal pronunciation will elide, or contract, the last two syllables into one.
Scansion shows this elision with an arc. Also, although iambic pentameter
is defined as a line of five slack-stress feet, there will often be a substitution
of another kind of foot within the line; unvarying iambs in line after line
would give verse a monotonous, singsong quality.
In quantitative verse the line is measured according to the length, that is, the
duration, of each syllable. The sound “strength” is longer than “at,” that is,
it takes more time to say it, the second syllable of “extreme” is longer than
the first, and the word “man’s” is longer than “of.” Despite these examples,
English verse in not quantitative, but classical verse (that of ancient Greece
and Rome) is. The meter of Greek epic poetry, imitated in Latin by Virgil,
is dactylic hexameter. The sixth foot is always a spondee, and any other foot
might be a spondee also; hence a dactylic hexameter line contains as many
as seventeen syllables. Using different symbols from those of English
scansion, a classical line typically looks like this:
- υ υ / - υ υ / - υ υ / - υ υ / - υ υ / -It follows from the above discussion, finally, that poetry is not a separate
category from prose and verse but will be expressed as one of them—
usually, of course, as verse. Most poems are verse, but much verse is not
poetry. Poetry, which cannot be defined precisely, is often characterized by
extreme compression, figurative language (including metaphor and irony),
dignity of expression, and concentration of thought and emotion—but none
of these features is indispensable. Poetry is not an accidental byproduct of a
certain number and arrangement of stresses and slacks. Greeting card
messages, limericks, and other forms of light verse rarely strike one as
poetry.