Hello Ma'am, I'm Here to Read Your Meter [Wakka Chikka]

I think it's time again for the pipe, tweed jacket and elbow patches. I'd like to pontificate on some of the technical stuff, the stuff you learned in school and vowed never to pay attention to again. Today I've  prepared a lecture on one of the more thorny and torturous aspects of verse. I call it...


Same...... And different!


Or in other words, Prosody and Meter in English Verse.


Let's start with the hard part: the definitions and goofy verbiage. Here's a sampler: iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest, dactyl, caesura, hexameter. And there's more, oh so much more!


I've actually come to enjoy all that stupid stuff, thanks to a book I've previously mentioned: Stephen Fry's "The Ode Less Travelled." If anybody can make technical definitions of metrical patterns sound interesting, it's that man.


But I have no wish to inflict such suffering on you, dear reader. (That masochism is my own cross to grin and bear.) Instead, I'd like to give you an easier way to think about the rhythms of poetry.


Ready? Here it is...

the SAME the SAME the SAME the SAME the SAME.

Got that? Pretty bouncy and lively, like jumping rope or makin' sweet, sweet love. And now let's compare:

the SAME the SAME DIFFerent and the SAME.

To anybody just reading poems because it's fun or unusual or not part of what you usually care for, it doesn't matter in the slightest that the first example is iambic pentameter, while the second example has a substitution of a trochee and a pyrrhic foot. It doesn't even matter if you know that English poetry is measured in feet. (Which does explain why so much poetry stinks to high heaven.)


What's important is that you be able to tell that there's a big difference in the way those two lines need to be read. You can't get so locked into the rhythm that you'll ride those rails straight off a cliff and down to hell:

the SAME the SAME diFFERent AND the SAME

Nobody would ever pronounce "different" that way. This is because it sounds stupid and wrong. The minute you've got to talk like you dress in frills and have a rare blood disease preventing you from mingling with the outside world, there's something not right either in the way you're reading or the way they're writing. Like this line from a ballad:

She CAME / from a FAR / counTRY

Did she now? Was she a tourIST? What did it say on her passPORT? 

If you're supposed to speak it differently than you usually would, the poet will usually go out of their way to let you know. Ordinarily that's done by putting a little accent mark above the syllable you're supposed to hit hard. You see this sometimes in Shakespeare, who could get away with it because he was The Greatest Writer Ever Known. Here's the proto-emo kid Romeo whinging about how much his life sucks.

Hence banishèd is banish’d from the world,
And world’s exile is death; then ‘banishèd,’
Is death mis-term’d. Calling death ‘banishèd,’ 
Thou cutt’st my head off with a golden axe,
And smil’st upon the stroke that murders me.

So reading poetry shouldn't involve making normal words sound weird by pronouncing them differently unless somebody specifically instructs you to do it that way. The words are pretty much sacred, the meter is just there to make things move along smoothly. When it's done right, there's an awesome push-pull between the rhythm you expect and slight variations on it.

This is where a lot of people make the comparison with music. You need something regular and repetitive to set up the feel of the song, but too much of that and you're left with aggravating tunes you can't get out of your head like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Or "Poker Face." 


So there's a play between what you're expecting and then slight changes you don't see coming. Radiohead does this all the time, even in their early alt-rock songs - here's the first song from their first record.

Listen to how regular the pattern is at first. You're just getting into the feel of the verse, things are moving along fine... when suddenly they throw a wrench into things. If you tried dancing along to this, there'd be a moment when you got a little confused, then started right back into things just in time for that weird rhythm thing to throw you off again. So it's not a great choice for a rave, but it's a really cool and different thing for a rock band to do. 


So the change from what you expect is what makes the song intriguing. You wait for that moment to come around again so you can figure it out. And after a while, it becomes so natural that you can't even imagine the song existing without it. Or at least I do - in most other ways it's a pretty unremarkable piece of music, I probably would never listen to this if it weren't for that little rhythmic trick.


Now, you've got to be really good to make something like that work. You've got to know your stuff, know the clichés and be bored by them. That's when you get to tinker with these things. You kind of have to earn the right to be weird, know the rules before you break them. Otherwise you just sound like you don't have the first clue what you're doing.

Here's a pretty typical example (taken at random from the Internet) of what happens when you can't tell the difference between same and different. Does this sound like he knows how to keep all his lines the same and just chose to break with tradition to spice things up? Or does it sound like he couldn't keep the beat if he had a metronome stapled to his chest?

Angels always in Death...

Luke Fink

Tears fall for no one

As my wings ready unfurl

I take to the sunlit sky

Upon the cloud winding twirls.

Ice in my veins

Drop upon the earth as the rain

The blood spills once again

Salvation amidst your aims.

Flaming sword in hand for those to die

Last breath of God in this life

Call your master as you will

I go in for the kill.

Sentence us all to Judgment Day

I will not be Satan's slave

Kiss of death is the measure for you

In the goes the blade, I die for you.

I dare you to read that aloud with stumbling all over yourself - it doesn't flow. The lines move like a boxer after five rounds and three belts of whisky. You're just staggering along until you can get to that rhyme and then drag yourself up again to set the next line up.


You can contrast this with something that makes conscious choices when to use or break with the rhythm.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

It's mostly got that the SAME the SAME thing going, but the beginnings of the lines don't work that way or it sounds like "i HAVE been ONE acQUAINTED." This would make us feel as though he's trying really hard to convince us that, indeed, Mr. Night is quite a close friend  with whom he frequently shares a snifter of brandy and the occasional game of Five-Card Stud.


I don't want to pick on Luke Fink (who's a cut or two above the average Internet poetry fare), and it's patently unfair to compare his efforts to those of Robert Frost, one of the modern masters of meter. I mostly wanted to find two opposite ends of the spectrum to highlight extremes. 


And with Frost, the guy was so good he could make complex tricks like this feel effortless, which is why every school kid studies him and most contemporary poets are bored by him. (I think Frost and Eric Clapton have a lot in common that way, where they both were so talented and alluring they ruined a whole generation of artists but that's neither here nor there.)



So there you have it - in a nutshell, recognizing the overall feel of a piece is what's important. Find the pattern and feel it out, you don't need to know the name. Once you know the pattern, you can see where the pattern breaks and alters. It's one of the differences between the surface of poems (things like jump rope chants or military jodies or greeting cards) and the substance, what actually makes poetry worth anybody's time.


I'll close with an excerpt that is just so much fun to read aloud, in no small part because of its meter. Enjoy...

from Nephelidia

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float,
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?
Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation,
Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past;
Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation,
Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.