The Prosody Handbook

A Guide to Poetic Form

Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486122670
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Written by two major American poets, this guide to versification is immensely useful for anyone interested in poetry or in general poetic structure. Its systematic study of meter, tempo, rhyme, and other components of verse incorporates countless vivid illustrative examples.
Concise and informal, The Prosody Handbook progresses from the smaller elements to the larger: from syllables to feet to lines to stanzas, and from smaller stanzas to larger ones. Its modified notation for marking times and stresses is easily understandable. The extensive and expanded material in the chapter titled `Scansions and Comments` introduces the manifold problems of scansion, confronting readers with the necessity of considering a poem's prosody simultaneously with all its other elements and aspects.
A glossary provides ready definitions and illustrations of the most common prosodic terms. A brief chapter covers classical prosody, and the text concludes with an updated bibliography. Both readers and writers of poetry will find this comprehensive volume an essential companion.

1

Prosody as a Study

Poetry—like prose, and like music—is an art of SOUNDS moving in TIME.

For particular purposes, these sounds may be analyzed into various units; for example, into PHONES (the smallest distinguishable speech sounds) or, in English and in many other languages, into SYLLABLES.

Traditionally, the metrical structure of English poetry—the outward and obvious features such as rhyme and meter and stanza form, that make it different from prose—has been analyzed in terms of syllables, and this remains the most useful way of proceeding.

In any case, we have a situation in which sounds are uttered and perceived consecutively. As written or spoken syllables move forward, they create images and ideas that we understand and respond to. Simultaneously, we respond also to the very sounds themselves and to the quality of their movement: their relative speed or slowness, and any patterns of regularity, or relative regularity, they may form. The stream of sound turns into images and thoughts and feelings; but it also registers in its own right.

Poetry, then, like music, is primarily a temporal art, rather than a plastic art like painting or sculpture. Sound, its movement and pattern, is at the very heart of a poem; it is part of the poet’s technique, and as important in determining our imaginative and emotional responses to a poem as are the meanings of the words themselves. It might make the point to say that a poet’s prosody—his control of the stream of sound—is his language within a language. Dante Gabriel Rossetti once put the idea memorably and much more strongly: “Color and meter, these are the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims.”

A poet’s intention always is to shape a prosodic form that is perfectly suited to the point he wants to make—to the particular quality of human experience he deals with—in this particular poem. Usually, he creates a form that “says” the same thing as the words themselves say: the prosody complements the poem’s thought and feeling, helping to fuse all the various elements into an indivisible and compelling experience. The hardy stresses, rapid rhythms, and playful rhymes of

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon!

are wonderfully appropriate to the madcap action, the delightful nonsense and raucous tone, of the verse; a metric very different but equally expressive would be expected in a meditative or elegiac poem.

Sometimes the wedding of sound and sense takes a rather different aspect. In order to gain an ironic or amusing effect, a poet may shape a prosodic form that qualifies—perhaps contradicts—rather than reinforces the sense. In the sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney beginning, “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,” the lover complains he is at his wit’s end to write a poem that will favorably impress his mistress. At last he hears what seems to be sound advice from his muse:

Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.

But the very choice of the elaborate and difficult form—a hexameter sonnet—is at odds with the muse’s recommendation of an artless and reportorial approach. And so considering the poem as a prosodically shaped thing, as well as a network of ideas and attitudes, we see Sidney’s ultimate message: art, besides sincerity and deep feeling, is necessary to the lover’s success. To avoid misreading the poem or condemning it as a case of manner violating matter, the sense must be read carefully against the prosody. Taken together, the words and the metric coalesce into just the sort of coherent and witty poem that might win the lady.

In any case, a vital relationship exists between a poem’s vision and its versification: the latter is in some way always made to work actively in the former’s service.

To study prosody, then, is to study such things as tempo and sound, pause and flow, line and stanza, rhyme and rhymelessness. To understand and appreciate poetry as an art, it is as necessary to study these matters as it is to study metaphor, imagery, and connotation. It is true, of course, that the study of prosody is not essential to the immediate appreciation of a poem. Children love and understand the quite complex poems of childhood, and the adult reader may respond deeply to a poem by Frost or Herbert without knowing the mechanics or terminology of its metric. To study prosody is to go beyond immediate appreciation and to try to discover some of the means by which poetry produces its particular effects. Prosody is for those who wish to go behind the scenes. It leads to an intellectual appreciation, and is a necessary study for anyone who is to be considered “educated” in the art of poetry, whether he writes it or not. In the same way, a person is trained to “read” a musical score or even a painting (that is, to know the crafts of drawing, perspective, color, and mass), though the listener and viewer simply rely upon the total impact of the work. In recent decades, the study of poetry has focused intensively on the SEMANTIC elements of the poem, and prosody has been somewhat neglected. Between the analyses of critics whose main interest lies in allusiveness and connotation, and of critics who are interested primarily in “myth” or in the “history of ideas,” the MEDIUM of poetry—the moving sound stream, the song-stuff—has become an unfashionable subject. One would almost think that images and ideas somehow get expressed without a medium of expression. And yet, Shakespeare’s verse shows a general pattern of

Ti-TUM | Ti-TUM | Ti-TUM | Ti-TUM | Ti-TUM

So long | as men | can breathe | or eyes | can see,

and the student of poetry is at last obliged to ask: What is the meaning of this ten-syllable standard? Why didn’t Shakespeare use a twelve-syllable standard, like the French poets? Or why not a line whose fundamental pattern is the reverse: TUM-Ti | TUM-Ti | TUM-Ti | TUM-Ti | TUM-Ti? And what was the point of measuring the verse at all? It is here that we must turn to the prosodist. Any more than casual reading of poetry will inevitably give rise to questions that can only be answered—if they can be answered at all—by a study of the physical qualities of the medium itself.

And, once begun, how should such a study proceed? Where lies its end? How minutely and scientifically should one scrutinize those sounds and the patterns they make as they cut their way across time—how much knowledge makes one “educated”? Dogmatic opinions are readily available, but ultimately every reader must answer such questions for himself. A poem yields up its meaning, and makes that meaning an experience, in two ways: (1) through the semantic content of words as these are organized in sequences of images, ideas, and logical or conventional connections; and (2) through the “music,” the purely physical qualities of the medium itself, such as sound color, pitch, stress, line length, tempo. Either study proves to be inexhaustible—the more so, since the matter and the metric are ultimately inseparable. Because the domain of prosody includes all that remains after the semantic content has as far as possible been excluded, every physical detail and aspect of a poem stands open to analysis. Traditionally, however, prosodists have limited their analyses usually to the more obvious and easily accessible features of the medium: the pattern of weaker and stronger stresses; the pauses (or lack of them) within lines and at the ends of lines; the rhyme words and rhyme pattern; line length; and the more obvious acoustic features such as euphony, dissonance, or onomatopoeia. These are analyzable in themselves and also in their relationships with the larger units of presentation: the sentence, the stanza, the whole poem. The degree of rigorousness of any such investigation depends of course on one’s particular aim with a particular poem.

In time perhaps a new system of prosodic analysis, and a new terminology, will appear and become as viable as the old and familiar apparatus. Meanwhile, the traditional approach remains immensely useful, even for very sophisticated purposes, and has been followed throughout the present book.

2

Poetry and Verse

When poetry shows—as it need not—some sort of definite regularity in prosodic form—some pattern of lines, pitches, quantities, or stresses, for example—the result is VERSE.

The term verse is sometimes used by critics to denote an inferior type of poetry (“mere verse”), but that definition is not to the purpose here. In the singular, “a verse,” it refers to a single line of a poem; and by extension it sometimes means a stanza or a whole poem or a section of a chapter in the Bible. These meanings too will not be useful here. We take verse to mean simply metered language: that is, language in which some quality of the syllables, such as stress or quantity, is either strictly or at least relatively regularized. The determinate pattern is called METER; the resulting kind of poetry is verse.

Much of the world’s poetry is verse: the Iliad and the Odyssey, the tragedies of the Greeks and of Shakespeare, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the poems of Yeats and Frost. Some of its greatest poetry, however, lacks meter: the King James version of the Psalms (and, for that matter, the Psalms in the original Hebrew) and the poems of Walt Whitman, for example. All FREE VERSE is unmetered. Generally speaking, all poetry can be divided prosodically into two types: metered poetry (verse) and free verse. (Whether poetry is metrical or not has of course no bearing on its merit; Whitman’s verse, for example, is greatly inferior to his vers libre.)

EXAMPLES

(i)
This is poetry, but not verse. There are many parallels, from sentence to sentence and within the sentences, in form and meaning; but there is no fixed pattern of line, sound, or stress	The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun. Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race....
	-Psalms: 19, KJV
(ii)
This is poetry in the form of verse.	Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes.
	Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free, O, how that glittering taketh me!
	—HERRICK, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
(iii)
This is verse, but no one would call it poetry. It is prose imposed upon by arithmetic.	The meter makes the verse, but not, of course, The poem, which demands much more than mere Arithmetic; and this distinction’s not An unimportant one, since verse sometimes Is thought sufficient or essential form.
	-ANONYMOUS

3

Syllables: Color, Stress, Quantity, Pitch

A SYLLABLE is a unit of speech sound that may be uttered with a single impulse of the breath (by impulse is meant an expulsion of breath). It consists of one or more distinctive sounds, called PHONES, one of which has relatively great sonority (deep, resonant sound). Modern linguistic studies are inclined to regard the syllable as an elusive and otherwise inconvenient unit; more minutely measurable units of speech sound—the phone, the phoneme—are preferred. But English is a stress language, and stress is intimately bound up with the syllable; also, tradition and universal practice in literature still dictate the syllabic unit as the most practical one for prosodic analysis.

The word ah consists of a single syllable and a single distinctive sound or phone. The word Amen contains two syllables, the second of which, -men, has three distinctly different sounds: the consonant m, the short vowel e (

), and the consonant n.

In English poetry four characteristics of the syllable are important: (1) COLOR, or phone quality—sometimes called TIMBRE; (2) STRESS, or relative force or loudness; (3) QUANTITY, or time in utterance—sometimes called DURATI...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Poetry Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the Dover Edition
• A Note on Terms
• 1 - Prosody as a Study
• 2 - Poetry and Verse
• 3 - Syllables: Color, Stress, Quantity, Pitch
• 4 - The Foot
• 5 - The Line
• 6 - Accentual and Syllabic Verse
• 7 - Meter and Rhythm,
• 8 - The uses of !Meter
• 9 - Tempo
• 10 - Rhyme
• 11 - The Uses of Rhyme
• 12 - The Stanza
• 13 - Stanza forms
• 14 - The Sonnet
• 15 - Blank Verse
• 16 - Free Verse
• 17 - Classical Prosody
• 18 - Prosody and Period
• 19 - Scansions and Comments
• Glossary
• A Selected Bibliography
• Index
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST