The Long and the Short of It

A Practical Guide to European Versification Systems

Joseph A. Dane

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780268077686
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della critica letteraria

Students of English literature now rarely receive instruction in versification (theory or practice) at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. The Long and the Short of It is a clear, straightforward account of versification that also functions as an argument for a renewed attention to the formal qualities of verse and for a renewed awareness of the forms and traditions that have shaped the way we think about English verse.

After an introduction and discussion of basic principles, Joseph A. Dane devotes a chapter to quantitative verse (Latin), syllabic or isosyllabic verse (French), and accentual verse (Old English/Germanic). In addition to basic versification systems, the book includes a chapter on musical forms, since verse was originally sung. Most serious studies of these systems in English have been designed for language students, and are not accessible to students of English literature or general readers. This book will enable the reader to scan verse in all three systems, and it will also provide a framework within which students can understand points of contention about particular verse forms. The guide includes a chapter addressed to teachers of English, an appendix with examples of verse types, and a glossary of commonly used terms.

Chapter One

Basic Principles

A. Syllable and Line

B. Line Combinations: The Stanza

C. Stylistic Elements

D. Levels of Description

E. English Verse

A. Syllable and Line

Verse is the organization of words according to units represented graphically and typographically as lines. Such lines are potentially repeatable. The most basic linguistic unit that defines and constitutes these lines is the syllable. Although we all know, more or less, what a syllable is, a syllable is difficult to define linguistically; and what might be called a syllable in speech or in the history of a language is not the same as what is considered a syllable in verse. The prosodic value of a syllable—that is, the way a linguistic syllable is treated in verse—is based on, but not necessarily the same as, the linguistic value or phonetic reality of that syllable.

A.1. Syllables are treated differently in different verse systems. They may be undifferentiated, that is, the prosodic value of all syllables is the same, or they may be distinguished, either by accent (stressed vs. unstressed) or by quantity (long vs. short). The following are basic verse types categorized by syllable treatment:

quantitative: a line consists of a given pattern of long and short syllables

isosyllabic: a line consists of a given number of syllables

accentual: a line consists of a given pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables

A.1.1. The above terms are conventionally used to describe historical European verse; Latin is usefully described as quantitative verse, French as isosyllabic, early Germanic verse as accentual (the basis for the organization of chapters 2–4 below). In the strictest sense, these descriptions are not accurate, since both French and Latin verse have supplemental rules of accent, and early Germanic verse incorporates rules of syllable count and quantity. Furthermore, the three categories may privilege English verse, which is sometimes described as “accentual-syllabic” (so Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason; and Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form; see introduction above, “Resources”). But such a category may be illusory. The principles of English verse generally should be described as variable, or as simply “unknown.”

A.1.2. Pure forms of quantitative, isosyllabic, and accentual verse types are certainly possible, even though historical forms (Latin, French, and early Germanic) are less pure than often described. There is nothing to prevent a poet from defining rules of composition that would involve accent only; and strictly isosyllabic forms exist in the experimental verse of Robert Bridges and Marianne Moore (see chap. 6, B.2). What appear to be nearly pure forms of syllabic verse may also be found in verse composed for music, although such verse is controlled by extralinguistic factors (see chap. 6, D on the verse of John Donne).

A.2. Verse Types and Notation

Because the bases for historical verse differ, no single system of notation can adequately describe all verse, and I have tried to use the simplest, most self-explanatory system in my descriptions below. For isosyllabic and syllabic verse, I simply use an x to mark a syllable; I note a required accent with an uppercase X. I use roughly the same notation for early Germanic verse forms: X and x distinguish accented from unaccented syllables or their equivalent. For quantitative verse, I mark syllables as long and short (_ and ˘; a syllable position that can be occupied by either a long or a short is marked x). There are numerous ways of describing what is called accentual-syllabic verse: the system of notation associated with the influential work of linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser distinguishes strong and weak syllables as S W. Thus, what is commonly described as iambic pentameter in their system would be WSWSWSWSWS or even 5 (WS). This might also be written x ´ x ´ x ´ x ´ x ´ or, as here, x X x X x X x X x X; an accented lowercase x might be used for my uppercase X, but such choices are often dictated less by theory than by what is available on a computer font. Single and double vertical lines are generally used to mark foot breaks and caesurae respectively, and I follow those conventions below. I use the same notation both to describe abstract, idealized line patterns and to analyze particular lines. Occasionally some modification is necessary, and particular details of notation will be discussed as the need arises.

A.3. Basic Units of the Line: Foot, Metron, and Colon

A.3.1. The syllables that form a line may be organized into larger units. The unit most familiar to English readers is the foot, which for some verse types is considered the minimal unit of composition. Types of feet have names based on Greek meter: the iamb (x X or x ´ in accentual verse, ˘ _ in quantitative verse), the dactyl (X x x in accentual verse, _ ˘ ˘ in quantitative verse), etc. The ten-syllable line represented above in section A.2 could be described as five repeating units of an iambic foot: x X | x X | x X | x X | x X. Another way of saying the same thing is iambic pentameter. The foot is not a basic unit of composition in the way that a line is basic; and there are many verse types, including French verse generally, that cannot be analyzed in terms of feet.

A.3.2. Metron and Colon

In other verse types, the minimal unit of composition is the metron (pl. metra). Greek iambic trimeter is considered three four-syllable units (x _ ˘ _) of metra rather than six two-syllable iambic units (˘ _) of feet. A unit longer than the metron is the colon (pl. cola). In some verse, the colon is a unit less than a line in length (a half-line, or the hemiepes in an elegiac couplet; see chap. 2, D.2). In other verse, the colon is the line itself (the glyconic, chap. 2, B.1.5). The study of cola is known as colometry. In practice, however, colometry almost always refers to the construction and representation of the lines themselves, not necessarily the cola.

B. Line Combinations: The Stanza

Combinations of lines are generally named after the number of lines per unit: distich or couplet (two lines), tercet (three lines), quatrain (four lines). These units can be defined either by rhyme scheme or by syntax. A fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet thus can be analyzed as three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet; each quatrain along with the concluding couplet has independent rhyming elements and each generally consists of a complete and autonomous syntactic unit. A larger unit of composition is the stanza: any formal pattern of lines that is potentially repeatable. In most poems, the stanza is repeated, although there are exceptions (see chap. 2, H on dramatic cantica and chap. 5, B.2.2 on the English ode). A stanza may or may not contain units such as the couplet or quatrain. Comparing stanzas in any poem will likely indicate the principles involved in their production.

B.1. Units such as couplets and quatrains, as well as stanza units, are traditionally indicated visually in both manuscripts and printed books, although the conventions for doing so are far from universal. In medieval manuscripts, rhymes are sometimes joined by marginal brackets. In printed books, stanzas are represented typographically, usually by a line space separating them.

B.2. Many stanza types are traditional. And for these (the French “fixed forms,” for example), basic principles are easily enough expressed in a table indicating line length and rhyme scheme. But for many other common but less traditional stanza types, the rules underlying verse structure are not so easily systematized, as in verse associated with musical compositions. Poets may compose stanzas according to any rules—accentual, syllabic, or even arbitrary rules unique to a poem—and they may overlay a pattern of line structures with a rhyme structure that can either support it or act as counterpoint. There is no theoretical limit to the length and complexity of a stanza. In English, examples of very complex forms are found in the odes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see chap. 5, B.2).

C. Stylistic Elements

Elements that are basic to the metrical structure of a verse should be distinguished from elements that are ornamental or aesthetic. While the latter stylistic elements are certainly crucial to what could be called the art of a verse, they are not foundational to the verse. There are, unfortunately, no absolute rules to distinguish between basic and stylistic elements. And certain verse features that are basic elements of versification in one system might be ornamental in another. In Greek hexameter, word accent is at best ornamental; Latin hexameter, however, has strict rules regarding the metrical use of this accent and implied rules regarding its aesthetic use. In some early Germanic verse, rules of alliteration are fundamental to the verse; thus the alliteration on the initial m- in the Old English line “metudes miltse, Þēah Þe hē mōdcearig,” is basic; without it, the line would be unmetrical. In modern English verse, alliteration is a purely ornamental matter, and a line is metrical regardless of whether it alliterates. Thus in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost:

Why? all delights are vaine, and that most vaine

Which with paine purchas’d, doth inherit paine,

As painefully to poare upon a Booke

To seeke the light of truth, while truth the while . . .

(act 1, sc. 1)

Here, the alliteration “paine purchas’d” is purely ornamental, as are such other potentially structural features as the rhyming “vaine . . . vaine . . . delights . . . light . . . ,” etc. Because the function of such elements varies in different verse systems, general definitions of basic and stylistic elements can be misleading.

C.1. Complicating this distinction is the fact that stylistic elements, even when not part of the fundamental structure of a verse line, can become so conventional that they begin to partake of the basic character of a verse. A line of an English heroic couplet in the eighteenth century will probably have a word break after the fourth or fifth syllable, even though a line that does not show such a break is not necessarily unmetrical (see chap. 6, B):

’Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill

Appear in Writing, or in Judging ill . . .

(Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism)

Early blues artists such as Son House and Robert Johnson “dropped” beats so regularly that the strict rhythmic conventions followed by some later blues artists seem almost unnatural (see chap. 5, D).

D. Levels of Description

What we call verse and its patterns can exist on a number of levels. Verse, for example, could be considered a predetermined abstract pattern that poets self-consciously try to produce; it could be the actual verbal patterns that are produced on paper, or the somewhat different abstract patterns that a reader expects. In addition, verse could encompass the patterns implied by particular readings and performances, or the abstract classifications that apply to them. And what to a literary critic or student of metrics would be a perfectly coherent account of one of these levels might be baffling to the poets themselves. A satisfactory description of verse on one level is not necessarily a satisfactory account of verse on any other level.

In most cases, the differences between the various levels are not overly troublesome, and most of the ambiguities can be negotiated. When we give rules for some basic verse types (say, Latin hexameter), those rules serve as tools of analysis. When we can speak of them as part of the poet’s basic rules of composition, we are speaking metaphorically and make no claims as to what was going on in any particular poet’s head. We suspect that Latin poets, being fluent in Latin as we are not, had something other than our rules in mind. In addition, real readers, even the individual authors of certain poems, could and do perform the same poem in different ways. In a sense, the individual written poem is itself a performance of the verse system it implies.

Thus the crassest answers that the language of classical verse description might give to questions concerning these levels are the following: But what is going on in a poet’s head? We don’t know. But what about how Lawrence Olivier (or my friend Fred) reads that line? We don’t care. A more reasoned but no more satisfying or accurate response might be: versification is the study and classification of the abstract forms implied by real verses; it is not the study of poetry as an art and it is not the study of performances of particular poems. But even that answer might fail in certain contexts, since different genres define the significance of these levels in different ways: Would we so easily ignore the performance conventions of the early blues artists mentioned above? Is not the essence of the form expressed in the very rhythmic and intonational irregularities we hear?

E. English Verse

Missing here is the chapter that English readers might expect to be basic, and that is a systematic chapter on the principles of English versification. I have confined my discussion of English verse to the specific cases in chapter 6 and the brief comments on the teaching of English in my conclusion. There simply are no universal rules of English verse production; or at least, in my study of English verse from early medieval to modern verse, I haven’t been able to find them. Students have known this for as long as I have been in and around schools, perplexed as they rightly have been over bizarre explanations that require “To BE or NOT to BE that IS . . . ,” or explanations that can’t seem to get us past line 1 of the Canterbury Tales: is it “When THAT ApRILLe WITH . . . ,” or is it perhaps “WHANN-uh that A-PRILL-uh . . .”? But the incomprehensibility of English versification should not lead students to believe in the incomprehensibility of all versification. I hope the presentation of these systems, often borrowed and imitated by English poets, will at least give the student of this tradition a place to start.

Chapter Two

Quantitative Ver...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Basic Principles
• Chapter Two. Quantitative Verse: Classical Latin
• Chapter Three. Syllabic Verse: French
• Chapter Four. Accentual Verse: Old English
• Chapter Five. The Power of Music
• Chapter Six. Implications for the Study of English Verse: Four Studies
• Conclusion: A Note to Teachers of English
• Appendix: Examples and Scansion of Common Verse Types
• Glossary of Commonly Used Terms