The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Ten sounds, alternating in beat or accent. Actually, it is not very helpful to say that the line is made up of ten sounds; we’ll soon discover that for our prosodic purposes it is more useful to look at it as five repeating sets of that ti-tum heartbeat. My old cello teacher liked to do it this way, clapping her hands as she did so:

and one and two and three and four and five

In music that would be five bars (or five measures if you’re American). In poetry such a bar or measure is called a foot.

Five feet marching in rhythm. If the foot is the heartbeat, the metre can best be described as the readout or cardiogram trace.

1

2

3

4

5

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

Let’s give the metre meaning by substituting words.He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

That line consists of FIVE ti-tum feet:

1

2

3

4

5

He bangs

the drum

and makes

a dread

ful noise

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

It is a line of TEN syllables (decasyllabic):

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

He

bangs

the

drum

and

makes

a

dread

ful

noise

Ten syllables where in this metre the accent always falls on the even-numbered beat. Notice, though, that there aren’t ten words in this example, there are only nine. That’s because ‘dreadful’ has two syllables.

Bangs, drum, makes, dread and noise are those even-numbered accented words (and syllable) here. You could show the rhythm of the line like this:

Some metrists would call ‘he’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’ and ‘-ful’ DEPRESSIONS. Other words to describe a non-stressed syllable are SLACK, SCUD and WEAK. The line has a rising rhythm, that is the point: from weak to strong, terminating in its fifth stressed beat.

The most usual way to SCAN the line, in other words to demonstrate its metric structure and show the cardiogram trace as it were, is to divide the five feet with this mark| (known as a VIRGULE, the same as the French word for ‘comma’ or ‘slash’ that you might remember from school) and use symbols to indicate the accented and the weak syllables. Here I have chosen to represent the off-beat, the depressed, unaccented syllable, and for the beat, stress or accented syllable.

There are other accepted ways of marking SCANSION: using–or u or x for an un accented beat and / for an accented one. If you were taught scansion at school or have a book on the subject you will often see one of the following:

For the most part I shall be sticking to and however, as I find they represent the ti and the tum more naturally. Besides, the other scansion marks derive from classical metre, which was concerned with vowel length rather than stress.

The Great Iamb (and other binary feet)

The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-tum, beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an IAMB.

I remember this by thinking of Popeye, whose trademark rusty croak went:I yam what I yam…Iámb, iámb, iámb

We will concentrate on this foot for the rest of this section, but you should know that there are three other feet in the same BINARY (two unit) family.

The TROCHEE is a backwards iamb, a falling rhythm, tum-ti:

The trochee obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with poky or choky.

Thus was born my Hiawatha,Thus was born the child of wonder;LONGFELLOW: The Song of Hiawatha

As a falling rhythm, a tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, it finishes on an unaccented syllable–an ‘and’ if you’re counting and clapping musically:

The SPONDEE is of equal stressed units:This also obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with the name John Dee. You may feel that it is almost impossible to give absolutely equal stress to two successive words or syllables in English and that there will always be some slight difference in weight. Many metrists (Edgar Allan Poe among them) would argue that the spondee doesn’t functionally exist in English verse. Again, we’ll think about the ramifications later, for the time being you might as well know it.

The fourth and final permutation is of unstressed units and is called the PYRRHIC foot. Don’t bother to think about the pyrrhic either for the moment, we’ll be looking at it later. All the feet possible in English are gathered in a table at the end of the chapter, with examples to demonstrate their stresses.

The iamb is the hero of this chapter, so let us take a closer look at it:

Ten syllables, yes, but a count, or measure, of five feet, five iambic feet, culminating (the opposite of the trochaic line) in a strong or accented ending. SAY IT OUT LOUD AGAIN:and one and two and three and four and fiveHe bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

It is a measure of five and the prosodic word, from the Greek again, for ‘measure of five’ is PENTAMETER. That simple line is an example therefore of IAMBIC PENTAMETER.