Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing

Art by Elliot Skow

Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?

The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.

Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,

uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.

If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.

Convinced? Ready to be? Standard introductions to iambic pentameter by poets and critics, like that in Steele’s book, will say that a line is in iambic pentameter if, either

* it consists of five iambs,

where an iamb is the kind of “foot” that consists of two syllables, the first weak, the second strong; or

* if some of the feet are not iambs, they are “permissible substitutions.”

It is in stating the rules for permissible substitution that traditional metrics founders. When, for example, is “trochaic substitution” okay? (A trochee goes strong-weak.) Steele says they’re allowed only after a pause, but then himself goes on to discuss trochaic substitutions that break that rule, of which he admits he lacks an explanation. Indeed this rule is broken in the very first line of Paradise Lost (stressed syllables in all caps):

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

[Of MAN’S] [FIRST dis-] [oBED-] [-ience, and] [the FRUIT]

“FIRST dis-” is a trochee, with no pause before it. Now Milton was a strict guy all around, in religion he was a puritan, so if there were a rule requiring trochees to be preceded by pauses, Milton certainly wouldn’t break it here on the very first page of his magnum opus. God is watching.

Shakespeare did it too—here, twice in one line! (trochees in brackets, the line is from Macbeth):

To do worse to you were fell cruelty

To do [WORSE to] [YOU were] fell cruelty

The right definition of iambic pentameter ditches the project of dividing lines into feet and checking what kind of feet they are, and instead asks you to (i) match the syllables in the line to an abstract template of ten alternating Weak and Strong “positions,” and then (ii) check whether that matching does, or does not, satisfy certain constraints. If it does, the line “scans,” it is metric; if not, not. We can do the matching by writing symbols for the positions over the matched syllables (the alignment between verse and template below is correct in a browser but may be wrong in email, please complain to Substack):

W    S       W      S W S  W         S     W    S
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

The first, and most important, rule governs which syllables may match to, or “occupy,” a weak (W) position. It is called, confusingly,

The Monosyllable Principle: a W position may not be occupied by the most stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word.

The “trochee” in Milton’s first line, “first dis-,” has a stressed syllable in a W, but “first” is a monosyllable, so the rule is not violated. Similarly, the trochees in Shakespeare’s line involve monosyllables. Only one syllable in either line risks violating the Monosyllable Principle: the “-bed-” in “disobedience.” But it matches to an S, so all’s well.

All this has been set up, so we can get to the “detailed” but “obscure” rules the great poets follow without knowing it. Two such rules are allowed exceptions to the Monosyllable Principle, for poets do break this rule, but the exceptions to its are tightly controlled; not just anything goes. (The exceptions I’ll discuss don’t include the most well-known: the permission to put a stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word at the start of the line. This exception is in all the textbooks, and so is useless to us.)

Here are some examples illustrating our first exception to the Principle. (All from Shakespeare; the word in which the violation occurs will be in all caps.)

 W     S     W     S  W    S     W   S     W   S
To glean the broken ears AFTER the man 

(As You Like It)

  W   S     W     S      W    S     W     S          W       S
Like a white hind UNDER the gripe’s sharp claws

(The Rape of Lucrece)

   W   S  W        S       W     S          W    S      W      S
This tyrant, whose sole name BLISTERS our tongues

(Macbeth)

The first syllables of “after,” “under,” and “blisters” are stressed (and stressed more than the second syllables), but all match to a W. All are instances of an exception called:

“Left alignment”: The Monosyllable Principle can be broken, if the mismatched (stressed) syllable begins a new syntactic unit.

“After” starts an adverbial phrase, “under” starts an adverbial phrase, “blisters” starts a verb phrase.

Here are examples illustrating our second exception:

   W      S      W   S  W   S     W       S    W       S
Henceforth be never numbered AMONG men!

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

  W  S  W     S     W     S   W      S    W  S 
And I will comment UPON that offense

(Sonnet 89)

“Among” and “upon” bear stress on their second syllables, which occupy W positions, contra the Monosyllable Principle. Those stressed syllables don’t begin syntactic units, so Left Alignment is not in play. The exception used here is instead

“Right subordination”: The Monosyllable Principle can be broken, if the mismatched (stressed) syllable is subordinated to a (later) stronger syllable that is correctly matched.

“Subordinated” is hard to explain (in my source, the explanation begins “k1 is not itself commanded by a strong constituent k2 whose Designated Terminal Element” etc etc), so we’ll have to take it on authority that “among” is subordinated to “men,” and “upon” to “offense.” (If it helps, earlier stresses in a phrase tend to be subordinated, in the relevant sense, to later stresses.)

The point is this. Shakespeare obeyed the Monosyllable Principle, and only made exceptions that satisfied Left Alignment or Right Subordination (or began the line). But no way could he have thought this to himself, or said so out loud. Neither rule is so much as describable in the standard textbooks on meter. The rules of meter are hard to discern, and the tools of the science of linguistics are needed to discern them.

Should poets and critics care? Indeed we should. Follow Steele’s advice, and either you’ll forgo the use of “trochaic substitution” where it would be perfectly fine, or you’ll throw up your hands and use trochaic substitutions when you shouldn’t. You’re better off reading a lot of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, etc, to get a taste for what they do and don’t do, and then apply that taste to your own verse, the rules in the textbooks be damned. Underexploited expressive possibilities await you.

The science of poetry is relevant to its art. A knowledge of what you can do in a poem, facilitates the writing of better poetry. Take John Donne, famous for venturing past frontiers of meter that stopped Shakespeare short. The author of one paper says that Donne’s “rough” meter is not some unsystematic bending of the rules, but is simply Right Subordination pushed to its limit, and that at this limit Donne creates

a signature cadence ... [where] a misaligned prominent syllable followed by a more prominent correct alignment often [has] a characteristic dramatic effect of inducing, then resolving, tension.

But if my days be long, and good enough
In vain this sea shall enlarge, or enrough
Itself...

(The Progress of the Soul, VI)

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This essay is part of Essays on Meter in Poetry.

References:

• Lev Blumenfeld, Generative Metrics: An Overview. (First quotation.)

• Kristin Hanson, Nonlexical Word Stress in the English Iambic Pentameter: A Study of John Donne. (Second quotation.)