OK, I’m grabbing the microphone. I was a good English student in high school except for the unit on meter. My test came back bloodier than a ribeye cooked rare. I asked my teacher about one of the lines. I had gotten the stresses incorrect. “But I could say it *this* way,” I said, saying the line out loud in a perfectly sensible way. “Then it wouldn’t be pentameter,” he said, making this face.😑
Not too long ago several many years after that harrowing experience I got interested in improving myself along these lines so to speak. I went down a rabbit hole that was late 19th century poetry journals where I discovered the “fight club” of differing views of how certain lines ought to be parsed. No Marquis of Queensberry was there.
Isn’t that inherent to metricality? My position is how one says it ought to be the guide. That seems to me an admission of subtly different ways a kind of “you say potato, I say potahto.” otherwise it’s my teacher, Mr. Lair saying “no, sir you are wrong.”
This is terrific. I suspect I "hear" meter "instinctually" because I have aphantasia. Since I have no mental imagery, sound is all there is. Great piece.
Wow. This helps. I'm my writing I want both to scan well in iambic and to capture natural speech. It doesn't take much to tweak our common speech into regular iambic meter, but too strict and it sounds artificial. Like syncopation in a melody, these moments of strange stress make a sentence sing. I use these exceptions intuitively, but now I know why.
"Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit" scans perfectly in iambic pentameter, I find all these abstract concepts needlessly obscure. My understanding has been that "iambic pentameter" is just the mode in which these writers wrote. It's why the first line of sonnet 116 should be pronounced: "let ME not TO the MARR-iage OF true MINDS" and not "LET ME NOT to the MARR-iage of TRUE MINDS" or some similar way I've heard modern readers interpret that line. Which isn't to say that the second reading is bad, but it's ignoring the meter of the poem.
First of all, I don't think that level of specificity is necessarily useful when defining the piece as a whole. If you pour blueberries and strawberries into your bowl of cornflakes, and say you're eating cornflakes, you haven't told a lie. If you want to get perfectly accurate, maybe you'd say you're eating cornflakes with milk and blueberries and strawberries. But simply saying "cornflakes" isn't wrong. You're referring to the base.
Secondly, I think your scansion of that line is arguable. Not wrong, but I think you're reading a modern understanding of prosody onto a, well, Shakespearean play. Read as five iambs:
"This TYrant, WHOSE sole NAME bliSTERS our TONGUES"
It reads awkward to the modern ear, tuned for realism; one might say, "accuracy" to "natural" speech patterns. But try reading it, say, through gritted teeth. Or make a small pause before "blisters" to collect your, presumably, very angry thoughts about Macbeth, and say the rest of the line quickly.
Essentially, interpreting "meter" as an arrangement of realistic speech patterns ignores that realism in our modern understanding wasn't exactly the mode of Shakespearean theatre: It was rhetorical, presentational, heightened. You'll notice that the repeated stress on the "t" sound in that line intensifies the emotion of the line, further emphasizing the turn on the transition to the next, with smoother consonances: "Was once thought honest. You have loved him well."
It's why John Donne and the metaphysicals, with their dryer, more "realistic" and conversational style, were not approved of by the likes of Dryden or Johnson or Pope, each of whom idolized Shakespeare.
EDIT: Additionally, and I’ll admit I’m not really knowledgeable to the specifics, but you have to remember the fact that English pronunciation has changed since Shakespeare’s time, the way “temperate” and “date” may actually have used to rhyme in shakespeares sonnet 18, other aspects of pronunciation such as syllable stresses have changed too.
EDIT 2: Thinking on it, I guess I should say that obviously, we don’t have an exact idea of how Shakespeare was performed, so I shouldn’t suggest that the line was performed in any specific way. But I just meant to point out the expressive function of meter—not to suggest that a metrically regular version is more plausible. We don’t have recordings, and a substitution definitely looks reasonable in that line.
OK, I’m grabbing the microphone. I was a good English student in high school except for the unit on meter. My test came back bloodier than a ribeye cooked rare. I asked my teacher about one of the lines. I had gotten the stresses incorrect. “But I could say it *this* way,” I said, saying the line out loud in a perfectly sensible way. “Then it wouldn’t be pentameter,” he said, making this face.😑
Not too long ago several many years after that harrowing experience I got interested in improving myself along these lines so to speak. I went down a rabbit hole that was late 19th century poetry journals where I discovered the “fight club” of differing views of how certain lines ought to be parsed. No Marquis of Queensberry was there.
Yeah I think it’s a bad theory of meter that relies on subtly different ways to pronounce a line.
Isn’t that inherent to metricality? My position is how one says it ought to be the guide. That seems to me an admission of subtly different ways a kind of “you say potato, I say potahto.” otherwise it’s my teacher, Mr. Lair saying “no, sir you are wrong.”
This is terrific. I suspect I "hear" meter "instinctually" because I have aphantasia. Since I have no mental imagery, sound is all there is. Great piece.
Minding your two left feet too much violates The Rules of the Dance?
Wow. This helps. I'm my writing I want both to scan well in iambic and to capture natural speech. It doesn't take much to tweak our common speech into regular iambic meter, but too strict and it sounds artificial. Like syncopation in a melody, these moments of strange stress make a sentence sing. I use these exceptions intuitively, but now I know why.
"Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit" scans perfectly in iambic pentameter, I find all these abstract concepts needlessly obscure. My understanding has been that "iambic pentameter" is just the mode in which these writers wrote. It's why the first line of sonnet 116 should be pronounced: "let ME not TO the MARR-iage OF true MINDS" and not "LET ME NOT to the MARR-iage of TRUE MINDS" or some similar way I've heard modern readers interpret that line. Which isn't to say that the second reading is bad, but it's ignoring the meter of the poem.
do you have a definition of iambic pentameter that fits all the examples in the essay?
It’s an iambic metrical scheme of five feet.
"This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues" is not five iambs.
First of all, I don't think that level of specificity is necessarily useful when defining the piece as a whole. If you pour blueberries and strawberries into your bowl of cornflakes, and say you're eating cornflakes, you haven't told a lie. If you want to get perfectly accurate, maybe you'd say you're eating cornflakes with milk and blueberries and strawberries. But simply saying "cornflakes" isn't wrong. You're referring to the base.
Secondly, I think your scansion of that line is arguable. Not wrong, but I think you're reading a modern understanding of prosody onto a, well, Shakespearean play. Read as five iambs:
"This TYrant, WHOSE sole NAME bliSTERS our TONGUES"
It reads awkward to the modern ear, tuned for realism; one might say, "accuracy" to "natural" speech patterns. But try reading it, say, through gritted teeth. Or make a small pause before "blisters" to collect your, presumably, very angry thoughts about Macbeth, and say the rest of the line quickly.
Essentially, interpreting "meter" as an arrangement of realistic speech patterns ignores that realism in our modern understanding wasn't exactly the mode of Shakespearean theatre: It was rhetorical, presentational, heightened. You'll notice that the repeated stress on the "t" sound in that line intensifies the emotion of the line, further emphasizing the turn on the transition to the next, with smoother consonances: "Was once thought honest. You have loved him well."
It's why John Donne and the metaphysicals, with their dryer, more "realistic" and conversational style, were not approved of by the likes of Dryden or Johnson or Pope, each of whom idolized Shakespeare.
EDIT: Additionally, and I’ll admit I’m not really knowledgeable to the specifics, but you have to remember the fact that English pronunciation has changed since Shakespeare’s time, the way “temperate” and “date” may actually have used to rhyme in shakespeares sonnet 18, other aspects of pronunciation such as syllable stresses have changed too.
EDIT 2: Thinking on it, I guess I should say that obviously, we don’t have an exact idea of how Shakespeare was performed, so I shouldn’t suggest that the line was performed in any specific way. But I just meant to point out the expressive function of meter—not to suggest that a metrically regular version is more plausible. We don’t have recordings, and a substitution definitely looks reasonable in that line.