Metric poetry is rhythmic language laid above, and to some degree matching, an underlying pulse. If you do not know where in that pulse you are, you may mangle the verse. In iambic pentameter the pulse is easy: five strong beats, separated by weaker off-beats. Often the pulse emerges from the rhythm even if you are not a scholar of prosody. Reading Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar,
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,
You’ll feel the beats as bolded:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
I don’t mean that you place extra stress on “not” when you say it; just that you sense that it falls “on the beat.”
Othertimes you need to know what you are doing, if you are not to lose the beat. Later in Antony’s speech he says
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Reading this naively, making “interred” two syllables, is wrong; the beat gets lost. To avoid this, one must read it with that extra poetic “-ed” added at the end
The good is oft interréd with their bones.
Same with the line
For Brutus is an honourable man.
If you contract “honourable” to “hon-ra-ble” you lose a crucial syllable, and miss a beat. It needs all four syllables: hon-our-a-ble; then the fourth beat can fall under the a.1
All this, to convince you that it is useful to know something about what sprung rhythm is, when reading and appreciating the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins didn’t claim to invent sprung rhythm, but he did claim to resurrect it, and write many of his poems in it. To read it, today’s English classes leave one unprepared. Absent knowledge of its principles, one may not appreciate the poems’ rhythmic properties, instead thinking that they are a garbled mess.
Unfortunately there are 101 different theories of what sprung rhythm is. Each theorist has spent astronomically more time developing their theory than I have spent evaluating it, so this is at best at attempt at a first approximation.
Here is “Pied Beauty”:
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Challenges arise already in line 2: where is one supposed to feel the beat? How many beats even are there? Line 1 has five beats in nine syllables, falling just as Shakespeare would lead you to expect,2 but line 2 has twelve syllables.
This is actually the easy case: already in less-arty English verse off-beats can be filled by more than one syllable, as in the last line of this stanza from “Bonny Barbara Allen”:
He turned his face unto the wall, And death was with him dealing: ‘Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all, And be kind to Barbara Allen.’
This is a ballad, so lines 2 and 4 should have three beats. That’s no challenge in line 2; for line 4, it’s achieved by reading the first two syllables, “And be,” as both occupying the off-beat:
And be kind to Barbara Allen.
So in line 2 of “Pied Beauty” there are indeed just five beats; but some off-beats are multiply-occupied:
for skies of couple-color as a brinded cow.
That, I said, was the easy case. The hard case may be found in line 6, the one with the funny accent marks that Hopkins himself wrote:
and áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
If you try to read this like Shakespeare, you’ll want to put “all,” “their,” “and, “-le,” and “trim” on the beat, and it will not work. What’s going on?
Actually, nothing unusual, if you remember your childhood. Nursery rhymes often omit words in the off-beat. “Three blind mice” is in tri-meter, three beats per line. But in its first line, there are only three syllables, all three of them on the beat. The off-beats are empty: no sound or syllable lands on them. Notice that as you read (or sing) you naturally pause between the words, the silence filling the off-beat when no words are available to do so:
Three blind mice.
Then, in the third line, one of the off-beats is filled, and you slip the word filling it into the silences, so that the whole line takes the same time to read as the first:
See how they run.
Another nursery rhyme example:
Ding dong dell Pussy’s in the well Who put her in? Little Johnny Green
You see this in pop music all the time. Here, though, listeners do not need to figure out where the beats fall, and how the words line up with them: the drumming does that. As a consequence, lyrics with adjacent words that are both on the beat are automatically separated by some silence (or are lengthened to fill the off-beat). Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” opens
Born down in a dead man’s town.
This sort of thing can get complicated:
There's a hard moon risin' on the streets to-night There's a reck-less feeling in your heart...
(Bob Seger, “The Fire Inside.”)
“Tonight” and “reckless” each take up two beats, and so last as long as “hard moon” and as “risin’ on the”—but they would not do so, if you read them out of context on the page.
So: Hopkins’s accent marks are telling you, in cases where it is not obvious, when a word falls on the beat. This doesn’t mean you’re supposed to stress the word more than you naturally would; it just tells you where in the beat you are as you read. And, importantly, the time between beats is supposed always to be (more or less) the same: “the feet [that is, beats] are assumed to be equally long or strong and their seeming inequality is made up by pause or stressing” (Hopkins). So if the accents tell you that adjacent words both fall on beats, you are to slow down as you read, and hear the silent off-beat between them. Once one knows this, the beats for the rest of the line fall into place:
and áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
The second-last line of “Pied Beauty” has another (unmarked) instance of this: “past change” has an empty off-beat between the words, so the phrase should last as long as “fathers-forth” did earlier:
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.
I wish that were the whole story. But sprung rhythm also involves what Hopkins calls “outrides.” And the meter (like all meters) has rules about which syllables can occupy an on- or an off-beat, rules that, some say, require telling, not just stressed from unstressed, but heavy syllables from light—where a stressed syllable might still be light. That’s not even to mention “resolved disyllables” and “moraic trochees.” Maybe someday my Jedi training will be complete.
Sprung rhythm is the most natural of things....It is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music. (Hopkins)
After writing the above I found that some printings of “Pied Beauty” have more accent marks than the version above, indicating that “spare, strange” (l. 7) and “swift, slow” (l. 9) are more on-beat pairs with the intervening off-beats unoccupied:
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spáre, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckléd (who knows how?) With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím; He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: Práise hím.
Giving the word its full pronunciation also contributes to Antony’s elevated eloquence, and allows him to begin using it ironically as the speech progresses.
The line is “headless” or “clipped,” missing the first weak syllable.
Thanks for this very lucid explanation of sprung rhythm, and a reminder to look again at a Hopkins poem I often find myself ‘humming’ the opening lines of! The version with more stress accents makes me see something I hadn’t noticed before: the whole poem comes down to the double-stressed imperative ‘Praise him’, which in a way feels ‘unsprung’ — it’s more like the repeated chord that ends a musical performance, a resonant coming-to-rest. But this double stress (in classical scansion, a spondee) is also anticipated at the end of the first stanza by ‘all trades’, where it doesn’t mark the end of the line, but signals the rounding out of the stanza into generalisation. So in terms of what might be called the rhythmic meaning of the poem, it feels as though Hopkins is contrasting the wonderful busy-ness and activity of the world (and all its varied rhythms) with the stillness of contemplation and wonder: it’s an upbeat hymn which ends ‘And now, let us pray’. Relatedly, we might hear sprung rhythm as an attempt to harmonise highly individualised perceptions (which GMH had in abundance) with an underlying order: the rhythm as man, the metre as God’s plan…
Thanks for this piece; I have never so far come across a more lucid explanation of sprung rhythm (I realise you're greatly simplifying and not accounting for all the theories, but still...).
Are those long "swooping pen marks" in Hopkins' verse the outrides? (And what do they mean - is it like enjambment but for rhythm?)
The way you explain sprung rhythm here really makes me get a "swung" feel from it (as in musical swung beats).
Have you ever identified readers who clearly "get" Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm (when reading aloud)? I assume it is not commonly done "correctly". And likewise, for Shakespeare - does everyone appreciate that you have to be careful not to elide certain syllables........I have a feeling a lot of people don't care about the meter *that much*, which is a shame....