Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material

...

Art by Elliot Skow

Division of labor drives thriving economies, and orchestras and rock bands. The bass provides the harmony; the vocal, or a soloing guitar, sings the melody; and then there’s the beat, nailed down by the man behind the drum kit. Can these riches be had with poorer means? Yes, just see Bach’s cello suites: like magic, one lonely instrument defines harmony, melody, and beat, all by bowing notes on four strings.

Metric poetry is a similar low bandwidth / complex signal enterprise. Of course poetry’s means are much reduced, even compared to solo cello—the simplest melody is impossible. But also its aims have shifted, to saying or expressing something (in the good case, something significant), while at the same time creating and sustaining a regular beat or rhythm:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

When the trick is turned, how’s it done? One proposal, the theory of meter in The Rhythms of English Poetry by Derek Attridge, reads as if inspired by the musical analogy. It is certainly worth examining.

Attridge’s discussion ranges from nursery rhymes and ballads to Shakespeare and Wordsworth; from the limerick to the heroic couplet. My topic is iambic pentameter, the most important meter in English (literary) poetry. Attridge’s theory of it, in slogan form is:

A line of verse is in iambic pentameter if it is a “five beat” line.

If this sounds trivial, it’s because the weight-bearing theoretical term—beat—has slipped in unnoticed. If I asked you to read

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

And asked you which syllables fall “on” the beat, you’d say the bolded ones here:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It turns out, in this case, that those are also the stressed syllables in the line. But we’d hardly be writing books about meter today if

A line of verse is in iambic pentameter if it has exactly five stressed syllables

answered our question. Same, even if the answer were the more complex (but more plausible)¹

...if it has exactly five stressed syllables, each preceded by an unstressed syllable,

or, if you like Greek, “exactly five iambs.” Counterexamples to this theory are easy to find. Macbeth says to Banquo’s ghost (focus on the last line; bold marks stress):

What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble: or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword.

The final line, with only four stresses, not only disproves the “five iambs” theory, it shows that Attridge’s theory, to get off the ground, cannot use “beat” to mean “stressed syllable.” In fact Attridge is quite explicit about this: a unstressed syllable may still “realize a beat.” Similarly, a stressed syllable may fail to do so—in which case it “realizes an off-beat.”

The question you should all now be asking, then, is

What is Attridge talking about, when he talks about “beats” in poetry?

Here’s the best I’ve got. Beats are supposed to be an audible property of metric poetry. Stresses are as well, but as we’ve seen, beats and stresses are distinct. So to convey what a beat is, Attridge can only remind you that, as a competent reader, you can (already, if you try) hear when a syllable realizes a beat, and when an off-beat. (You’ll “hear” this in your head, if you’re reading silently.) Lucky for us, becoming a competent reader does not require long hours with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, just fluency in English and sufficient exposure to pop music, especially the lyrics of Taylor Swift.

No further definition of “beat” is possible. But this explanation—the hope is, and Attridge’s hope must be—is enough for you to glom on to the notion and notice it in your experience. Try it: read again

 And dare me to the desert with thy sword.

Do you not sense that, unstressed as it is, “to” nevertheless falls on, or “realizes,” a beat? I sort of agree. Let’s see where Attridge takes this.

To test the theory, we can follow two easy steps. Step 1: make two long lists of lines, one a list of iambic pentameters, the other a list of...not iambic pentameters; step 2: check if every line on the first list has five beats, and every line on the second has fewer, or more. If the answers are all yes, gold stars all around.

But how do we assemble the two lists? And how do we do the checking? Step 1 is easy: we may assume that Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, etc, knew what they were doing, and rarely failed when they tried to write iambic verse. Step 2 is harder. I could check the lists, or Attridge, or even you; but really how expert are we at detecting beats? Attridge seems to be of two minds about this, and one of the minds produced some rules that will “tell you” where the beats in a line of verse are.

The “default” rule says that stresses realize beats, and non-stresses realize off-beats. But, like the laws of physics in The Matrix, this rule may be bent, and sometimes broken. Other rules govern the bending and the breaking. One of them is the rule of “promotion”: