Theory of meter: introduction to an introduction

Part 1: against feet revisited

Writing iambic pentameter is hard. Well maybe it’s easy for you, but we can at least agree that it’s not trivial: not just any ten-syllable line counts. There are rules! A theory of meter, whatever else it is, is an attempt to state those rules (for iambic and all other meters). A theory will list conditions, and say that a line is in iambic pentameter if, but only if, it meets those conditions; and to be a winner, a theory must list the right (true, correct) conditions.

Who needs a theory of meter? Beginning poets might want rules to follow, but it’s unlikely that Chaucer, or Shakespeare, had much of a theory of meter—not one they could write down or say out loud, that is. Among other reasons, even today’s most knowledgeable experts don’t agree on what the rules are; and those experts don’t know less about the subject than 14th or 16th century poets. (If you find this outrageous, and want to start in about iambs and trochaic substitution, I’ll get to all that in just a second.) No, the great and not-so-great poets of the past wrote metrical lines mostly by “feel,” possibly guided by a few explicit heuristics. In some sense a full understanding of meter was “in” them, but they knew it the way you know, say, the grammatical rules about subject-verb agreement, or how to calculate parabolic trajectories when you catch a baseball.

Nor do readers need a theory of meter, for they can do as the poets do, in reverse: read by “feel.” In fact in most cases the poets (the good ones) have done the work for you: one may understand and fully appreciate the poetic qualities of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” in blissful ignorance of stress or accent, even of iamb of trochee. The reader who pauses over “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears” to wonder “does that scan?” has become distracted from the main business.

But, just because you can read and write great metric poetry in ignorance of the true theory of meter, does not mean the theory is not worth pursing. Fish succeed in their aquatic life; hydrodynamics is still a worthwhile discipline.

The “classical” theory of iambic pentameter says that a line is metric if it can be segmented into five “feet,” and either the feet are all “iambs,” or the non-iambic feet are “allowable substitutions.” (More on that shortly.) Those devoted to the science of meter haven’t taken this idea seriously for a long time, but belief in it persists elsewhere, including in literary studies. Here I’ll present the shortest and simplest argument against it I’ve been able to find. (It’s inspired by a slightly different argument in “Generative Metrics: An Overview” by Lev Blumenfeld.)

First, though, the target needs more careful description. A “foot” is just a sequence of syllables; to divide a line into feet is just to mark where one foot ends and the next begins. So take

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

The syllables of this line may be grouped into five two-syllable feet, as follows:

[But soft,] [what light] [through yon-] [-der win-] [-dow breaks?]

The classical theory defines four two-syllable feet, differing in how stress is distributed among the two syllables. In an iambic foot, the first syllable bears less stress than the second. In a trochee, the second syllable bears less; in the pyrrhic, both syllables are equally weakly stressed; and in the spondee, both are equally strongly stressed.

With all this hard-to-remember terminology in place, we can now ask: what does the classical theory say are the conditions for a line to be in iambic pentameter? A crude first-pass at the theory’s answer looks like this:

A line is in iambic pentameter if it may be divided into five feet, and all of them are iambs.

The Shakespeare line above might be thought to meet this condition. If we use bold for syllables that are either stressed, or more stressed than their foot-partner, the line might look like this:

[But soft,] [what light] [through yon-] [-der win-] [-dow breaks?]

Already there is a problem, however, because the line could just as easily be read with “what” bearing the same amount of stress as “light”:

[But soft,] [what light] [through yon-] [-der win-] [-dow breaks?]

I won’t pause over the consequences this “multiple allowed readings” has for the classical theory. It already has to say, for other reasons, that a line can be in iambic pentameter, even if it does not consist of five iambic feet. That’s because the masters of the meter break that “rule” all the time. Milton wrote, in Paradise Lost, of

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [...].

Divided into feet, this becomes:

[Regions] [of sor-] [-row, dole-] [-ful shades,] [where peace]

This line has only four iambs, preceded by a trochee. The classical theory’s conditions, therefore, must look more like this: