by Stephen Fry
You can certainly try to write whole English poems composed of iambic hexameter, but I suspect you’ll find, in common with English language poets who experimented with it on and off for the best part of a thousand years, that it yields rather clumsy results. Its best use is as a closing line to stanzas, as in Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)’:
And consummation comes and jars two hemispheres.
Keats ends each stanza of ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ with an alexandrine in a style derived from the verse of Edmund Spenser.
She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.
Alexander Pope in his (otherwise) pentametric An Essay on Criticism was harsh on these Spenserian mannerisms and included this self-descriptive hexameter:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
There are very few examples of eight-beat lines in English verse. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ is a rare successful example of a trochaic octameter:
In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Another very familiar example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
You will notice Poe chooses to end the even-numbered lines strongly, docking the final weak syllable, as Tennyson does for every line of ‘Locksley Hall’. You might also notice how in reading, one tends to break up these line lengths into two manageable four-stress half-lines: Poe’s lines have very clear and unmistakable caesuras, while Tennyson’s are less forceful. The four-stress impulse in English verse is very strong, as we shall see. Nabokov, in his Notes on Prosody, suggests that the hexameter is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’.
Heptameters, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.
Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may
As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):
Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:
My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,
My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.
This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean – in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:
But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,What dreadful dole is here?
Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.
You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:
My life through lingering long is lodged,
In lair of loathsome ways,
My death delayed to keep from life,
The harm of hapless days.
But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,
What dreadful dole is here?
Eyes, do you see? How can it be?
O dainty duck, O dear.
We can do the same thing with Kipling’s popular ‘Tommy’, which he laid out in fourteeners:
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms
That guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms,
An’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers
When they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business
Than paradin’ in full kit.
What we have there are verses in lines footed in alternating fours and threes: tetrameters and trimeters, a metrical scheme you will see again and again in English poetry. Such four and three beat lines are also common in verse designed for singing which, after all, uses up more breath than speech. It would be rather difficult to sing a whole heptametric line without turning purple.
The long and winding road
and
You are the sunshine of my life
could be called (by an ass) iambic trimeters and tetrameters respectively, while
That’s the way I like it
and
I can’t get no satisfaction
are trochaic trimeter and tetrameter. Of course, it is fundamentally daffy to scan lyrics (a word derived from the Greek lyre, the harplike instrument used to accompany song) since it is the musical beat that determines emphasis, not the metrical stress. You could never guess the very particular emphasis on ‘get no’ just by reading the lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ unless you knew the tune and rhythm it was written to fit.
FOUR BEATS TO THE LINE
Wordsworth wrote ‘Daffodils’ in straight four-beat tetrameters.
I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Tetrameter, the four-stress line, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, then tetrameters are the sandwiches – the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. If you ask someone to write a poetic ditty on a Valentine’s card or something similar, nine times out of ten they will write tetrameters, whether they do so consciously or not: the four-beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the four/four time signature is so standard as to be the default: you don’t have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.
Four stresses also mark the base length of a form we will meet later called the ballad, where they usually alternate with three-stress lines, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’:
And many was the feather-bed
That fluttered on the foam;
And many was the good lord’s son
That never more came home.
Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
In each of these ballad verses the first and third lines have four stresses (eight syllables) and the second and fourth lines have three (six syllables):
It might have struck you that all three extracts could have come from the same poem, despite their each being s
eparated by roughly a hundred years. We will hold that thought until we come to look at the ballad later. You will remember, I hope, that the Earl of Oxford’s duff heptameters and Kipling’s rather better managed ones seemed to beg to be split into a similar arrangement:
My life through lingering long is lodged,
In lair of loathsome ways,
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms
That guard you while you sleep
Tetrameters, even if they follow ballad form and alternate with trimeters, don’t need to have the swing and narrative drive of a ballad: they can be used in more lyrical and contemplative poetry too, as we have already seen with Wordsworth’s use of them for his daffodils. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is perhaps the poet who most completely mastered the reflective aspect of the four-beat/threebeat measure. Almost none of her poetry is in lines of longer than four feet, yet its atmosphere of depth, privacy and (often sad) thoughtfulness is a world away from lusty narrative ballads.
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Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
1612
The Auctioneer of Parting
His ‘Going, going, gone’
Shouts even from the Crucifix,
And brings his Hammer down –
He only sells the Wilderness,
The prices of Despair
Range from a single human Heart
To Two – not any more –
Lord Byron shows that pure four-beat tetrameters can be blissfully lyrical: note the initial trochaic substitution in the last line.
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.
While Humbert Wolfe demonstrates here their appropriateness for comic satire:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
The above examples are of course in iambic four-beats.
She walks in beauty like the night
Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke’s metrical version of Psalm 71 is written in trochaic tetrameters:
Lord, on thee my trust is grounded:
Leave me not with shame confounded
As is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha:
Often stopped and gazed imploring
At the trembling Star of Evening,
At the tender Star of Woman;
And they heard him murmur softly
Now look at the following two four-stress lines, which reiterate the point I made earlier about question and answer: the obvious but crucial difference in the way each foot as it were distributes its weight.
Trochees end their lines in weakness
Iambic lines resolve with strength
But as we know, iambic lines don’t have to end with a stressed syllable: you can add an extra weak syllable (hypermetric addition). Similarly, trochaic lines can have their weak ending dropped (catalectic subtraction). In both cases you’re either adding or subtracting a weak syllable: the number of stresses stays the same.
Tyger,tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
Blake’s famous opening lines drop the natural weak ending of the fourth trochees, giving a seven syllable count and a strong resolution.
Dum-di, dum-di, dum-di dum
or
Trochee, trochee,trochee troke
The full trochaic line ‘Tiger, tiger burning brightly’ would be rather fatuous, don’t we feel? The conclusiveness of a strong ending frames the image so much more pleasingly. Here is the opening to Keats’s poem ‘Fancy’:
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Both lines of the first couplet (a couplet is a pair of rhyming lines) have their final weak endings docked. The second couplet is of four full trochees. Why?
Well, at the risk of taking us back to English classes, it is worth considering this, for the sake, if not of appreciation, then at least of one’s own poetry. The strong endings of the opening give a sense of the epigrammatic and purposeful: they offer a firm opening statement:
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
The weak endings of ‘melteth’ and ‘pelteth’ (after all, in his time Keats could perfectly well have said ‘melts’ and ‘pelts’) echo the meaning of the image by melting and popping to their end rather than banging to a solid conclusion. Sweet Pleasure’s evanescence is evoked by the evanescence of the metre.
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Did he consciously set out to do this and for that reason? Well, I think someone with a sensitive ear for the rhythms and cadences of verse wouldn’t need to be taught something like that. To anybody with the slightest instinct such use in metre would come as naturally as finding the right musical phrase for the right emotion comes to a composer. It is true, however, that Keats from an early age completely soaked himself in poetry and (despite being labelled a ‘Cockney poet’ by literary snobs of the time) experimented all his life with poetic form and constantly wrote about prosody and chewed over its nuances passionately with his friends and fellow poets. A mixture of absorption in poetry, obsession with technique and, of course, natural talent culminates in what you might call ‘poetic taste’ – a feel for precisely which techniques to reach for.
Incidentally, for some reason Keats’s ‘Fancy’ was one of my favourite poems when I was a mooncalf teenager. Don’t ask me why: it is after all a slight work compared to ‘Endymion’, ‘Lamia’ and the great Odes.
MIXED FEET
Let us consider the whole issue of mixing feet within a poem. The end of writing poetry is not to write ‘perfect’ metre with every line going da-dum or dum-da into the distance, it is to use the metre you’ve chosen to reflect the meaning, mood and emotional colour of your words and images. We’ve already seen how subtle variations such as pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions stand as perfectly acceptable ways of bringing iambic pentameter to life. What about mixing up whole lines of iambic and trochaic metre in the same verse?
He bangs the drums and makes a noise
Scaring girls and waking boys
Nothing necessarily wrong with that either. Don’t get hung up on writing perfectly symmetrical parades of consistent rhythm. Utterance, sung or spoken, underlies poetry. Human utterance, like its heartbeat and its breathing, quickens, pauses and breaks its patterns according to states of relaxation, excitement, passion, fear and all manner of moods and feelings: this is precisely why I took so long over caesura and enjambment earlier. No one could say that the above two lines are wrong, it is surprisingly rare, however, to find two metres mixed in this fashion (in ‘literary’ verse, as opposed to popular ballad and song lyrics, at least) and you would want to alternate trochaic and iambic lines for a good reason: the ‘ear’ of the reader would note (however subconsciously) the variation and expect something from it. Perhaps in the above example the alternating trochaic lines could form a kind of chorus or explanatory aside:
He bangs the drums and makes a noise
(Scaring girls and waking boys)
He makes a row till dawn unfurls
(Waking boys and scaring girls)
I never knew a greater pest
(Even squirrels need a rest)
He drives his wretched family wild
(Spare the rod and spoil the child)
So long as you are in control of the metre, using its swing and balance to fit the mood, motion or story of your poem there is no reason not to use a variety of beats within the same piece. I would only repeat this observation: well-mad
e poems do not mix up their metric scheme carelessly. Have you ever seen a parish magazine or some other flyer, newsletter, brochure or poster where the designer has got too excited about the number of fonts available on his computer and created a great crashing mess of different typefaces and sizes? Musical pieces often go into double time or modulate up or down for effect, but generally speaking such techniques are crass and ugly unless there is a good purpose behind it all. Most of the paintings we admire use a surprisingly small palette of colours. A profusion of herbs in a dish can cancel out each flavour or drown the main ingredients. You get the idea.
Having said all that, let’s look at the whole first stanza of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
As we observed earlier, these are trochaic four-stress lines (docked of their last weak syllable). That holds true of the first three lines, but what’s afoot with the last one? It is a regular iambic four-stress line. Here’s the third stanza:
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
Trochaic first and last lines ‘enveloping’ two central iambic lines; and the poem’s penultimate stanza runs:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
In this case we alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters. The rest of the poem is trochaic. With a little casuistry one could, I suppose, make the argument that Blake’s shift between metres ‘stripes’ the verse as a tiger is striped. I think that is more than a little tenuous: there is no plan to the changes between metre, no apparent design at work: certainly, poets in the past and present have employed metre, rhyme and even the shape of the words on a page further to conjoin form with subject matter, but I do not believe this applies here.