Poetry and the role of the toe in scansion

If you are in the habit of thinking about poetry as you go about your daily business, then you will probably be attracted to Paul Chowder, the protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s first-person novel “The Anthologist.” Paul introduces himself:
 
HELLO, THIS IS PAUL CHOWDER, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know… Well… everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you.
 
Paul is himself a minor poet suffering a bad case of procrastination. He is meant to be writing the introduction to a poetry anthology, and the novel traces his thinking on the subject, eventually becoming that very introduction. It’s fascinating – you really do learn a lot about poetry – and it’s hugely entertaining. For Paul, thinking about poetry is not just a cerebral matter– these thoughts are tangled inseparably with his reflections on his broken relationship and on everything to do with daily living. There’s no trace of class distinction between ‘poetic’ language and everyday language in Paul’s thinking; they often help each other out while respecting each other’s territory.
 
Obviously I’m up in the barn again – which sounds like a country song, except for the word “obviously.” I wonder how often the word “obviously” has been used in a country song. Probably not much…
So I’m up in the second floor of the barn, where it’s very empty, and I’m sitting in what’s known as a shaft of light.” [1]
 
Everyday language serves to paraphrase and account for the impact of a line of poetry;
 
Notes of joy can pierce the waves, Sir Walter (Scott) says. In other words, notes of joy can cut through the mufflement. Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don’t have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do. [2]
 
Paul, like all of us, is a seeker after notes of joy, and for him poetry provides many of them. Even a single word can be relished.
 
What a juicy word that is, “divulge.” Truth opening its petals. [3]
 
But probably unlike most people, Paul also spends much of his time reflecting on and savouring the metre of poetry.  His thoughts on metre and scansion are the main focus of ‘his’ book.  Although he writes free verse to satisfy present tastes, he is dismissive of it:
 
The kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now – the kind that I write – is slow-motion prose.[4]
 
His argument is that the basis of English poetry is the four-beat line, the metre of the early ballads.
 
… the really important thing you have to know is this: The four-beat line is the soul of English poetry.[5]
 
Even iambic pentameter  (“the longer line”) is treated dismissively:
 
People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’re going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line!... They’re going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse… and all this so-called prosody they’re going to shovel at you. And sure – fine – you can handle it. You’re up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they’re going to dish out that day. But remember (a) that the word “prosody” isn’t an appealing word, and (b) that pentameter came later on. Pentameter is secondary. Pentameter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis of English poetry is this walking rhythm…
Four beats in each line. That’s the classic rhythm in poetry, and in songs, four beats. Don’t let anyone tell you different.[6]
 
Paul’s amusing discussion of a stanza by Kipling introduces an aspect of scansion which deserves serious consideration by both writers and performers of poetry. I’ll go on to mention some real-life commentaries I’ve come across, but Paul first.
 
And what is Art whereto we press
   Through paint and prose and rhyme –
When Nature in her nakedness
   Defeats us every time?
 
You’ve got to admit that’s good. That’s Kipling. Did you hear what he did?... notice there that Kipling’s second and fourth lines have a rest. A rest on the fourth beat. Listen for the booms now.
 
And what is Art whereto we press
   Through paint and prose and rhyme –  BOOM
When Nature in her nakedness
   Defeats us every time?  BOOM
 
And here’s kind of a curious historical fact. Nobody, for years and years and years, centuries even, was able to say that poetry had those obvious booms. Nobody paid attention to the rests.[7]
 
Paul thinks of one exception – “a poet named Sidney Lanier”, (and he might well have included John Thelwall)[8], but in general,
 
…there was really nobody of any significance talking about rests in the straightforward musical sense of a place where you tap your toe without speaking…
 
Finally came Derek Attridge, a man with a sensitive ear who taught at Rutgers. In 1982 he introduced the idea of what he called “unrealized beats” or “virtual beats.” … In other words, rests. How hard is that?
 
I almost had forgotten (rest)
   That words were made for rhyme: (rest)
And yet how well I knew it – (rest)
   Once upon a time! (rest)
 
That’s Christopher Morley. A light verser. Four beats in the line, the fourth being a rest. I hope you can hear it.[9]
 
If we were to ask students to scan this stanza, what response would we expect?
 
And it’s not only this question of silent beats, or rests, that might cause disagreement about how a line scans.
 
The contemporary Australian poet Stephen Edgar describes a problem which concerned him  
in his own writing of accentual verse. He was concerned
 
…that the number of stresses that I wrote in might not match the number of stresses that the reader read out…[10]
 
It’s possible for one person to read a poem in a way that “doesn’t scan” while the same words can be read by another so that it does.
 
As Philip Roberts, another contemporary Australian poet, says :
 
Stress is an oral matter, one which is not conveyed by the medium of print.[11]
 
Roberts discusses this issue of poetry ‘in print’ vs ‘out loud’ in his excellent book “How Poetry Works”. His chapter on “Stress, Rhythm and Metre” points out just how much goes on when we move from print to sound.
 
As he says,
 
…metre is an abstraction, a statement of the most common pattern set up by the rhythms of the poem taken as a whole.
 
Most students who have been exposed to poetry for some time will appreciate this point. Many will have looked at Shakespeare’s departures from the strict pattern of iambic pentameter and will realise that the departures are an important part of the poetry. And this is true of most poetry.
 
There do exist poems which have no such departures, and they will score 10/10 for scanning from most readers, but even some of the most well-known nursery rhymes demonstrate that the arrangement of stresses can vary while the basic pulse persists. Roberts uses “Three Blind Mice” as an example of a poem which:
 
“does virtually every conceivable thing rhythm can do in English, while still keeping to a regular metre.” [12]
 
 And most importantly, one of the things it does is use
 
…the effect of the silent stress… This is like a ‘rest’ in music: a period of silence of specific duration relative to sounds which precede and follow it.[13]
 
So a rest which can be ‘heard’ or felt, but cannot be seen on the page, is capable of influencing the counting of stresses in a line. Other factors complicate this task as well. The opening chapter of Robert Pinsky’s book The Sounds of Poetry, is a really interesting discussion of “Accent and Duration”. He points out that ‘stress’ is achieved in a variety of ways – volume, duration and pitch can all play a part –  but also that the ‘stressedness’ of a syllable is relative to that of others in its context (its foot).  If you consider a number of paired syllables where one is unstressed and one is stressed,
 
 …the stressed syllable in one relatively light pair (is) sometimes on a level with, or even below, the unstressed syllable of a fairly heavy pair… The stressed syllable is determined only in relation to the other syllables within the foot. Thus, a stressed syllable within one foot may be less stressed than the unstressed syllable in another.[14]
 
Yet we do hear, in metrical verse, that ‘background’ rhythm or pattern of stresses, the “abstract pattern.”  And we hear it at the same time as we hear “the actual living rhythm of the lines.”
 
This is the effect Robert Frost was talking about when he described the art of ‘skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’. As Clive James, quoting this remark in his Poetry Notebook (p211) puts it:
 
Implicit in the idea was that the spoken language supplies the poet with a store of rhythms which he can, and indeed must, fit in counterpoint to the set frame of the metre…[15]
 
These are all quite thought-provoking and enlightening comments, but all analysis of rhythm and metre should keep in mind that crucial observation by Philip Roberts quoted above:
 
Stress is an oral matter, one which is not conveyed by the medium of print.
 
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say ‘not “completely” conveyed’, because the conventional pronunciation and speech tunes of English do provide general guidelines, but another riff from the delightful Paul Chowder will serve to highlight some of the less certain areas of the business of scansion:
 
…my theory is that iambic pentameter is in actuality a waltz. It’s not five-beat rhythm, even though ‘pent’ means five, because five beats would be totally off-kilter and ridiculous and would never work and would be a complete disaster and totally unlistenable. Pentameter, so called, if you listen to it with an open ear, is a slow kind of gently swaying three-beat minuetto. Really, I mean it.
 
That’s from page 4 of the novel. He mentions his theory there because,
 
I can’t resist giving you a little glimpse of it here.
 
But we have to wait until chapter 14 for the full flourish. Paul Chowder has been reading a typical book on English Versification and he takes issue with it:
 
You see, this is what I’m up against. This little book here… It’s James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry… In it he says some true and interesting things and some false things.
We can’t blame him for saying the false things, because he’s saying what everybody has always said from the abysm of time. First he says that iambic pentameter is preeminent in English poetry. No it is not. No it is not. Iambic pentameter is an import that Geoffrey Chaucer brought in from French verse, and it was unstable from the very beginning because French is a different stress universe than Middle English and it naturally falls into triplets and not doublets. No, the march, the work song, the love lyric, the ballad, the sea chantey, the nursery rhyme… all those have four beats…
And then Fenton says that iambic pentameter is, quote, “a line of five feet, each of which is a ti-tum. As opposed to a tum-ti.”
And that’s what they all say… And it isn’t. An iambic pentameter line is made up of six feet. Or rather five feet and one empty shoe – i.e. a rest. Unless the line is forcibly enjambed, and then, to my ear, it sounds bad. Keats, bless his self-taught genius soul, came up with some scary enjambments. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains,” next line, “My sense.”[16]
 
Paul goes on to discuss the nature of iambs, but for him “the real thorniness” is PENTAMETER. He analyses (his way) an example from Dryden: 
 
All human things are subject to decay
And when fate summons monarchs must obey.
 
…you think, okay, good, I see five stresses there, like five blackbirds on a power line.
Five little blackbirds. Ah, but there’s a raven of a rest there at the end that you’re not counting, my friend. If you say the two lines together, you’ll hear the black raven. Listen for him:
 
All human things are subject to decay   CRAW!
And when fate summons monarchs must obey.   CRAW!
 
If you leave out those raven squawks – those rests -  and you only count the blackbirds on the line, you are not going to be able to say this couplet the way Mr. Dryden meant it to be said. Try it as a run-on… What? Who? Where am I? You see? It’s just not right that way. You cannot have five stresses in a line and then jog straight on to the next line. If you do that, it sounds out of whack. It sounds horrible. It sounds like – enjambment. [17]
 
He gives other examples which have convinced him that
 
You’ve got to have the rests! There’s no question about it. If you don’t have the rests you don’t have a proper couplet. These are six-beat lines. So-called iambic pentameter is in its deepest essence a six-beat line.
Actually no, I take that back. It’s not. In its very deepest, darkest essence it’s a three-beat line. Here’s where we get to the nub of it. Because people really only hear threes and fours, not sixes.
 
All human things are subject to decay    rest
And when fate summons monarchs must obey.   Rest 
 
…iambic pentameter is really, if you count the rest the way you must count it, a kind of slow waltz rhythm. You can leap around the room reciting so-called iambic pentameter to yourself and your leaps will fall in threes. You cannot make your leaps fall into fives. You need to add the rest. I’m telling you that this is true. No amount of reading and underlining any textbook about meter and seeing them go on and on about five beats is going to make that necessary sixth beat go away. It’s there, and it’s been there for centuries. And when poets forget that it’s there, it hurts their poems.[18] [19]
 
This might make for an interesting experiment in a lesson, and will be valuable if it achieves no more than alerting readers and performers of poetry to two things. First, to the importance of moments of silence in all uses of language. And second, to a point Robert Pinsky makes at the beginning of his book:
 
There are no rules.
However, principles may be discerned in actual practice: for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or amended.
Art proceeds according to principles discernible in works of art. [20]
 
It’s the poem that calls the tune.
 
 
Dianne Cook
 
 
 
 
 
 


[1] Nicholson Baker   The Anthologist   Simon and Schuster  2009  Pocket Books Fiction  p2.

[2] op cit   p3

[3] op cit   p1

[4] op cit   p2

[5] op cit   p10

[6] op cit   p10

[7] op cit   p13

[8] John Thelwall  Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and utterance of the English language: with an Introductory essay on the application of rhythmical science to the treatment of impediments, and the improvement of our national oratory; and an elementary analysis of the science and practice of elocution, composition, &c (1812).
Thelwall argued that: …the crotchet or quaver rest constitutes a part of the elocutionary, as well as of the musical bar…
 

[9] Nicholson Baker  op cit   p14-15

[10] Stephen Edgar  In Form for Forty Years: A poet’s developing practice  Poet’s website: stephenedgar.com.au

[11] Philip Davies Roberts   How Poetry Works  Penguin 1986  p18.

[12] op cit p22

[13] op cit p23

[14] Robert Pinsky   The Sounds of Poetry  Farrar, Straus and Giroux NY 1998 p14

[15] Clive James   Poetry Notebook 2006-2014  Picador 2014  p211

[16] Nicholson Baker op cit p208

[17] op cit p212-3

[18] op cit p215

[19] Philip Davies Roberts op cit  also points out that the five-beat line can sound somewhat alien to the’ English’ ear. But argues that the caesura is sometimes used to give such lines a more duple feel. (6 beats?)  He also analyses a passage from Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ to show that “a poem written in a five-stress metre…could well sound, in performance, much more like four-stress lines.” He claims that our methods of scanning metre into metrical feet is “unfortunately… borrowed from the ancient Greek and Latin theorists (and) does not reflect the way in which English rhythms, and by extension, English poetry, actually work.” (p28ff)

[20] Robert Pinsky op cit p7

from The Voice Magazine   NSW Speech and Drama Association   2016
editor: Kathleen Warren