Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
The
above excerpt is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which like most of his other
sonnets, is written in iambic pentameter, a popular meter used in traditional
English poetry. An iamb is a metrical foot composed of an unstressed syllable,
followed by a stressed syllable. The other three metrical feet in English are
trochee, dactyl, and anapest. So what made the iamb a favorite among traditional
English poets?
Let’s address
this question by looking at the phonology and syntax of English. English poetry
follows a lot of the literary traditions of Latin and Greek, which had the
distinction of short/light and long/heavy vowels. This difference carried over
to the formation of stressed and unstressed syllables in English (poetryfoundation). There are patterns in
syllabic stresses and parts of speech (noun, adjective, etc.). For example, multisyllabic
nouns typically start with a trochee (stressed followed by unstressed syllable),
such as ‘paper’, ‘bottle’, ‘pencil’. Multisyllabic verbs typically start with an
iamb, such as ‘neglect’, ‘erase’ (Herment & Turcsan). Let’s look at a line
from the poem in the beginning:
“And summer’s lease hath all too short a
date.”
The
first word in the sentence is a conjunction, followed by a trochaic noun (‘summer’).
Preceding a noun with an unstressed syllable is very common in English. Besides
proper nouns, nouns seldom start a sentence by themselves. We typically precede
it with an article or determiner (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’), which is almost always
unstressed. In the same vein, ‘too short’, another iambic combination, shows that
adverb followed by an adjective readily makes an iamb. Adverbs, from ‘very’, ‘really’,
to ‘happily’, typically end on an unstressed syllable. ‘short’, ‘clever’, and
many other adjectives start with a stressed syllable (granted, adjectives have
a lot more variations in terms of syllabic stresses).
Because
of these syntactical constraints in our language, iambs can account for more
combinations of words in sentences. While still maintaining phonological
consistency (rhythm), iambic meters more closely resemble syntax of regular
speech and give more freedom to poets to express ideas.
How does
structure in poetry change when there are different syntactic and phonological constraints?
Let’s look at a five-character Chinese poem by Li Bai, a famous Tang Dynasty
poet.
床前明月光
(bed)(front)(bright)(moon)(light)
疑是地上霜
(suspect)(to
be)(ground)(above)(frost)
举头望明月
(raise)(head)(watch)(bright)(moon)
低头思故乡
(lower)(head)(think
of)(past)(home)
Chinese characters
are all monosyllabic and are combined to make phrases. This linguistic trait
makes much more regularity in the way sentences are formed. In the above poem, observe
that every line can be broken into a 2-3 structure:
床前明月光
(bed)(front)(bright)(moon)(light)
The
first two characters form a prepositional phrase (bed)(front) and the following
three characters form a noun phrase (bright)(moon)(light). All of the lines
follow this pattern: a two-character phrase followed by a three-character
phrase. The emphasis of each line seems to be on the latter three-character
phrase whereas the preceding two-character phrase serves more as a modifier.
As we
can see from the examples, although some aspects can be arbitrary, syntax and
phonology play a huge role in forming the structure and meter of poems.
However, much of the traditional poetic structure has given way to free-verse
and prose-styled writing. What do you think contributed to the erosion of
phonological and syntactic constraints in poetry? Also, if anyone is
knowledgeable about other forms of poetry, such as the haiku, please share your
thoughts.
Citations:
Herment,
Sophie, and Gabor Turcsan. "A Heuristic Corpus for English Word Prosody: Disyllabic Nonce Words." Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody
(2013): n. pag. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.
Staff,
Harriet. "Where Does Iambic Pentameter Come From?" Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.
Joseph, I’m really glad you were able to bring up an example in two different languages. I find it very interesting how different languages end up using improper syntax or phonology in their poetry. I think that most poetry, like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, is supposed to be read aloud. With this comes the assumption that poetry has to have a spoken rhythm. Since I am a musician, I think of this from a music perspective. It’s good that you point out that different words naturally have different stressed syllables. But the form of poetry, like the form of music, often requires that the stress or accent be placed in certain regular patterns. Thus, the words have to be bent to the will of the poetic form. However, I find it fascinating as a monolingual speaker that other languages sort of adapt a different style of poetry or music, most likely as a result of the different natural rhythms in their language. If Chinese, for example, had similar rules as English does for which syllable should be stressed, I would be interested to see if the poetic forms were more similar.
ReplyDeleteI’d like to expand on the connection between poetry and music that Paul brought up and to address your question on the shift of modern poetry away from iambs. From the perspective of the speaker and the listener, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables creates a logical pattern that is pleasing to the ear and easily and fluidly pronounced. Therefore, alternating syllables are more common in everyday speech and, as was pointed out in lecture, in names. This is analogous to consonance and rhythmic consistency in music: a consistent pattern is established and the combinations of tones are generally pleasing to the ear. In the baroque period, around Shakespeare’s time, disruptions such as dissonance and asymmetrical meter were uncommon just as non-iambic poetry was uncommon. However, as music progressed into the modern period, dissonance, asymmetrical meter, and a lack of obvious melodic and rhythmic pattern have become more common in music as a deviation from traditional classical music. This mirrors the shift in poetry, if free verse and prose can be seen as the poetic equivalent of modern music. This plays with our sense of what sounds “good” and is natural to speak or play, and functions to defy our expectations of easy auditory patterns.
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