I'm working on the 1400s. I'll probably need to make rhymes later, but right now I'm just trying to remember how to write meter.
Comments, corrections, and suggestions are all welcome. But I want to publish a little book on using poetry to help yourself remember history.
So, if you contribute, how will I know what is mine and what is yours? I
won't know.
So I propose to assume that -- unless somebody specifically says different -- I am free to adopt any suggestions as my own.
I hope that's okay.
The 1400s.
Constantinople falls before the Turks.
New Rome soon bears the name of Istanbul.
{Now that I'm posting it, the first line doesn't work for me.}
At Orleans the dark horse Joan upsets
the arc of war. Since Agincourt won’t come
again, the Brits cry, “Hold, enough!” {last line only four feet}
At
Castill
on the
cannon
makes all
castles
obso
lete -- their
resale
value
shot.
{No clue what’s wrong with the second line, but it sure doesn’t seem right.}
The navigator Henry steers his pilots far away.
De Gama even manages to sail to far Cathay.
{7 feet per line} {repeated word “far”}
Herr Gutenberg is pressing his new type.
{Not strictly iambic. But it is one of Jerome’s allowable exceptions. (#3, below) Allowable or not, I don’t like it in this case.
Judson Jerome in
The Poet’s Handbook:
[These four exceptions] account for 90 [sic. 90 percent?] of those you find in metrical verse in English.
…
DUM da da DUM da DUM {trochee}
da da DUM DUM da DUM {pyrric, spondee}
da DUM da da DUM da DUM {anapest}
da DUM da DUM da DUM da {extrametrical syllable}
…
Let me now fill in words to correspond to the syllables in my da DUM lines. …
- Whispering branches scrape
- on the cold panes of thought.
- I dream of escape, but I
- am caught by inner whispers.
Elsewhere in
The Poet's Handbook, Jerome says that exception number 1, starting a line with DUM da da DUM, or, indeed, using that in the middle of a line if it comes after a pause, is so normal that you wouldn't even call that "loosely iambic." It counts as iambic because it works so naturally in iambic poems.
}