Iambic pentameter thread (it's rooted in the Shakespeare thread, he said)

[Wiploc]

"nested in spheres." Bravo! That's the stuff !

I really enjoyed these, Wiploc.

Thanks.

I'm using Wikipedia as my main source of history.
I believe the phrase, "nested in spheres" came from there.

 

[WAB]

"nested in spheres." Bravo! That's the stuff !

I really enjoyed these, Wiploc.

Thanks.

I'm using Wikipedia as my main source of history.
I believe the phrase, "nested in spheres" came from there.

well, rats, then. I thought it came from your noodle. Anyway, it's still brilliant to fit it into your works.

****

To all,

I will be posting some Wallace Stevens, Anthony Hecht, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and maybe Browning. Perhaps Frost. Before the thread dies its inevitable slow sinking death. No WAB thread has lasted more than a few pages.

 

[WAB]

The beginning bits of The Comedian as the Letter C, a long poem by Wallace Stevens (1923) - in my estimation some of the best IP of the last century:


i

The World without Imagination

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
Berries of villages, a barber's eye,
An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.
It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
That century of wind in a single puff.
What counted was mythology of self,
Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,
The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,
The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak
Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw
Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,
And general lexicographer of mute
And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.
The whole of life that still remained in him
Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,
Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,
Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
The old age of a watery realist,
Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
That whispered to the sun's compassion, made
A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon
Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that
Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.
The valet in the tempest was annulled.
Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.
Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates,
Dejected his manner to the turbulence.
The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
The dead brine melted in him like a dew
Of winter, until nothing of himself
Remained, except some starker, barer self
In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
Was not the sun because it never shone
With bland complaisance on pale parasols,
Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.
Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried
Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.....
...............................................................


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47428/the-comedian-as-the-letter-c

 

[Wiploc]

"nested in spheres." Bravo! That's the stuff !

I really enjoyed these, Wiploc.

Thanks.

I'm using Wikipedia as my main source of history.
I believe the phrase, "nested in spheres" came from there.

well, rats, then. I thought it came from your noodle. Anyway, it's still brilliant to fit it into your works.

Is it my fault that Wikipedia sometimes writes in iambs? [smirk]

No WAB thread has lasted more than a few pages.

I've got a lot of centuries to go, and this is only the first draft.

 

[WAB]

well, rats, then. I thought it came from your noodle. Anyway, it's still brilliant to fit it into your works.

Is it my fault that Wikipedia sometimes writes in iambs? [smirk]

No WAB thread has lasted more than a few pages.

I've got a lot of centuries to go, and this is only the first draft.

Way cool. That'll give me a chance to hunt up more IP from great poets. I must remember, I don't have to limit my selections to blank verse. Maybe some Pope will be in order. He may have been the closest to Shakespeare when it comes to excellence of technique.

 

[Wiploc]

500s:
Fat Lady Sings

King Arthur, Beowulf, and Clovis reign.
We know that one of them, at least, is real.
Clovis unites the Franks, a single realm,
then dies, dividing rule among his sons.

The Frankish civil wars involve Brunhild,
and will inspire songs of Wagner’s ring.

Scots, who are Irish, move to Caledonia,
thereafter to be called the land of Scots.

Justinian rules the eastern Roman empire,
Roman or Greek? Let’s call them Byzantine.
Triumphant Byzantines go into Spain,
and Africa, and Italy, and debt.

Academy of Plato is extinguished.
Without this final flame, the age goes dark.
But Belisarius takes Carthage
from Vandals, using armored men on horse,
so fair to say the age is also middling.

 

[Wiploc]

I keep getting confused about dates and the order of events.

Back in BCE, I thought it was because the 400s perversely came after the 500s.

But it still happens. I'm sure there are many chronology errors in what I've got so far.

(Not to mention that Wikipedia says earlier dates should all be regarded as approximate or conjectural.)

My new theory is that the problem is aggravated by the fact that centuries are more recent as I go up the page

(500s

400s

300s)

but years are more recent as I go down the page.

(401

402

403).

So maybe I'll start working from the other near end, and go backwards.

Or maybe I should just reorder my notes?

Anyway, if my next post includes Covid or D-Day (not necessarily the one from Animal House), don't think that's because I think those happened in the 600s.

--

ETA:

For instance, I've got Clovis uniting the Franks in both the 500s and the 400s.

 

[Swammerdami]

I stopped writing after one stanza because I wanted a ruling from the chair.

It was the Sixth of January
. . When a country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

This alternates pentameter with tetrameter. OK?


I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek: TFT is a very courteous and pleasant place and I don't really think friends here will complain to the Mods about the tetrameters. But I am curious about terminology. Is there a special name for alternating meters like this? What about lines with nine syllables instead of ten?

 

[WAB]

Editing!

I stopped writing after one stanza because I wanted a ruling from the chair.

It was the Sixth of January
. . When a country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

This alternates pentameter with tetrameter. OK?


I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek: TFT is a very courteous and pleasant place and I don't really think friends here will complain to the Mods about the tetrameters. But I am curious about terminology. Is there a special name for alternating meters like this? What about lines with nine syllables instead of ten?

Good question! I just use the word 'nonce' whilst breaking all the rules. ETA: 'When' being a headless iamb'. [ouch]

Also, I hear l1 & l2 as perhaps a tet followed by trimeter.

ETA:

Two trimeters, ie 'January ' as a feminine ending???

Hey, who's the chair BTW?

 

[Wiploc]

I looked up "ballad meter," which turns out to be the same as "common meter":

Traditional ballads are written in a meter called common meter, which consists of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) with lines of iambic trimeter (six syllables). ... --google search

Meter in Ballads
Though the majority of ballads use iambs as their main foot, there is no specific meter required for a ballad. This means that while one ballad might use common meter (and many do), another ballad might use a different sort of meter. Generally speaking, ballads have a consistent meter throughout, so that a ballad in common meter will be common meter all the way through, while a ballad with another meter will use that meter all the way through. However, even poems with consistent meter tend to have some mild variations on that meter within them, meaning that a ballad in iambic pentameter will likely contain occasional lines of eleven or more syllables that break the "ten syllables per line" rule of iambic pentameter. [emphasis added] -- litcharts.com

The litcharts website looks interesting. I'll have to poke around there more.

I don't believe either of the above definitions. Meter is normally in feet these days, not syllables.

I guess we'd say Haiku is written in syllabic meter, but I can't think of anything else.

If Haiku has meter.

Let's look at the world's most famous limerick:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Well, blow me down.
The truncated first feet are offset by extrametrical syllables, with the result that each line has exactly the number of syllables dictated by the definitions above.

There once was a man from Nantucket
de DUM de de DUM de de DUM (de)

But the actual rule with limericks, as with all poetry, is that you can get away with whatever you can get away with.

Let me see if I can remember one of mine:

There was a role model, Ulysses.
The suitors were after his missus.
He lied and he screwed;
he was violent and rude.
A morality tale is what thissis.

Line three has a truncated first foot (de DUM, rather than de de DUM) but no extrametrical syllable (unaccented syllable after the final stressed syllable). It has five syllables rather than six, and it's just fine.

Line five has the extrametrical syallable at the end, but it doesn't have truncated syllable at the beginning, so it winds up with ten syllables rather than nine. It's fine too.

I like to try to truncate the first foot of a line if the previous line has an extrametrical, but it's not worth much effort. And I've never heard of anyone else doing it.

 

[WAB]

I looked up "ballad meter," which turns out to be the same as "common meter":

Traditional ballads are written in a meter called common meter, which consists of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) with lines of iambic trimeter (six syllables). ... --google search

Meter in Ballads
Though the majority of ballads use iambs as their main foot, there is no specific meter required for a ballad. This means that while one ballad might use common meter (and many do), another ballad might use a different sort of meter. Generally speaking, ballads have a consistent meter throughout, so that a ballad in common meter will be common meter all the way through, while a ballad with another meter will use that meter all the way through. However, even poems with consistent meter tend to have some mild variations on that meter within them, meaning that a ballad in iambic pentameter will likely contain occasional lines of eleven or more syllables that break the "ten syllables per line" rule of iambic pentameter. [emphasis added] -- litcharts.com

The litcharts website looks interesting. I'll have to poke around there more.

I don't believe either of the above definitions. Meter is normally in feet these days, not syllables.

I guess we'd say Haiku is written in syllabic meter, but I can't think of anything else.

If Haiku has meter.

Let's look at the world's most famous limerick:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Well, blow me down.
The truncated first feet are offset by extrametrical syllables, with the result that each line has exactly the number of syllables dictated by the definitions above.

There once was a man from Nantucket
de DUM de de DUM de de DUM (de)

But the actual rule with limericks, as with all poetry, is that you can get away with whatever you can get away with.

Let me see if I can remember one of mine:

There was a role model, Ulysses.
The suitors were after his missus.
He lied and he screwed;
he was violent and rude.
A morality tale is what thissis.

Line three has a truncated first foot (de DUM, rather than de de DUM) but no extrametrical syllable (unaccented syllable after the final stressed syllable). It has five syllables rather than six, and it's just fine.

Line five has the extrametrical syallable at the end, but it doesn't have truncated syllable at the beginning, so it winds up with ten syllables rather than nine. It's fine too.

I like to try to truncate the first foot of a line if the previous line has an extrametrical, but it's not worth much effort. And I've never heard of anyone else doing it.

OK Wippy, you're the chair.

To Swammerdami, you asked:

Is there a special name for alternating meters like this?

HooooooooWheee, yes. Squinters like to make special names for everything writers and poets do. Well, not everything.

If Shakespeare were to be resurrected and then come here right now in a time machine, I can hear him saying [Erkel voice], "Did I do that????

 

[Wiploc]

I stopped writing after one stanza because I wanted a ruling from the chair.

I've done one stanza of anapestic tetrameter
(de de DUM, de de DUM, de de DUM, de de DUM)
already, and plan (though "plan" may be too strong a word)
to do many different styles of poetry in my second draft.

But I'm not the OP, so I'd also be happy with a ruling from the chair.

1. 
   [*=1]It was the Sixth of January
   [*=1] . . When a country met its shame.
   [*=1]A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
   [*=1] . . And shat upon the walls of same.

This alternates pentameter with tetrameter. OK?
[emphasis added]

Line 1: strikes me as iambic tetrameter. (With an extrametrical syllable.)

Line 2: We could call this iambic tetrameter with a truncated first foot,
or we could call it iambic trimeter with an irregular (anapestic) first foot.
Since the first syllable is stressed, but stressed less than the third syllable,
it can be classified either way. We'll look at the rest of the poem to see which classification works for us.

Line 3: We could call it iambic pentameter, but none of the other lines are pentameter. So my instinct is to class it as iambic tetrameter, and call the last two syllables extrametrical.
de dUM, de DUM, de DUM, de DUM (de de)

Line 4: Iambic tetrameter.

Upshot:
Lines 1 and 4 are iambic tetrameter.
Line 2 can work as either trimeter or tetrameter.
Line 3 can be either tetrameter or pentameter.

Rather than have a single line of trimeter or pentameter, my inclination is just to call all four lines tetrameter:

1. 
   [*=1]It was the Sixth of January
   [*=1] . . When a country met its shame.
   [*=1]A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
   [*=1] . . And shat upon the walls of same.

 

[WAB]

I've done one stanza of anapestic tetrameter
(de de DUM, de de DUM, de de DUM, de de DUM)
already, and plan (though "plan" may be too strong a word)
to do many different styles of poetry in my second draft.

But I'm not the OP, so I'd also be happy with a ruling from the chair.





Line 1: strikes me as iambic tetrameter. (With an extrametrical syllable.)

Line 2: We could call this iambic tetrameter with a truncated first foot,
or we could call it iambic trimeter with an irregular (anapestic) first foot.
Since the first syllable is stressed, but stressed less than the third syllable,
it can be classified either way. We'll look at the rest of the poem to see which classification works for us.

Line 3: We could call it iambic pentameter, but none of the other lines are pentameter. So my instinct is to class it as iambic tetrameter, and call the last two syllables extrametrical.
de dUM, de DUM, de DUM, de DUM (de de)

Line 4: Iambic tetrameter.

Upshot:
Lines 1 and 4 are iambic tetrameter.
Line 2 can work as either trimeter or tetrameter.
Line 3 can be either tetrameter or pentameter.

Rather than have a single line of trimeter or pentameter, my inclination is just to call all four lines tetrameter:

1. 
   [*=1]It was the Sixth of January
   [*=1] . . When a country met its shame.
   [*=1]A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
   [*=1] . . And shat upon the walls of same.

er...I'm not good with any kind of leadership roles, so... if it's okay with everyone else, I hereby and forthwith and even fifthwith do most humbly and with great feelings of cowardice and renunciation and honesty do hereby and yeah I know I said that already and sooth and unto whom howsoever it behooveth do give up ye chair to anyone who wants to sit thereon. Or therein.

[and the peasants rejoiced] [emphasis mine]


ETA: Wiploc wrote:

I don't believe either of the above definitions. Meter is normally in feet these days, not syllables.

I believe you are correct, O ye moste mag - namininon - eh - miimnaninin...mimous...eh...mighty chair.

And I always assume that there is some poet somewhere doing something she is not supposed to. Doing it on purpose, and doing it with great glee. Perhaps even laughing whilst she goeth about it. I imagine Shakespeare laughing while (S)he wrote, at least when (S)he was in the zone.

 

[Wiploc]

I'm the chair!

The chair explicitly allows non-iambic and non-pentameter.

Ballad meter is allowed; haiku is allowed; native English meter is allowed; irregularities are allowed; blank verse is allowed; free verse is allowed; whale roads are allowed.

Myself, I figure to continue with the iambic pentameter for awhile. I'm still learning how to do it. I only just figured out that starting a line with a trochee what causes me to accidentally slip into anapestic meter.

 

[WAB]

I'm the chair!

The chair explicitly allows non-iambic and non-pentameter.

Ballad meter is allowed; haiku is allowed; native English meter is allowed; irregularities are allowed; blank verse is allowed; free verse is allowed; whale roads are allowed.

Myself, I figure to continue with the iambic pentameter for awhile. I'm still learning how to do it. I only just figured out that starting a line with a trochee what causes me to accidentally slip into anapestic meter.

 

[WAB]

It might be helpful to invite Copernicus* to this thread. As a linguist, perhaps he can explain to us, and to me especially since I do not know Latin, how to go about understanding the syllable/meter question.

I would love to know how to hear, and SAY, this line, from Virgil correctly, which I love deep in my heart because not only can I hear that it's beautiful (at least, the way I hear it), but I I have a rough understanding of what each of the words mean.


Quadrupedente putrim sonitu quatit ungula campum ( from The Aeneid. )

*I have tried the @whosywhatsit option, but I couldn't get it to work.


@Copernicus

 

[Swammerdami]

It was the Sixth of January
. . When a country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

This alternates pentameter with tetrameter. OK?

I wrote it as I did for better grammar parsing, but intended it to scan as pure pentameters and tetrameters like this:

It was the Sixth of January when
. . A country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

Should I have written it the second way? (Yes, best would be to rewrite it and avoid this issue.)

This alternation of pentameter and tetrameter seems very familiar: Are there famous poem(s) with this meter?

 

[WAB]

It was the Sixth of January
. . When a country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

This alternates pentameter with tetrameter. OK?

I wrote it as I did for better grammar parsing, but intended it to scan as pure pentameters and tetrameters like this:

It was the Sixth of January when
. . A country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.
​

Should I have written it the second way? (Yes, best would be to rewrite it and avoid this issue.)

This alternation of pentameter and tetrameter seems very familiar: Are there famous poem(s) with this meter?

To my ear, the stanza (in the quote bubble, the second version) is a wee tad wobbly, Swammerdami. The two halves do not match (metrically) for me. There are a variety of ways to scan. One way (wrong way no doubt) :

It was the Sixth of January when
. . A country met its shame.
A band of traitors stormed the Capitol
. . And shat upon the walls of same.

would be rigid, and unnatural, making the lines

1 iambic pent
2 iambic trimeter
3 iambic pent
4 iambic tet

But there are many other ways it could be scanned, as you know. People hear poetry differently. Have you heard a reading by the poet reading their own work? Very often, it seems as if they are ruining the poem, at least for me.

On the other hand, some poets say their poetry the very way that I hear it. Derek Walcott is a great example.

I have always maintained that if you want to hear Shakespeare the right way, listen to a trained Shakespearian actor. Olivier, McKellen, Jacoby, Hopkins, Gielgud, someone of that caliber.

 

[Swammerdami]

Several decades ago I bought a (1927) copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Works at a small Sunday "flea market" in Berkeley, Calif. and — almost miraculously — still have this volume despite a few moves where I lost most possessions.

In Volume VIII (Essays) are "The Poetic Principle", "The Rationale of Verse" and "The Philosophy of Composition." I loved reading those fun essays and this thread inspires me to re-read them. Poe is quite assertive in these essays; I wonder what poetry scholars think of his opinions. (* - It's called "Volume VIII" in the table of contents, but all eleven "volumes" are in a single 1200-page book.)

"Philosophy of Composition" was especially fun to read: He strives to demonstrate that, faced with the task of writing a poem to appeal to both critics and the public, "The Raven" was almost the only possible result! Here's a brief excerpt to show what I mean

... This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain.

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary: the refrain forming the close of each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word "Nevermore.'' In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.

ETA: I see that my "Okie"(?) pronunciation of JAN-u-AR-y is part of the metrical confusion in my poem above.

EETA: Whack! And I see that I can't even count up to three, claiming that "a country met its shame" was tetrameter!

 

[Wiploc]

Several decades ago I bought a (1927) copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Works at a small Sunday "flea market" in Berkeley, Calif. and — almost miraculously — still have this volume despite a few moves where I lost most possessions.

In Volume VIII (Essays) are "The Poetic Principle",

https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/poetprnb.htm

"The Rationale of Verse"

https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/ratlvrsd.htm

and "The Philosophy of Composition."

[url]https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm



[/URL]I'm definitely going to read them. Thanks.