Metrical anomalies

[milo]

sorry but you're not even stretching your arms. (I don't know what you're referring to.)

lines of iambic pentameter need only have three iambic feet. most people in the know...your formalist idiots actually know this to be so. (Judson Jerome estimated that 40% of most IP poetry consists of variant feet, but I still don't get your point.)

the soliloquy from hamlet, written but shakespeare that iambic meter guy....count the feet the first line count the iambs
count the iambs on the first 5 line. then have a peep at the sixth.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

in general i'd tell somebody the meter was off unless i knew they understood the iambic rule, i only know this because i was shown it by a few members on the site. (What is the iambic rule?) i'm not very good with meter but bad meter is bad meter. (What is the bad meter that you are referring to?) if someone who really knows what good meter is tells you you have bad meter, believe them. (How do I know who knows what good meter is?) you either know it or don't know it. (Seriously?) to assume you know it doesn't cut the mustard. (What exactly am I assuming?)

I'd love to respond to this, but I didn't understand much of it. The first six lines are good iambic pentameter with normal variants -- so what's the point?

SUCH FAITH they HAD ONCE to CRANE their FAC es in

(The "in" at the end takes a theoretical stress.)

Those are the stresses. There is more than one way to scan it, but it sounds nice to me as it is.

SUCH FAITH / they HAD ONCE / to CRANE / their FAC / es in

That's as good a scansion as any. Actually, when I read the poem aloud, I read it more like this:

such FAITH / they had ONCE / to CRANE / their FACE / es in

As I said, the "in" takes a theoretical stress, and the second foot (in this case) is an anapest.

---

I can often gauge my meter when I try to sing what I write to the tune of Gilligan's island. But that's because it is often in ballad meter. However, I think when you vary the meter without intended effect then you are damaging the underlying rhythm.

But that's my point. The fourth and fifth lines, when read aloud, have good meter. It's only when they are scanned that they look off.

One of Shakespeare's sonnets starts with a line that has only one iamb in it despite the overall meter being iambic pentameter, yet the line is famous and everyone seems to like it:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
LET ME / NOT to / the MAR / riage of / TRUE MINDS

One of the techniques of good poets is to insert rhythmic explosions into their poems. It is the amateurs who write in perfectly regular meter. (Not always, of course. Pope's metrics were very regular, but then, some people think his poetry sounds monotonous.)

You have scanned the line of Shakespeare wrong here, BTW.

If you are new to scansion you may want to at least learn that in English, three stressed or three unstressed syllables will not appear in a row as English is a cadence based language. It is informally referred to as the rule of three.

---

I started out writing in heavily cadenced free verse in my 20's. As I learned more about meter, I started to gravitate to that. However, the original free-verse tendency never left me.

Today, I write out my lines counting syllables as I go. Counting syllables just helps me to get the poem into rough form. If I am aiming for iambic pentameter, I'll end up with lines in the range of 9 to 11 syllables. Some lines will have four accented syllables, some will have five, and some will have six. The problem (if it's a problem) is that if the lines sound good to me, I will often leave them as they are. Consequently, I rarely achieve perfect IP. Some lines will scan as iambic tetrameter and some will scan as iambic pentameter, and many of the lines will have frequent anomalies (although many will be perfectly iambic).

Non-poets who read my poetry have no problem with it, while formalist poets get bent out of shape over the imperfect meter. My advice to them is, "Read it as if it were free-verse" -- but because the poem comes close to sounding like metered poetry, they still don't like it. Without a doubt, I'm stretching the envelope. My tendency is to feel that poetry in general is headed in my direction: cadenced but not rigidly metrical.

Nonetheless, I want to discuss the issue of metrical anomalies. I'm curious to know what people consider acceptable and unacceptable.

Here's the second stanza of a poem about a friend dying in a hospital. The form is four lines of IP and one line of iambic trimeter.

Such faith they had once to crane their faces in
The breeze, and reach green arms to birds and sun;
The motherly sun, which warms my nervous thighs,
Which nurtured once their petals’ sheen, will presently
Turn their petals dry ...

The fourth and fifth lines are the problem:

which NUR / tured ONCE / their PET / al's SHEEN / will PRES / ent ly
x TURN / their PET / als DRY

The fourth line would appear to have six feet, with a pyrrhic as the final foot. However, since the lines run together, and since the first foot is a headless iamb, I read them like this:

which NUR / tured ONCE / their PET / al's SHEEN / will PRES
ent ly TURN / their PET / als DRY

.. as if the first foot of the fifth line were an anapest. And since anapests are acceptable substitutions in iambic meter, I feel that these lines are okay as they are. But I'm curious to hear other people's opinions. (Note: Frost slipped anapests into many of his iambic poems -- "Mowing" is a good example.)

Counting syllables or counting stresses is not the way to write good metric verse - indeed it produces the opposite effect. You need to train your ear to produce natural rhythm and this is done through hard work, practice and study.