## Metadata - Author: [[George T. Wright]] - Full Title: Shakespeare's Metrical Art - Category: #books ## Highlights - The study of meter is always to some extent intrusive. Like most intense experiences, verse moves too fast and is too seamless for us to discern its segments as they pass or to hear, with full consciousness, its collecting and dissolving structures. Analysis slows down the beautiful current in order to help us understand the principles of its flow. The reader who is already deeply sensitive to the sound of verse lines and their movementin time may justly feel offended at any minute analysis that stops the verse and directs our rapt attention to this or that part of its design. But when I hear students, innocent of dissection, murdering the verse; when I hear learned scholars at professional meetings quote Shakespeare's lines without any apparent sense of their difference from ordinary speech, without any effort to convey with their voices, even in passing, the grace and force of those words that move us so in the theater; and when I hear gifted actors, blessed with the ability to speak the speech trippingly or, when appropriate, with due gravity, mislay the accents, omit words or change keys, and ignore the metrical clues to the meaning of the verse because they are unaware of the metrical principles on which it rests, I cannot help believing that a better understanding of those principles may encourage some readers, scholars, and actors to listen more closely to the meter, to hear how much of human feeling is involved in its structures, and, when the occasion calls, to speak the verse with a finer sense of its rise and flow. ([Location 68](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=68)) - A language that insistently pushes the stresses on words to the front, to the first syllable, as all Germanic languages do, would seem to be distinguished by an impulse toward the trochaic, and certainly large numbers of English words, such as window, table, swimming, and laughter, are in themselves natural trochees. Natural iambs, on the other hand, are easily provided not only by iambic words (alone, submit) but also by combining a or the or prepositions with monosyllabic nouns, which are also numerous in English, or by combining pronouns with monosyllabic verbs: I doubt, you see, he went. But which of these impulses, iambic or trochaic, is stronger in English speech generally is hard to say. What seems beyond dispute is that the trochaic and iambic currents of our speech find an appropriate arena in meter that is iambic rather than trochaic, and this is because iambic verse accommodates a wide range of metrical variations and trochaic verse does not, though why this should be so is again mysterious.' ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=103)) - Patterns we find in poetry always derive from patterns we discern or intuit in the world around us.' ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=109)) - Stressed syllables may vary in strength, and unstressed syllables may vary in weakness, and a third group may strike us as uncertain, as falling into a range that seems stronger than unstressed but weaker than stressed (here marked as -. ). In the most regular meters, such syllables are relatively rare; but their frequent appearance in English iambic pentameter helps to make this meter sound more speechlike than any other. In effect, iambic pentameter recognizes and incorporates an intermediate kind of syllable that may appear either in a stressed or in an unstressed "position,"… ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=125)) - If the meter is accentual, it measures the interval between stressed syllables by the time that elapses between them, without specifying how many unstressed syllables appear in that interval. In looser forms (nursery rhymes, for example), the number of syllables that intervene between stressed ones may be extremely variable, from zero to six or so. But if the meter is not only accentual but also syllabic, then the interval between its accented syllables is marked not by a measured time-lapse but by the occurrence of a fixed number of unaccented syllables (usually one). In such a meter we hear a pulsation (see Halpern, 185) in each stressed syllable, but the intervals between stressed syllables are not so regular. In the most daring such meter, iambic pentameter, one or more pauses may occur in midline, but to the trained ear what counts is that the pattern of alternation which is structurally essential to the line will be resumed after each pause. As we know from many productions, when Othello says, "Put out the light… ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=133)) - pentameter is itself the most problematical line-length, and the mark of this is its resistance to simple division: it does not divide… ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=145)) - Pentameter, then, is the most speechlike of English line-lengths, especially when it appears without rhyme. Long enough to accommodate a good mouthful of English words, long enough too to require most of its lines to break their phrasing somewhere, it also resists the tendency to divide in half. In fact, it cannot do so. A midline pause, wherever it appears, leaves two stressed syllables on one side and three on the… ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=155)) - In practice, the poet may produce the following changes in the normal iambic foot:1. Increase the difference in stress between " and - (strong iamb).2. Increase the stress on the unstressed syllable (spondee).3. Diminish the stress on the stressed syllable (pyrrhic).4. Combine 2 and 3 (trochee). ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=219)) - In a different analysis, there are two principal kinds of variation from iambic rhythm. If the term iambic designates an increase of stress from the first to the second of a pair of syllables, the possible variations are decrease of stress (trochee), or level stress. Level stress may be found in any degree of stress: weak, intermediate, or strong. Weak level stress is pyrrhic, strong is spondaic; ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=221)) - These variations, commanded by a skillful poet, can go a long way toward making iambic pentameter carry a strong flavor of natural English speech. Shakespeare's use of them to convey a great variety of states of mind, Donne's to suggest the stumbling, precise discourse of a lover or arguer feeling his rhetorical way, Milton's to shadow forth the grand motions of his epic narrative, all exemplify ways of manipulating the counters of this expressive system so that it answers these poets' different purposes. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=224)) - The belief on which this book rests is that there are always at least two structural orders simultaneously audible in iambic pentameter-the metrical and the phrasal (actual lines and stanzas, and actual phrases and sen- tences)-and their varied rhythmic interplay constitutes the great beauty of the form. ([Location 252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=252)) - Of all English meters, iambic pentameter makes the most of divergences between the stress pattern of a line and the phrasal pattern. ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=257)) - The ingenuity with which Renaissance English playwrights fit the phrase to the line is dazzling. Clearly, they mean us to hear two orders of language at once: a metrical order, in which the stresses alternate five times from weak to strong (with variations), and the order of the phrase or sentence, an order that seems to move along, to say what it has to say, without noticing the metrical pattern. But we as listeners have the opportunity to observe and to hear both orders of language alive in the same words. ([Location 261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=261)) - A great meter is no mere implement, like pen or typewriter, but a keyboard a young poet learns to master, exploring its range and subtleties, stretching its capabilities of harmony and expressiveness. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=318)) - Many later poets have done skillful work in iambic pentameter, but they have never recovered that early excitement, which can probably only be felt when a meter (or any aesthetic mode) with extraordinary expressive possibilities first bursts upon the awareness of artists. In English poetry this happened twice with iambic pentameter: once with Chaucer; and once when, after the meter had been rediscovered, its full capacities came to be seen and heard, in the 159os and subsequent years, perhaps extending all the way to Milton. The excitement of renewing and refining the meter can be felt even in so late a poetry as Pope's. When in later centuries young poets first feel the excitement of poetic creation, it is often derived from poets two hundred years their seniors, and it is usually somewhat polite and secondhand. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=333)) - By 1590, then, when Shakespeare began to write the works we know, the chief features of his central meter had already been set: (1) the ten-syllable iambic line; (2) a conventional midline break in phrasing; (3) line-integrity (most lines were endstopped); and (q) a "smooth" reconciliation of English phrasing and the metrical pattern. The regular pentameter line comprised these features, along with the standard variations (trochaic, pyrrhic, and spondaic) which poets used with increasing skill to make their lines more graceful, varied, and expressive. ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=623)) - Early Elizabethan versification is essentially an art of congruence, a fitting of phrase to metrical pattern; by Shakespeare's time it has become as well an art of counterpoint, an art in which the rhythmic phrase may work either with or against the metrical current. ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=663)) - First, in order to fit English speech more successfully to iambic pentameter, the poets began to allow themselves the license of letting their language diverge from that of normal spoken English, chiefly in four respects. ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=702)) - 1. Variable pronunciation of minor syllables. ([Location 703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=703)) - 2. Pronunciation of -ed. ([Location 714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=714)) - 3. Exaggerated use of the auxiliary verbs do and did. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=724)) - 4. Inversion of natural word order. ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=728)) - Except for Milton, whose style owes much to Spenser, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose syntactical distortions are enlisted in the service of intense speech, no later poet inverts the normal order of English words as much as Spenser. For centuries, syntactical inversion was a common resource of poets and for many readers a characteristic sign of poetic style. Indeed, poetry that did not make use of this device would have seemed to many readers of poetry from 1550 to 192o strangely unpoetical, even crude9 ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00359G96M&location=735))