What is English meter?

A dialogue about poetry

I recently discovered that Brad Skow, philosophy professor at MIT and writer of Mostly Aesthetics, believes that concepts of metrical feet—like iambs and trochees—aren’t very useful for understand poetic meter. I was struck by this, and we immediately agreed to write a dialogue on the subject. And here it is! As you will see, we don’t even agree on how to scan notable lines of English verse, though you will read about linguistic theory, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, and dipodic verse while we debate.

First some housekeeping.

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Last week, I said the next play for the Shakespeare book club was As You Like It. This is wrong. **The next play is Henry IV, part I**. Schedule here.

For The Newstatesman I reviewed Molly the controversial new biography by Blake Butler. For The Critic, I wrote about the proposed Jane Austen statue in Winchester and how those who oppose it are hypocritical snobs. For The FitzwilliamI wrote about James Joyce and whether he rejected Ireland. (One of my better pieces, recommended.)

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Henry: Brad, start by telling me your position. Is sounds like you don’t think the traditional view of prosody, where we count the iambs and trochees in a line of verse, is correct?

Brad: Ha, that’s a bit unfair, you asking the simple question, me having to give the long-winded answer. But here goes.

A line of English verse (or any stretch of the English language for that matter) has a rhythm, which is just its pattern of stresses. You could represent that rhythm by marking, for each syllable, whether it is stressed or unstressed, though that would oversimplify. Stress comes in gradations: in “con-sid-er-a-tion” both “sid” and “a” are stressed, but “a” has a stronger stress. The question before us, though, is about meter: when is a line of verse in iambic pentameter—or trochaic tetrameter or whatever, but let’s focus on iambic pentameter. The answer has something to do with the line’s rhythm, but what?

In a high school poetry class you might be told this answer: a line is in iambic pentameter when its rhythm is “WSWSWSWS” (W=weak, unstressed; S-strong, stressed). In traditional terms, an “iambic foot” is a weak syllable followed by a strong syllable; in those terms, iambic pentameter is five (Latin penta) iambic feet. “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” fits this paradigm.

Still, this definition just will not do. If it were right, then Shakespeare and Milton—even Milton!—would constantly be failing to write in iambic pentameter. To take one famous example, here’s a line from Paradise Lost:

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death

The rhythm is “S S S S S S W S W S,” at least three violations of the “rule.” Or consider

Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain

(Also Milton.) That’s W S W W S S W S W S. Last example, Wordsworth:

Almost as silent as the turf they trod

That’s S W W S W W W S W S.

So the true conditions on a line’s rhythm, that it must meet to be in iambic pentameter, must be much more complicated. I’ve tried to understand what Professors of Linguistics who have studied this have said about it, but it’s hard, and they don’t agree anyway. (One proposed the rule: a stressed syllable S may not occupy an unstressed position W if the stress is “lexical,” and “there is a node N that dominates W and immediately dominates S.”¹) In any regard, in their search for those conditions, the notion of a foot, and/or stating the conditions under which “trochaic substitutions” are allowed (putting a strong-weak sequence where a weak-strong should be), do not seem to be of much use.

Henry: But you’re a philosophy professor! You’re good at giving these answers! And that was admirably clear.

Let me argue for the role of common sense. I don’t want to wave away the study of linguistics, but isn’t this all a bit fussy? That exceptions exist is not to prove that the rule isn’t real. As Samuel Johnson said,

If I come to an orchard, and say there’s no fruit here, and then comes a poring man, who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me, “Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears,” I should laugh at him: what would that be to the purpose?’

Most of the time, English poetry fits metrical patterns. The exceptions wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the standard wasn’t assured. The fact is, if you pick a line of English verse at random, it is likely to be iambic.

Says Lysander, stresses in bold:

I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
As well possess’d; my love is more than his;
My fortunes every way as fairly rank’d,
If not with vantage, as Demetrius’;
And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
I am beloved of beauteous Hermia:
Why should not I then prosecute my right?

Isn’t this the heart of the matter? Shakespeare sounds iambic. That is English poetry. The exceptions to the rule are more properly understood as variations, not violations. That Milton is a master of those variations (no argument on that score) is only true because his baseline is iambic. This section shows that very well: the variations draw so much attention because of the contrast they make with the standard.

He now prepar’d
To speak; whereat their doubl’d Ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his Peers: attention held them mute.
Thrice he assayd, and thrice in spight of scorn,
Tears such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way.

That Milton is constantly draw back to the iambic pattern once he varies it shows the importance of the meter.

I wonder, do any poets share your view?

Brad: Excellent, this is excellent, lots of good questions here. One is what is iambic pentameter? and at a certain level of abstraction we agree: it’s “weak-STRONG” five times, with variations allowed. A further question is which variations are allowed?; and here it might look, to the naive reader, like our attitudes diverge. Not that we favor different answers (I don’t know the full answer!); but your vibe is more “that’s not a very important question,” while mine, maybe, is “time to wheel in some serious theoretical apparatus.”

But I doubt we’re as far apart as appearances suggest. I think that, once you’ve read enough verse, you get a feel for it, and you can read it fine without paying much attention to the meter—unless you hit a truly non-metrical line, in which case you’ll feel a jolt and pen an angry letter to the editor. It’s much like telling when a sentence is grammatical: we can all do it, well enough, even if a linguistics textbook looks, to us, like someone vomited symbols on the page.

A further question is how common variations on the “weak-STRONG” rhythm are. The linguists with their computers could probably tell us. Instead I conducted an unscientific 30 second survey. Here’s a speech we all know, with stressed syllables in bold:

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 heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. 

Not a single line here is “WSWSWSWSWS.” (Okay, some are quite close, and there’s some fuzziness over when a syllable counts as stressed.) But I guess my point is, and I won’t be surprised if you agree, that if, as one reads, one is always looking for this pattern, and forces each line to match it by inserting unnatural stresses, you’ll mis-read a lot of verse.

Maybe what I really care about is, that quite a large range of variation is possible in the rhythm of the line, when writing iambic pentameter. The poet Timothy Steele’s excellent book Missing Measures argues, persuasively I think, that the free verse revolution was partly driven by the conviction that iambic pentameter was a straightjacket; that to write it one must, as Ezra Pound put it, write like a “metronome.” That’s just false, and it’s a tragedy, one might think, that the Modernists falsely believed that their felt need for rhythmic freedom could not be achieved in metrical forms. (You asked if any poets share my view, and I don’t know, but at least some of what I believe, Steele believes too, since I got it from him.)

But maybe we’ve wandered a bit far from the question of whether iamb and trochee are useful concepts for understanding English verse!

Henry: I don’t think the question doesn’t matter, more that it is not amenable to the sort of statements that theory prizes. In biology, a large amount of variation around certain core traits is a normal and expected thing to observe within a species. Eventually, variation leads to speciation, but mostly variation is part of what defines a species. A beetle is still a beetle, not despite the within-species variation but because of it.

I think we should pay close attention to the variations, as you did with the Hamlet speech (and yes, I would mark the stresses differently!). But trying to show that meter isn’t the basis of English poetry seems too much like trying find a beetle without six legs. There are whole poets whose work you simply won’t get very far with once you abandon the idea of iamb and trochee. What are to make of Robert Frost, for example, if we don’t believe in meter?

Pound once wrote that “to break the pentameter, that was the first heave”—a line that clearly bears the burden of Wordsworth’s influence;—from The Prelude:

She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp’d my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;

Wordsworth shifts to anapests in the final line, so that the rhythm bears the feeling of a boat surging upon a lake. He broke the pentameter with a heave, long before Pound. Poor Pound, he knew that he was wrong about the metronome. Only second rate poets are metronomes, not Wordsworth. Every iambic poet who came before had already broken the pentameter. And so he was left with only one choice—not to break it, but to deny it.

Frost, as ever, got much closer to the truth.

All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with metres—particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless.

I note, too, that one of the exercises Pound set for school pupils in his ABC of Reading was to “try to write in the meter of any poem he likes.”

Brad: Ah, but I agree that meter is the basis of English poetry! I believe in meter as much as you do. The claim that I was advancing, that maybe you disagree with, is that the notions of foot, iamb, trochee, and so on, aren’t good notions to use, in a science of meter. That could be true, even if there is such a thing (maybe misnamed) as “iambic pentameter.”

Phlogiston might be a good analogy: chemists at one point thought it was a good concept to use when building a chemical theory. Phlogiston, they thought, is the substance given off during combustion. But they eventually stopped using the concept. It’s not that they changed their mind about what phlogiston was; they stopped thinking in terms of it altogether, finding oxygen, metal, acid, etc better concepts. But when they made this change, they didn’t also assert that nothing ever burst into flame. What changed was the theoretical apparatus they brought to their attempts to understand a phenomenon that they continued to recognize. Iambic pentameter, or meter, is the phenomenon; iambic foot etc is the apparatus.

So my position is maybe too subtle: yes, I say, meter matters, and one needs to have a sense of what it is; yes, “iambic pentameter” is verse that matches to some degree the “WSWSWSWSWS” template; but no, the science of meter, as it advances, won’t use foot, iamb, or trochee.

Is it worth getting into the weeds, to try to illustrate this? I admit to being over my head here, as I am not a linguist studying meter, I only play one on TV. But the vibe I get from trying to read those people is something like this. Traditional theories say a line is in (strict) iambic pentameter if (i) it consists of five iambs, or (ii) a permissible substitution of a trochee for an iamb has been made. They then go on to list the permissible substitutions, for example, that it is okay for the first foot of the line to be a trochee. Modern linguists’ complaint is that the list of which substitutions are allowed, and which aren’t, is left completely unexplained; that a good theory will explain them; and that the plausible explanations that have been produced do so without using the notions of iamb or trochee at all (though they still refer to stressed and unstressed syllables).

Maybe that’s helpful; maybe not. To finish, let’s descend from these airy heights of theoretical abstraction to actual poetry, your example from Wordsworth,

Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;

I think you said that this line is not in iambic pentameter? And that knowing it violates the rules helps appreciate the poem? I think that the line is perfectly iambic (iambic meter does not require even numbered syllables to be stressed) and (to return to Steele’s point) that it’s being so is not incompatible with a rhythm that “bears the feeling of a boat surging upon a lake.”

Henry: Perhaps we can read that as a dipodic line of verse. There are five stresses, but natural speech will only make three of them strong, the other two fading to weak stresses, or, perhaps, no stress at all. This is one of those vexing instances of the meter being at once iambic and not iambic, but perhaps like the elusive grand unifying theory or physics, we’ll just have to live with the uncertainty.

1. Paul Kiparsky, “The Rhythmic Structure of English Verse,” 1977.