Archive for July, 2009
Writing Dragon Winter
Monday, July 27th, 2009
I think yesterday morning’s writing will stand. (I’m working on Dragon Winter.) I tweaked it tonight. It’s a little too early for me to be sure I can keep it, because I can’t yet read it from as distant a perspective as I need to judge it.
I’ve also been trying to figure out what goes into my current scene besides a description of the action. I think I need the physical description to connect the previous scene with the following scene, but I don’t like a scene to accomplish only one thing.
It’s been suggested that a scene can do four things: develop character, develop the setting, develop the theme, or advance the plot. A good scene will accomplish at least two of these things.
I have some preliminary ideas, but it’s getting late and I’m probably going to sleep on it before I work more on the current scene.
She Saw the Moon over Milford Haven
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
I’m singing “Milford Haven,” by the Oyster Band, because I found that I can fly!
I finished a new scene of Dragon Winter last night, after finally realizing that the female main character’s reactions had to be expressed non-verbally. I’ve got a few scenes written ahead, so that leaves me with one crucial section left to write.
I’ve been working on this fantasy poem for ten years. There’ve been many times when it looked as if I couldn’t pull it off. Now I see that I’m going to. I’m elated.
I’ve set this week aside mostly for writing. (You can still expect the Norse verse form series to continue.)
The end is now in sight.
Old Norse Poetic Forms: Málaháttr. Maybe.
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
A while back, I published a description of the accentual-alliterative verse form that Beowulf and Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun are written in. The particular form discussed is the most common in old Germanic poetry. Its Norse name is fornyrðislag. (If you’re not familiar with accentual poetry, alliteration, or the specific rules for fornyrðislag, read the linked post first. It explains the basics.)
There are other meters, however.
The great advantage we have in talking about fornyrðislag is that it’s been rendered in modern English comparatively often, as you can see from the Beowulf translation above. Modern English rendition of other Norse meters is rare. Worse, the only descriptions of some of the forms that I can readily track down are incoherent or confusing. They lead me to suspect that the authors are unacquainted with poetry, Old Norse, or both; or that the writing is most unclear.
What am I to make of a description claiming that fornyrðislag lines have four syllables (not accents), and then quotes this as an example?
Hljóðs bið ek allar
helgar kindir
meiri ok minni
mögu Heimdallar
Vildu at ek Valföðr
vel fyr telja
forn spjöll fira
þau fremst um man?
I don’t read Old Norse, but it’s clear even so that several of those half-lines must have more than four syllables. Probably most people know that poets will deviate from strict adherence to meter in order to create prosodic interest. But when a poem breaks a rule as often than it keeps it, one has to question whether the rule is correctly viewed as describing the verse in any way. “Fornyrðislag has four syllables per half-line” does not describe the verse above; nor does it match other clear descriptions I have heard of fornyrðislag. I doubt the accuracy of this source, therefore.
When the same source then tells me that málaháttr is a form with five syllables instead of four, I have to wonder. The example quoted is:
Munda ek mildingi
þá er Mæra hilmi
flutta-k fjögur kvæði
fimtán stórgjafar
Hvar víti áðr orta
með æðra hætti
mærð of menglötuð
maðr und himins skautum?
Another source describes málaháttr as a variant of fornyrðislag whose principle difference from the base form is that, in fact, it has a regular syllable count: there are usually five syllables in a málaháttr half-line. (Occasionally there are more).
Saying that málaháttr differs from plain fornyrðislag in having a regular count of syllables (five) as well as a regular count of accents (four) does describe the examples given reasonably well. I am inclined to think it probably correct.
Happily, I have managed to turn up an example of málaháttr in modern English. Here’s the opening verse of a piece by StarSeth:
“Two honorable husbands
I have wedded in time,
And both are buried,
blazes have felled them.
Three strong siblings had I
that similarly fell,
So goes the life of Guðrun,
cursed by gods and men … ”
StarSeth’s Skuldskaparmal project looks to be a more accurate source of information that some of the references more easily turned up by searching, but he hasn’t posted his paper yet. I hope he does so.
Málaháttr stanzas, like some forms of fornyrðislag, generally have four lines. You will often see them written as eight half-lines.
New Journal Theme, Finally!
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
As you can see, I’ve created a new Wordpress theme for my journal, based on Starkers, and using the tutorials mentioned in the previous post. It looks more-or-less like the rest of my site, which you can now easily navigate to. I started this project with half-baked CSS and no PHP, so it’s been a major effort to get it to this point.
Odds are I’m going to be tweaking the typography for a while, but I’ll be back to posting regularly after I take a day or two off.
Journal Reformat in the Wings
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
I’m putting a huge effort into learning how to make this journal look like the rest of my website. That means improving my CSS, and making a nodding acquaintance with PHP, so I can make a new Wordpress theme. I made major progress over the last few days, especially tonight. I’m not ready to upload yet, but it shouldn’t be long. Then I’ll go back to updating more frequently. Here are some particularly helpful references:
Working on the page
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
I’ve been working on cleaning up the code for the site as a whole, making it better conform to what’s usually held to be good practice these days. This involves improving my CSS, which started off lamentable and still needs work. I may concentrate on this until the whole site looks the way I want it to.
Tweaks
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
I’ve tweaked the blog to make it easier to read and navigate:
- The font is no longer bolded in single-page view;
- And you do have a sidebar there.
- I turned justification off, which means fewer ugly post titles and fewer line-wraps in the poetry quotes.
I’m also going to work on making the blog look like the rest of the site, with my standard navigation and graphics. But I might not get that done right away.
Writing Formal Poetry: Ambiguous Scansion
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Last night I was working on the 11th scene of Dragon Winter. Since I’ve mentioned ambiguous scansion a couple of times recently, and since it turned up as an awkwardness in my own writing yesterday, this seems an opportune time to discuss it in more detail.
In order not to spoil the story for prospective readers, I’m going to attempt to discuss the poetics without giving away too much of the plot. This means leaving out more context than I would otherwise; I hope, nonetheless, that what follows will be clear. I’ll also note that, since we’re talking about work very much in progress — a part of the first draft I’m writing right now — that I may end up keeping nothing you see here. I don’t decide that a scene probably works until it’s been finished for a few days, and even then I may later decide against it. (Dragon Winter once came in at more than 8000 words, before I decided to excise an entire subplot.) Caveat lector.
As background for these lines: the female main character, Ruhano, is standing on a windy cliff. Another character has just launched a silk-and-bamboo hang glider off the cliff, dived, banked, and begun to climb, passing close to her position.
Ruhano saw its widespread wings tilting
As Shazemar banked to catch the updraft
And cleared the cliff, soaring past the ledge.
The air that eddied from the nearest wingtip
Stirred stray strands of her blue-dun hair.
“Two chances have you had to save yourself;
Two choices have you made (unfinished line) ”
Tentatively, I’ve accepted the first five lines as part of the description in the launch scene. Entirely aside from the question of flow, I don’t think I get away with the last two.
Why not?
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that our textbook example of regular iambic pentameter is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Here we have three perfectly regular lines of iambic pentameter, and one line with ambiguous scansion.
Why is line 2 ambiguous?
English, unlike some other languages (e.g., Japanese), has strong patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. It’s apt to fall into alternation of stressed/unstressed unless a three-beat rhythm has been established. That means that where we have three stressed syllables in a row, the middle stress is often demoted or weakened: it becomes a secondary stress, a comparative unstress. And where we have three unstressed syllables in a row, the middle syllable is often promoted: it becomes a weak stress, a comparative stress.
In Elegy’s second line, we have three syllables in a row that would normally carry stress: “herd winds slow.” Now, you can read that the way I naturally read it in context, the way I marked it above: I read it effectively stress very-weak-stress stress because the rhythm of the first line is so strongly marked that it comes naturally to me to demote ‘winds.’ But you can also read it:
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea …
If you do that — if you read six beats — the stanza still sounds good. A rhythm is nevertheless established, and you don’t trip over it. Ambiguous scansion is perilous, but not forbidden: sometimes it works. It works here.
Now, the basic meter of Dragon Winter is iambic pentameter, but it’s not nearly as regular as “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” It’s what I usually call ragged pentameter: the style in which Shakespeare wrote most of his plays. There are more stress variations within the lines, and I’m more apt either to chop off an initial unstressed syllable, or to add an extra-metrical unstressed syllable to the end of a line.
Malcom to Macduff, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but God above
Deal between thee and me! for even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, would not betray
The devil to his fellow and delight
No less in truth than life: my first false speaking
Was this upon myself: …
Successful formal verse has enough regularity to establish a base rhythm, and enough variation to provide interest. Note that Shakespeare’s irregular lines are often bracketed by regular ones, re-establishing the rhythm he’s temporarily broken.
Now go back, and look at my lines:
Ruhano saw its widespread wings tilting
As Shazemar banked to catch the updraft
And cleared the cliff, soaring past the ledge.
The air that eddied from the nearer wingtip
Stirred stray strands of her blue-dun hair.
“Two chances have you had to save yourself;
Two choices have you made (unfinished line) … ”
There is not one single completely regular line of iambic pentameter in the first five lines quoted. The closest to regular, line 3, drops an internal unstressed syllable. Three of the remaining four lines also drop unstressed syllables; and all of them depend on demoting a syllable with secondary stress to make the five-beat rhythm work. I think I get away with it — I think I can probably keep those five lines, because they aren’t ambiguous. You can probably tell how to read them without stumbling over them.
Now, the next two lines have some good points and some bad points.
- Parallelism of sound combined with parallelism of concept. Excellent.
- ‘Have you had’ and ‘have you made’ have strong rhythm. Good.
- But ‘have you had’ and ‘have you made’ are comparatively colorless. Bad.
- Seriously ambiguous scansion. Bad. I need the reader to say:
“Two chances have you had to save yourself;
Two choices have you made … ”
But eventually I noticed that there’s a fair possibility they’ll read:
“Two chances have you had to save yourself;
Two choices have you made … ”
And if they read that way, we’re getting into ‘lose the rhythm’ territory. I don’t know whether I’ll end up keeping the ‘Two chances have you had/Two choices have you made’ pair or not — it may well have enough good points to override its bad points. But if I do keep it, I can’t have it follow the five irregular lines directly. Re-establishing the rhythm with some unambiguous and regular lines before I take any more liberties is crucial.
So Fond of the Weather
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
I’ve slowed down on posting a bit, for two reasons:
- We’ve been having hot- and cold-running thunderstorms, of the sort that keep me away from the computer for hours. I decided to make a virtue of necessity and take a minor vacation.
- We’re having a cool summer — so cool I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt and closing the windows at night, for the first time ever. And it’s so cool that it’s fun to go out on the back porch to read in the late afternoon. I’ve been doing that. Who knows how long this wonderful weather will last?
If it were like this all the time, I could come to like summer.
Accentual-Alliterative Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Today I’m talking about accentual poetry, as practiced by Father Gerald Manley Hopkins. In case you haven’t been following the discussion, this link will take you to an explanation of the difference between syllabic and accentual meter, among other things.
Hopkins called his particular version of accentual poetry ’sprung rhythm.’ The alternative, syllabic poetry, is ‘running rhythm.’
Springboks Demonstrate Sprung Rhythm
Sprung rhythm is an accentual meter, in which a leading stress is followed by anywhere from zero to three unstressed syllables. Lead-in unstressed syllables may precede the leading stress in a line, particularly if the previous line ended in a stress: Hopkins viewed the meter as wrapping around, joining the lines as if the breaks weren’t there: the beginning of the next line can be considered part of the previous one, after a fashion.
Others have regarded iambic pentameter as the natural meter of English verse. But Hopkins said: “Sprung Rhythm is the most natural of things. For (1) it is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. (2) It is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music, so that in the words of choruses and refrains and in songs written closely to music it arises. (3) It is found in nursery rhymes, weather saws, and so on; because, however these may have been once made in running rhythm, the terminations having dropped off by the change of language, the stresses come together and so the rhythm is sprung. (4) It arises in common verse when reversed or counterpointed, for the same reason.”
Hopkins’ own description of his meter, at length.
For an example of sprung rhythm, here’s one of Hopkins’ best-known poems:
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Which I believe is meant to scan so, with the bold words being the stresses that Hopkins (I believe) counted, and the italicized being secondary stresses:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I believe Hopkins intended his verse to be regular, and that he counted only the very strongest stresses. You can quarrel with some of my choices of primary and secondary stress: the scansion is ambiguous, and the poem could be read the other way. Hopkins wrote ambiguous scansion fairly often; but he was aware of it, and in some poems resorted to marking the intended long, stressed syllables with acute accents, and some short unstressed ones with accents grave. Not every site that reproduces Hopkins’ works reproduces the accents; and I don’t recall seeing an edition of “God’s Grandeur” so marked. But you can find accents over “Pied Beauty” and “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
If this were my poem, there are two things I’d want to do with it:
- I’d lose the word ‘now’ in line four. That would eliminate both the ambiguity in the line, and the awkwardness of so many weak and unstressed syllables that have to be read in succession; I think the remaining syllables would suffice.
- I’m not sure what I’d do with the combination of highly ambiguous scansion and enjambment in the last two lines, but I’d probably do something with it, because it’s easy to flounder over: how is that to be read? (Enjambment is letting a line break fall in the middle of a phrase; “over the bent | world” is enjambed.)
On the whole I think the poem is past brilliant. And most of the time I can easily pick up the rhythm despite the fact that some of the secondary stresses are only slightly weaker than the primary. But in those two places the ambiguity is not quickly resolved, and then my reading falters. If I notice something like that when I’m writing poetry, I always try to fix it. (Ambiguous scansion is one of the things it’s easy to miss: I know how I meant the line to read, after all.)
The alliteration in the poem is so obvious I haven’t bothered to point it out. You’ll also surely have noticed that it also rhymes. In fact, this poem has the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet: it’s ABBAABBA CDCDCD. Hopkins wasn’t the first to employ accentual poetry, alliteration, and a fixed rhyme scheme and verse form all at once: there are poems in Middle English, from the Alliterative Revival, that do the same. Some time I’ll discuss one of my favorites from that period.
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