Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
How to Write a Shakespearean Sonnet
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Also on Hubpages: How to Write a Shakespearean Sonnet. Which covers sonnets, pretty much. I hadn’t intended to start posting about poetry over there — I was thinking of something more commercial — but I got a request.
Now that the blog addition requests have slacked off, I may have time to visit people’s blogs myself.
Later: I took this one down too.
How to Write a Petrarchan Sonnet
Monday, October 5th, 2009
I decided to try my hand at writing Hubpages. “How to Write a Petrarchan Sonnet” is published there. I analyzed Milton’s “On His Blindness” as an example.
Semaphore’s Poem Tides
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
I don’t mostly like free verse, but this poem’s worth attention:
New Article Up at Ezine Articles
Monday, August 31st, 2009
I wrote a new, and more precise, article about the different sorts of poetic meter:
“Understanding Poetry — Accentual-Syllabic, Syllabic, and Accentual Meters”
This article is posted at Ezinearticles.com, and you can republish it if you follow their terms of service.
The Ballad of the White Horse
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
I’m going to work on Dragon Winter tonight, rather than writing a lengthy post. In the meantime, let me take the opportunity to recommend G.K. Chesterton’s narrative poemThe Ballad of the White Horse. It’s about Alfred the Great and his struggle with the Vikings, and it rocks.
If I could write like this—!
“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,
“I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.
“The gates of heaven are fearful gates
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
Which is too good to tell.
“But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is for ever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?
“When our last bow is broken, Queen,
And our last javelin cast,
Under some sad, green evening sky,
Holding a ruined cross on high,
Under warm westland grass to lie,
Shall we come home at last?”
And a voice came human but high up,
Like a cottage climbed among
The clouds; or a serf of hut and croft
That sits by his hovel fire as oft,
But hears on his old bare roof aloft
A belfry burst in song.
“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.
“And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the Three Kings
And see the dear and dreadful things
I hid within my heart.
“The meanest man in grey fields gone
Behind the set of sun,
Heareth between star and other star,
Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,
The council, eldest of things that are,
The talk of the Three in One.
“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gold,
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.
“The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
“The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.
“The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.
“The wise men know all evil things
Under the twisted trees,
Where the perverse in pleasure pine
And men are weary of green wine
And sick of crimson seas.
“But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.
“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”
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.
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.
Accentual Poetry: Christabel
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
In a previous article, I explained how accentual-alliterative poetry works, in general, and described the most common Old English/Old Norse meter. I’ve had requests for more on this subject. Here goes.
- There are other old Norse meters. I’ll describe them and provide some links, but I’m not sure any examples of them exist in English. I’d like to find some, because I don’t think most people will get a really good feel for how they work from examples in Old Norse. Certainly I won’t: I learn meters by reading poems and having the meter stick in my brain, and I don’t read Old Norse.
- There’s the Alliterative Revival poetry, from the later medieval period.
- There are some notable examples of English poetry that’s alliterative, accentual, or both. That’s where I’m starting.
If you took English literature in high school (or its equivalent), it’s likely you read some of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative fantasy poem Christabel. I’m not sure I can call it an epic poem, though it’s certainly a story in verse, because it doesn’t have the heroic epic feel. It is, rather, a Romantic narrative; or a Gothic one.
In his preface to the poem, Coleridge writes:
I have only to add that the meter of Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four.
Coleridge was mistaken on one point: accentual meter was not a new principle, but an old one. He was not imitating the Old English meter, though: Christabel does not alliterate. Instead, Coleridge wrote it in rhyming couplets. He wasn’t the first to combine rhyme with accentual meter, either — you can see that in some of the Alliterative Revival poetry. But Christabel is the most conspicuous such poem in modern English.
As you may recall, the typical modern English meter is syllabic; that is to say, the counts of both the unstressed and stressed syllables matter. Regular syllabic iambic tetrameter works like this :
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things …
The longer lines in this poem usually consist of four iambs. An iamb is an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed one. It matters how many unstressed syllables there are.
Christabel works like this:
‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit!——Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.
As you can see, the count and arrangement of unstressed syllables in these lines varies considerably; but there are always four stresses.
All right, more accurately: I think Coleridge intended that there should always be four stresses, and I marked them that way. But in my dialect, the natural way to read the last line of the first stanza is:
How drowsily it crew!
‘How’ is such a weak stress that, against the strong stress of ‘drow’, it feels unstressed; ‘it’ is also a weak stress, but it’s promoted by following two short syllables that are unstressed. When I read this line, you could argue over whether it has two or three beats; it can’t really be said to have four. I’m not sure I’d have let myself get away with a line like this, especially so early in the poem, before the reader has had a chance to get used to the rhythm.
In the current draft of my fantasy poem Dragon Winter, in a scene that isn’t online at the time of this writing, I have a line that reads:
Geometric patterns in gemlike hues
For one of my first readers, this line clunks badly. Winter is largely in pentameter; but her dialect apparently is one with the ‘jommetry’ pronunciation of ‘geometry.’ Instead of ‘geoMETric,’ with distinct primary and secondary accents, it’s ‘geometric,’ and so the line sounds as if it only has four beats, when she reads.
Is something like this making Coleridge’s line seem to have three beats to me?
Recording Poetry, Again: I Need Practice
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
I haven’t gotten any part of William Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung conclusively recorded yet because I’m not satisfied with my reading. The equipment all works fine, but I’ve never read poetry to an audience before. I’ve been experimenting with emotion, phrasing, speed, and emphasis. The crucial thing is to make it easy for a listener to follow what’s happening in the story.
I’m having an easier time doing that with my own sample scene from Dragon Winter. While I was writing, I never permitted myself to bend normal grammatical phrasing in any way, so the thing that takes most of my technical attention in reading my own stuff is paying attention to enjambment (in poetry, enjambment is when a phrase doesn’t end where the line ends, when there isn’t a pause there; the opposite of enjambment is end-stopping).
William Morris did use some rather unusual constructions, though he didn’t do it as often as many other poets have, and I’m finding it more challenging to attempt to read them so that they’re readily intelligible. Take these lines:
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate …
That’s far enough removed from normal diction to occasion a second of puzzlement — a more serious matter in oral delivery than written, since the reader can pause with less effort.
And this:
Thus was the dwelling of Volsung, the King of the Midworld’s Mark,
As a rose in the winter season, a candle in the dark;
And as in all other matters ’twas all earthly houses’ crown,
And the least of its wall-hung shields was a battle-world’s renown,
So therein withal was a marvel and a glorious thing to see,
For amidst of its midmost hall-floor sprang up a mighty tree,
That reared its blessings roofward, and wreathed the roof-tree dear
With the glory of the summer and the garland of the year.
There’s nothing unorthodox about the structure here, but so many intertwined clauses separate the end from the beginning that it’s not the easiest thought to follow if you’re only hearing it; and, besides, this:
That reared its blessings roofward, and wreathed the roof-tree dear
is almost a tongue-twister.
I’m glad I didn’t set a schedule for putting up recordings. I want to learn to make good ones before I post them.
The other thing that probably makes reading Dragon Winter easier is that I wrote in pentameter, which is often said to be the natural meter of English. Sigurd the Volsung is in hexameter, as you can see.
Recording Sigurd the Volsung
Friday, June 5th, 2009
I’ve started to make recordings of William Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung. I’m not practiced at it, and the poem is very long, so I’m recording in small chunks. I wanted to do a weekly podcast, recording each section as I publish it, but it’s taking me too long to make the recordings. I couldn’t keep up the schedule. That may be something I attempt later.
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