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On Meter in General and on Robert Frost's Loose Iambics in Particular 135

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On Meter in General and on Robert Frost's Loose Iambics in Particular 135 .1 ON METER,IN GENERAL AND ON ROBERT FROST'S LOOSE IAMBICS IN PARTICULAR 13 that their lines share is typographic: the lines are not rightjustified, and that is what distinguishes free verse from prose. On Meter in General and While metrical verse also fails to be rightjustified, the lines that make up on Robert Frost's Loose Iambics in Particular metrical verse are subject to measurement just as surely as if they were made of cloth, and both poet and reader had a yardstick. The units in terms of which lines are measured are, of course, not yards and inches, but syllables Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser and feet, where feet-as we detail below-are syllable sequences subject to special conditions. 1 The Line in Poetry 2 Syllable-Counting Meters Virtually every society we know has poetry, and every poetry that we know kinds of meters are those that measure the lines in terms of their about is composed of lines. It is this that distinguishes poetry from all other The simplest counts so many syllables to a line. Such meters occur in the forms of literary art. There is, of course, much more to poetry than the syllables : one languages all over the world. Much of the poetic canon in Italian, formal organization of the running text into lines and into couplets and stanzas poetry of and French is written in syllable-counting meters (see Halle and with or without rime. Indeed, much of our finest poetry has neither couplets, Spanish of the poetry of the Hebrew bible (see Halle stanzas or rime. But one immutable fact remains: all poetry Keyser 1980), and so is much everywhere is poetry (Halle made up oflines. 1997). So, too, are the tanka and haiku forms of Japanese At first sight this seems a rather trivial, superficial distinction rightly 1970). how such meters work, we recall that metrical traditions lampooned by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham when he wrote that Before illustrating they count syllables . In some traditions, e.g., English, every poetry was nothing but prose unjustified at the right margin. Bentham's differ as to how as one metrical unit. In others, e.g., Japanese (see below in remark was not meant to be taken seriously because it glossed over the syllable counts (1) and (2)), syllables with short vowels count as one metrical unit, but. essential difference between prose and the poetry known to Bentham. In the syllables with long vowels count as two metrical units. There are, moreover, metrical poetry familiar to Bentham and his readers the lines were subject to syllables following the last accent in the line do not count, strict rules that determined in each case where a line must end and a new line traditions where other systems a syllable ending in a vowel counts only if begin. Much later when free verse became the standard for poetry in French, whereas in still followed by a consonant-initial syllable, etc. Line length is therefore mea- English, and elsewhere, the joke turned serious since in free verse there are no metrical units rather than syllables, and we shall take formal principles determining what a line is, yet the line remains. As Ezra Pound sured in terms of distinction below by representing each metrical unit by an wrote in his 81 st canto, his aim was "to break the pentameter, that was the first account of this Thus, in (1) and (2) below syllables with a long vowel, transcribed heave," and he succeeded in this perhaps beyond his wildest dreams. Pound, asterisk. text by double vowels, are assigned two asterisks, while all other Eliot, and the majority of English poets that followed them have broken not in the receive only one asterisk. only the pentameter, but all meter.' As a result the only common property syllables We are grateful to John Halle, Yuki Kuroda, Leo Marx, Hugh McLean, Sidney Monas, Wayne O'Neil and Helen Vendler for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper. I For a discussion of the breakup ofmetrical verse in the 20th century, see Steele 1990. 130 Linguistics : In Search ofthe Human Mind ® 1999 by Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser 134 ON METER IN GENERAL AND ON ROBERT FROST'S LOOSE IAMBICS IN PARTICULAR 135 reading metrical verse. We built a ship up on the stairs * * * * * * * * 3 What is a Foot? All made ofthe back-bedroom chairs, The most elementary part of the metrical computation was already introduced And filled it full of sofa pillows in (1) and (2). It consisted in specifying the metrical units that are counted in determining the lines of the Japanese haiku and tanks meters. We observed To go a-sailing on the billows. that for these meters we count a syllable with a long vowel as two units and one with a short vowel as one unit, and we reflected this fact formally by (1) and (2), in English meters every syllable representing long syllables with two asterisks and short syllables with a single Unlike the Japanese meters of for measuring the length of lines. There is therefore in (3) asterisk. As noted above the machinery employed in this (syllable-counting) counts as one unit for each syllable. The four lines in (3) are all iambic tetrameter; verse is of a rudimentary kind. All that it requires is knowing whether for one asterisk yet the number of syllables in the lines varies: the first two lines have eight purposes of the meter a given syllable counts as one or two or is not counted at irregularity disappears once all. Once this has been determined line length is measured as in (1) and (2). syllables each, while the last two have nine. This in terms of feet. We turn therefore to foot construc- Somewhat more complex machinery is involved in meters where line length we measure line length is measured in feet rather than syllables. Foot-counting meters are encoun- tion. for foot construction were discovered by Idsardi tered in a wide variety of poetic traditions beginning with Homer's Iliad and The devices that are used accentual systems of different languages. Odyssey. Included here are the meters of classical Greek and Latin, the Old 1992 in the course of his study of two boundary markers. One groups into feet the Norse epics, Russian poetry from the eighteenth century to the present, The basic devices are right the other marker foots the elements on its left. German poetry from Hans Sachs to Rilke, and English poetry from Chaucer to metrical elements on its ; of a right Frost. Metrical units that are not to the right of a left boundary or to the left . Such unfooted units play an important role in Footed verse differs from pure syllabic verse in that its lines are measured boundary, remain unfooted first examples are found at the ends of the third and not directly in terms of syllables-or more accurately, of metrical units-but different meters . The rather in terms of sequences of such units, and these sequences are called feet. fourth lines of (4) below. parentheses to represent the two boundaries: a left parenthesis Basically there are only two kinds of feet: binary and ternary. The traditional Below we use its right, a right parenthesis ")" foots the elements on names of the binary feet are iamb and trochee, and those of the ternary feet: "(" foots the elements on rules inserting parentheses. For iambic feet we anapest and dactyl. The difference between the two is the location of the its left. Feet are the result of right parenthesis beginning at the left edge ofthe line most prominent element in the foot, regardless of whether it is made up of two have a rule that inserts a skipping two syllables after every insertion. As elements (binary) or three elements (ternary) . The prominent element is and proceeding rightwards results in the insertion of a parenthesis after every even- called the head of the foot and it is always located at an edge. Iambs and shown in (4), this numbered syllable. Crucially, in the last two lines of the stanza, the proce- anapests are right-headed (the prominent element is at the right edge of the unfooted. foot). Trochees and dactyls are left-headed . Thus, an iambic pentameter dure causes the ninth syllable to remain line is made up of five (binary) iambs, whereas a dactylic hexameter is com- posed ofsix (ternary) dactyls. Consider the opening lines of Robert Louis Stevenson's A goodplay in (3). 132 ON METER MGENERAL AND ON ROBERT FROST'S LOOSE IAMBICS IN PARTICULAR 133 (1) Tanka into syllables . And what is true of determining syllables is-not surprisingly haru tateba when spring comes -also true ofmore complex linguistic functions such as identifying words in a 5 string of speech or of extracting the meaning of such a string: all of these kiyuru koori no the ice melts away things are readily done innumerable times each day by ordinary humans, but, 7 as of this writing, this task is far from fully understood. nokori naku without trace The work of the last half century in linguistics has established that much of s t * s 5 the machinery required for the computation of all aspects of language-- kimi ga kokoro mo your heart syntax, morphology and phonology including the computation of syllables and 7 metrical units-is innate, part of the genetic endowment that makes us ware ni takenamu melts into me human.3 As human beings we are equipped at birth to learn the computations 7 involved in producing the words and sentences in our native tongue during the (Kokinshuu) first years of life and are then able to perform these enormously complex (2) Haiku computations unconsciously and with the greatest ease.
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