Beyond "Loose Lamb": The Form and Themes of the English "Dolnik"

Abstract

In this paper I present and analyze a verse meter transitional between syllabotonic and purely accentual. Russian scholars, who were first to notice and study this meter, have called it dolnik, and I am using this term here. I analyze English and German dolnik poetry, comparing it to its Russian counterpart. Western metrists have overlooked this form, confusing it with neighboring metrical types, yet dolnik, or strict stress-meter, warrants investigation as a verse form in its own right. In late Middle Ages, following influence of French syllabic verse and Medieval Latin hymns on accentual Germanic prosody, a verse form evolved in which a consistent number of syllables between adjacent stresses was not required, yet complete freedom was not allowed: number of unstressed syllables was typically restricted to one or two. After having virtually disappeared from Germanic literary poetry, dolnik was revived during late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when English and German literature was recalling its past. The German and particularly English literary dolnik was based on most popular binary meter of epoch -the iamb. I focus on dolnik in English texts from Southey to Frost and in German texts by Heine and Benn. I compare these to Russian literary dolnik, which has no predecessor. It came into existence in twentieth century and evolved from ternary meters. Establishing and distinguishing dolnik from adjacent verse forms, I show that different metrical boundaries have been set up by Russian, German, and English poets. The different origin of Germanic literary dolnik, on one hand, and its Russian counterpart, on other, has played an important role. Difference in linguistic structure, particularly length of words, is equally important. Further, I study formal differences between particular groups of poems and their thematic and stylistic preferences: different Poetics Today 16:3 (Fall 1995). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.141 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:48:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 494 Poetics Today 16:3 verse forms gravitate to particular themes, such as love, God, the historical, or the supernatural, and when dealing with same theme, different verse forms treat it in stylistically dissimilar ways. When we read a poem, we understand not only what it tells us with words, but also what it implies by form of its meter or stanzas. Every poem written in Spenserian stanza brings to mind The Faerie Queene, together with its images and style. Every tragedy written in unrhymed iambic pentameter is perceived against background of Shakespearean tragedies, with their character types, plots, and stylistic colorings. Each verse form has accumulated many layers of associations during long period of its use by generations of poets. It is mostly these associations that make some meters seem naturally suitable for elevated and serious subjects, and other meters for light and playful motifs. To understand fully message of a poetic text, including its semantic undercurrents and implications, we must identify its metrical form and study historical background of this form, together with its thematic and stylistic preferences. Such of verse forms for particular subject matters and stylistic colorings are, of course, not rigid. They are no more than tendencies, especially with widely used, omnivorous forms. But preferences are definitely traceable. They develop historically and surround form with a kind of semantic halo (cf. Gasparov 1976, 1982; Tarlinskaja and Oganesova 1986; Tarlinskaja 1989). In English poetic tradition, for example, theme of is more frequently accompanied by iamb than by trochee. English lyrics written in trochaic tetrameter couplets rhymed aabb prefer theme of God, while abab variant prefers love theme, but not as consistently as iambic tetrameter poems with abab rhyme scheme do (Tarlinskaja and Oganesova 1986: 90). The love theme, when coupled with iambic tetrameter, usually assumes a melancholy, unhappy semantic variant; when coupled with trochee, it develops a different semantic variant: joyous, playful. The stylistic coloring of iambic poems about love is typically elevated, often with bookish and classical associations, while in trochaic poems typical stylistic coloring is lower, with folk settings and images. Here are just two typical examples of iambic and trochaic tetrameter couplets, rhymed abab, both from poetry of Thomas Moore.