English Iambic Verse: The Syllable

Abstract

Syllable length plays an important if subtle role in the sound of English iambs. In 1909, Robert Bridges, who cared deeply about such matters, complained: Indifference is the strangest phenomenon in English verse. Our language contains as long as can be, and others short as can be, and yet the two extremes are very commonly treated as rhythmically equivalent. A sort of of stress is set up, and MISPRONUNCIATION IS RELIED ON overcome any 'false quantities.' ... There is little doubt [a] Prosody [would] pay great attention the quantitative value of syllables (Letter 67). Bridges was thinking of the lyric poems of Swinburne, whose inescapable beat certainly imposed a rhythmical patter on the words. But this quantity also affected iambic pentameter. An accented syllable may be short, an unaccented syllable long, and it doesn't matter, so long as the beat is strong enough suppress these differences. Bridges himself spent years pursuing a perfected prosody based on syllable duration, producing some two thousand lines of quantitative hexameter verse before he abandoned as a basis for English poetry. If the attempt failed, it is because, as Charles 0. Hartman has said, quantities are not sufficiently defined in English provide the basis for a meter (34). The differences between longer and shorter are simply too slight. Even so, poets with good ears (like Bridges) are keenly aware of syllable length. Here are some iambic lines by Keats and Tennyson. In them, receive a metrical stress are almost always long. (Throughout this paper, / and x indicate accented and unaccented syllables, while--and [??] indicate long and short ones.) (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Keats arid Tennyson pay attention how their long and short are distributed. Stressed are generally long, and when a stressed syllable is short, the poet compensates for the loss of duration in the stressed position by lengthening elsewhere maintain rhythmic consistency. For example, the short stressed syllable may be followed by a long unstressed one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Here the stressed syllable puck-, is short, and the unstressed sequence which follows it, -ered f-, is a long one--including three consoriatits--to make up for its shortness. Similarly, in [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Or the short stressed syllable may be followed by a pause: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the last example, the normal word order, pipe ditties (transitive verb--object.) is interrupted by the prepositional phrase to the spirit; the pause necessitated by this slightly awkward syntax is reinforced by the t:d juncture. Shod stressed are most common in the fifth position, where the line, break acts as a pause: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The comparative indifference u) syllabic at the end of the line has its analogue in the classical hexameter, the last syllable of winch can be either long or short. Brevity in a stressed syllable may also be redressed by adding an extra syllable after the stress. The result is analogous the resolved iamb of Greek and Latin, in which a long syllable is replaced by two short ones. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Or consider the following sequence: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Eleven of the fifteen stressed are long, and anapestic feel (or so-called elisions) occur immediately after three of the four are defective, i.e., short. In the fourth instance, the slowdown after the short stressed that is delayed by an intervening foot (Ely-), but makes an appearance nonetheless: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The extra syllable can even precede the stress. …