Excerpted from The Body of Poetry by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2005)
When I began work on a critical study of the changing connotations of iambic pentameter in American poetry, I didn’t expect that I would devote so much attention to dactyls. In free verse from Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Eliot through Anne Sexton and Audre Lorde, I noticed the consistent presence of triple rhythms, usually falling triple rhythms. Studying these poets’ prosodic practice, I found that for each of them the triple rhythm presented an aesthetic, emotional, and ideological alternative to the iambic pentameter–the standard meter for centuries by the mid-nineteenth century.
Because I enjoyed the non-iambic passages I was analyzing, I began to experiment with non-iambic meters in my own poetry. At first I found it extraordinarily difficult to conceive of a poem of indeterminate shape in a non-iambic meter (though I had written some sapphics), much less to sustain the rhythm; the poems would transform themselves into iambic pentameter or die on the page. I spent several years in the process of training my poetic ear (which had originally been trained in free verse and then in iambs) in meters other than iambic. Recently, I was asked to produce a series of poems for use in celebrations of the seasons. The project required me to produce eight poems, conveying very different moods, for the same audience at six-week intervals. I wrote each poem in a different non-iambic meter: trochees, alternating dactylic and anapestic stanzas, dipodic meter, cretics, and so on. In writing these poems, I found myself challenged and inspired by my rhythmical raw material, and the supposedly arcane meters provided pleasure to the audience as well.
Robert Wallace, who has recently proposed that all meter in English be defined as iambic, might argue that, rather than bringing non-iambic meters into the discussion, I could just as easily refer to this series of poems as using a variety of “rhythms” overlaid on the basic iambic meter of English. The use of the single label “iambic” to include lines in other meters, however–long a common practice in the case of trochaic lines within iambic poems–may prove to erase what it assumes to include, just as the generic use of the pronoun “he” said to include females arguably erases female presence.
John Thompson establishes in The Founding of English Meter that the early history of the iambic pentameter in English was characterized by no substitution at all, clumsy substitution, and “forcing” the meter. These phrases may sound familiar to those who have read similar descriptions of the “clumsiness” of anapestic and dacytlic meters. As I discuss in The Ghost of Meter, only during the past two centuries have non-iambic meters become a barely accepted presence in English-language written poetry. Perhaps the early history of non-iambic meters in English is now developing analogously with the early history of the iambic pentameter.
Although all but a tiny portion of poetry in English has been written so far in iambic pentameter, it is important to recognize that the iambic pentameter is not a neutral or essentially “natural” meter. Its connotations are distinct and culturally defined. Each of the non-iambic meters, also, has its own character, music, and history, however subtle or intermittent. As I notice throughout The Ghost of Meter, the dactylic rhythm carries connotations of irrationality, violent or beautiful. Trochaic poems, from MacBeth’s witches to “The Tyger” to “The Raven” and even “Hiawatha,” have a history of supernatural and exotic subject matter. If it is true that, as Martin Halpern posits, the non-iambic meters are a more direct legacy of Anglo-Saxon poetic rhythms than the iambic, it will be valuable to see what kind of energy a new connection with that legacy might bring into our metrical poetry and how the connotations of non-iambic meters will play out in the imagery, the mood, and the cultural role of future poems.
Though many of our poetic ears have lost touch with the sounds of non-iambic meters–and, in many cases, even with the sounds of iambic meter–there is no reason to expect or to wish the non-iambic meters to atrophy entirely. When the the audience, reading my poems aloud, was able to predict which syllables to stress in spite of variations in the non-iambic meter, a “metrical contract,” to use John Hollander’s term, was certainly in evidence, albeit a non-iambic one. The prosodic situation is certainly more complex given a diversity of meters than it would be if all meters were called iambic, but our tools for understanding the rhythm of individual poems are also more complex, and potentially more flexible and sensitive. I use the adjective “potential” here, however, because I find our prosody still unable adequately to acknowledge substitution and modulation in non-iambic meters.
Perhaps because of their roots in the rhythms of the oral verse tradition in English, non-iambic meters have been restricted to popular poetry for so long that their consignment there has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is no coincidence that the examples of poems I discuss in this piece are virtually all drawn from “low” poetry. The last time that non-iambic meters peered out into the world of high culture, during the late nineteenth century, the declamatory recitation style of such poets as Poe, Longfellow, and Tennyson gave them the reputation of being inherently artificial, particularly in contrast to the emerging free-verse aesthetic. Few if any poets in our own century have written non-iambic meters that are subtly modulated and meant to be read aloud with natural speech stress, according to our twentieth-century preference. That fact, however, does not necessarily mean it cannot be done.
The main source of difficulty with the non-iambic meters is the assumption that they are not “natural” to English. This view appears to have originated in the nineteenth-century reactions to dactylic verse in English. It has held strong through Yvor Winters’ conviction that the “iambic movement . . . appears to be natural to the language” (91) through most contemporary accounts. I have of course been taught, repeatedly, in the words of a poet who instructed me in graduate school, that “English falls naturally into iambics.” To my ear, this sentence has a distinct triple rhythm. I would scan it as dactyls, ending in a trochee as many dactylic lines do, with one secondary stress or “cretic” substitution in the first foot: “English falls naturally into iambics.” I find this the simplest scansion and the one that embodies the actual music of the line. I am well aware, however, that according to the most common system—whereby a line is accepted as innocent [i.e. iambic] until proven guilty [non-iambic]—the line should scan as an iambic pentameter with initial trochaic substitution and a falling ending, a reading I find jerky and decidedly “forced.”
Is iambic meter the only natural meter? Though some contemporary poets believe that we no longer speak in iambic pentameter, others enjoy citing everyday examples of the meter to prove how ubiquitous and innate it really is. One of my favorite such examples, Marilyn Hacker’s “a glass of California chardonnay,” was quoted at a recent conference. On the flight home, I began idly to wonder if the non-iambic meters could also be found easily in everyday speech. Only four or five minutes later, a flight attendant announced, “please return to your seats and make sure that your seat belts are fastened securely.” Robert Wallace writes that “the anapest is a good, and frequent, foot in English.” Perhaps, along with dactyls and trochees, it forms a “natural” rhythm as well.
Of the many questions have yet to be answered about the nature of non-iambic meters, one of the most essential is the question of their hospitality to metrical substitution. The prosodist Martin Halpern formalized in 1962 the idea, now a truism, that iambic meter is different from all the other meters because it alone can absorb substitutions with varying degrees of stress. As Timothy Steele puts it, “trochaics and triple meters . . . haven’t the suppleness and the capacity for fluid modulation that iambic measures have, nor do they tolerate the sorts of variations (e.g., inverted feet at line beginnings or after mid-line pauses) that the texture of iambic verse readily absorbs.” Steele gives as an example a line from Longfellow: “The blue heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,” and comments, “it is unlikely that we would emphasize the two definite articles . . . but that is what Longfellow wishes us to do, since he is writing in trochaic tetrameter.” This line of reasoning constitutes a tautological trap in which to catch non-iambic meters; because the meter is trochaic, we assume the pronounciation is meant to be unnatural; then we damn the trochaic meter for forcing unnatural pronounciations. According to this common conception, “substitutions” in a non-iambic meter do not substitute at all, but actually demand that we “force” the pronounciation of certain words to fit the meter. Non-iambic meters are held to be so overbearing that they can’t allow word-stresses an independent and counterpointing rhythm.
To me, the idea that non-iambic meters can’t be modulated through substitution is a prejudice analogous to the Renaissance scholar Gascoigne’s belief—described by John Thompson in The Founding of English Meter—that the iambic meter in the line, “your meaning I understand by your eye” is faulty because it forces us to stress “der” (72). To cite a well-known example, Clement Moore’s line “As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly” in The Night Before Christmas employs two expressive substitutions of the pattern unstress-stress-stress in the anapestic base. These beautiful changes can be accepted as valid metrical substitutions, not explained away as clumsy anapests. Similarly, the line “the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow” substitutes an iambic foot and a foot of the pattern stress-unstress-stress (it might be called a cretic) in the anapestic base. Isn’t the counterpoint between speech and meter in such lines just as enjoyable as the counterpoint in iambic lines that employ substitution?
The distinctions between meters add immeasurably not only to accuracy in scanning individual poems, but also to the aesthetic pleasure the ear finds in metrical substitutions. The movement of metrical counterpoint, from which the beauty of accentual-syllabic prosody–in all meters–largely emerges, depends on the existence of distinct metrical norms that can play off of each other and stretch each others’ limits, but never overtake each other completely. Metrically skillful poets play with the reader’s perception of meter, testing and pushing it but never letting it lapse entirely, as when Shakespeare follows two lines with trochaic-spondaic substitutions with a strictly iambic one, in the very nick of time: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/admit impediment. Love is not love/which alters when it alteration finds.” The power of effective substitution arises not from rhythmical variation alone but from the dangerously close presence of a conflicting meter which would, if indulged too excessively, undermine the poem’s actual meter. The tension between conflicting meters, a source of beauty and excitement, would disappear without metrical diversity.
Even the boundaries that give metrical lines their identity would disappear without distinctly different metrical categories. Metrical feet are not all equally interchangeable. Dactyls and trochees, for instance, can’t be substituted into a line of iambs (except after a caesura or line-break) without ruining the meter. That is why the trained ear finds the line “Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley,” to use a hypothetical example from Halle and Keyser’s important essay on prosody, unrecognizable as iambic pentameter. But dactyls and trochees can easily be substituted, of course, in lines of falling meter. The kinds of substitutions the ear will accept in a line depend entirely on the line’s metrical context. For this reason alone, it is necessary to preserve distinctions between meters. . . .
The long hegemony of free verse has finally cleared our ears of the stifling and artificial associations that haunted metrical verse, particularly non-iambic verse, at the beginning of our century. The field is, in a sense, clearer for metrical verse, particularly non-iambic verse, than it has been for many generations. Aspiring poets and creative writing students need to learn the full range of English prosodic possibilities. They will gain fluency and resourcefulness as writers, flexibility and sophistication as readers, from learning to hear the many different metrical patterns in English and the rhythmical variations on those patterns. My own students–mostly beginning undergraduate poets–hear anapestic, dactylic, and trochaic rhythms as different from the iambic. If I were to try to persuade them that “Evangeline”–or, for that matter, a popular triple-meter rap tune–has an iambic base, I would convince them once and for all that prosody as a discipline is either deaf or terminally arcane.
Exposing beginning poets to a spectrum of metrical options helps them to become more aware of their own inclinations toward certain rhythms, including but not limited to the iambic. While some student poets write metrical poetry most easily and happily in iambs, an equal number write it most easily and happily in dactyls and trochees. Prosodic systems which maintain that only iambs can form a metrical base for substitution deny those students who might enjoy non-iambic meters the chance to develop skill in modulating them.
My current image of English prosody is a compass, with the duple and triple, rising and falling, rhythms constituting four primary compass points: trochaic, anapestic, iambic, dactylic. Interspersed among these fall the other meters and combinations of meters, accentual-syllabic and accentual, many possible ideals in relation to which poets and readers can situate the shifting and relative rhythms of actual poems. Rather than abandoning the non-iambic directions of the metrical compass, we can allow time for further experimentation to develop and refine these less-used meters through poetry and prosodic theory. Time may prove the falling and triple rhythms in written English to be sophisticated metrical idioms in their own right, worthy counterparts to the rising duple rhythm with which we are already so familiar.
Excerpted from The Body of Poetry by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2005)