Earl Gray

Earl Gray
"You can argue with me but, in the end, you'll have to face that fact that you're arguing with a squirrel." - Earl Gray

Monday, January 16, 2012

Blank Verse


Let's take a break from our usual banter to take a look at some technical questions. If you find such discussions too dull for the blogosphere please don't hesitate to say so. We'll start with this one: How is a listener able to discern blank verse from an unmetered string of iambs (and substitutes)? Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" has whole paragraphs of the latter:

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun -- slow dived from noon -- goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear?"


How does the ear distinguish this iambic prose from, say, Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"? How does it discern that Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is free verse...

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.


...and not enjambed iambic pentameter (i.e. with a lame foot after the semicolon)?

The apparition of these faces in
the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough.


Let me deconstruct the question for clarity:

  • A reader can look at the page, see the boxy text, and recognize that the lines all have approximately the same number of syllables. VoilĂ ! Blank verse!

  • Rhymes would go a long way toward defining the meter.

  • Detecting the rhythmic feet is easy enough but how does the ear, not known for its counting ability, notice their quantification into meter?

  • Note that, while blank verse itself is rare enough these days, heterometrical blank verse is virtually non-existent. Even an experienced ear--one that can discern the four meters in "Prufrock" thanks largely to the rhyming--would have difficulty detecting different meters within blank verse.

The short answer is that something happens at the end of each line.


"Beowulf" was written as one long string of text, metered accentually. For convenience, we'll confine our discussion to accentual-syllabic verse. Let's examine some strategies, listing them in rough descending order of frequency, for forming feet into meter without using rhyme. To demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of these techniques--to say nothing of the genius of the Bard--I'll draw all of my examples from Mercutio's speech in "Romeo and Juliet", Act I, scene IV.

1. Poem length. It takes blank verse more time to establish and confirm its meter than rhyming verse requires. Not surprisingly, almost all blank verse is sonnet length or longer.

2. Rhythmic attenuation. Lines "find the cadence", the poet front-loading most of the noisy substitutions, especially inversions (i.e. trochees, in this case). Acephaly and, to a lesser extent, anacrusis are more common than catalexis or hypercatalexis (which is rarely more than a shwa-based semi-syllable in blank verse).

Drums in | his ear, | at which | he starts | and wakes,

The trochaic inversion is followed by four perfect iambs.

3. Endstopping, partial and full. Completed phrases and/or punctuation end each line. All other things being equal, blank verse tends to exhibit slightly less enjambment than rhyming verse. In this excerpt we see every line ending in punctuation: colon, semicolon, period or comma.

Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;


4. Breath pauses. Poets create enough--ten, generally--distinct, unpunctuated syllables to force a breather at the end of the line.

And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two

If "being" and "prayer" were not compressed this line would be twelve syllables long. Meanwhile, the sibilance and long vowels contribute to the actor's need to come up for air after this unbroken line.

5. Echoes other than rhyme. Sonic devices (e.g. assonance, consonance, alliteration or, to cheat a little, pararhymes) end the lines.

Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plaits the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,


The assonance of "blades" and "wakes", "Mab" and "backs", "bear" and "hairs", along with the alliteration of "bodes", "backs" and "bear", demonstrate how the repetition of sounds announces the ends of lines, albeit less conspicuously than rhymes would.

6. Irregularities. Enjambments pose a challenge that can sometimes be handled with either sonic surfeits or metrical irregularities at the start of the subsequent line.

And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a’ lies asleep,


The trochaic bump, "tickling", and the tongue-twisting overalliteration of "tithe-pig's tail tickling" combine with the lack of punctuation (see #4, "Breathe pauses", above) to force a tiny lacuna after "tail".

7. Classical diaeresis. This, the rarest and most subtle of these techniques, involves using cadential words (e.g. iambic words in an iambic poem) at line or stanza breaks. Here we see that "asleep" and "anon" are the only iambic words in the whole section. They come with a sense of finality, even though neither ends a sentence.

Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two




"But virtually no one writes blank verse anymore," one could say, "so why is any of this important?"

Verse is making a comeback. Granted, it is almost exclusively rhymed verse but look at the nature of those rhymes. As modern metrists move toward more and more imperfect rhymes the importance of these other meter-markers rises in lockstep. Regardless of circumstance, they identify the poet as a master of the craft.


6 comments:

  1. I enjoyed the technical discussion because I have been writing an epic poem in blank verse, and subconsciously or consciously have been following all these rules, as well as others I generated for myself. I am writing biographical tales in blank verse about the lives and ideas of philosophers and scientists. I call it Scientia Hermetis, or Hermead of Surazeus.

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  2. Thanks for taking the time to respond, Astarius. I'd be curious to hear about some of the rules you've generated yourself.

    Earl

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  3. Hi Earl,

    I decided to write narrative tales in blank verse about philosophers and scientists to elevate them as heroes instead of warriors and kings.

    1. My poem is currently 77,000 lines of blank verse in 25 episodes, each around 1,500 to 7,000 lines each tale.

    2. I do a lot of attenuation, so while many lines are iambic, many lines are not. Long Greek names that have five syllables like Aristoteles, I treat as three syllables.

    3. I often use endstopping. Unlike Shakespeare and Milton, I never end sentences halfway through a line, just to keep lines elegant.

    4. I use lots of enjambment where it sounds good, but I don't enjamb between adjective and noun, and never leave words like a or the or prepositions hanging at the end of a line. I keep grammatical fragments together on lines.

    5. I do not consciously use rhyme or sonic devices, but they often appear on their own.

    6. I often use irregular meters to vary the cadence, so the lines sound natural rather than sing-songy of strict iambic.

    7. I use diaeresis in that I allow for words written with three syllables to be pronounced with two instead, like natural would be two syllables, pronounced as nat-ral, but I never use the apostrophe.

    I use feminine endings so often the tenth syllable is accented, and sometimes I use a looser and have 12 or more syllables because I would rather write a solid line rather than twist things to get exactly 10 syllables.

    Unlike most narrative verb tense, I use present tense throughout the entire story because I want the reader to feel like they are watching the events live, like in person or in a movie.

    I never use the word "the" because I can almost always replace it with an adjective and still make it sound natural.

    I post numerous short fragments on the book page I created recently because I published the first 15,000 lines in volume 1.
    http://facebook.com/Hermead

    Volume 1 is for sale here
    http://tinyurl.com/Hermead1

    I also posted 5,000 lines free which includes part of the invocation, several philosophical speeches, and the complete tale of Platon at about 3,700 lines.

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  4. Since I replied a year ago, I have written a total of 107,000 lines in Hermead my epic so far. I have written about all the major philosophers from Thales to Lucretius. Also, I have since published volume 2.

    Hermead Vol 1 - 15,000 lines - Hermes, Prometheus, Kadmos, Asklepios, and Hesiodos
    http://tinyurl.com/Hermead01

    Hermead Vol 2 - 16,000 lines - Thales, Anaximandros, and Pythagoras
    http://tinyurl.com/Hermead02

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  5. The Hermead is now at 124,000 lines of blank verse. I have published 4 out of 7 volumes. A complete list of editions can be seen here:
    http://tinyurl.com/HermeadEditions

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the update, Surazeus. Good luck with it!

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Your comments and questions are welcome.