Accentual verse

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Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line regardless of the number of syllables that are present. [1] It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English, as opposed to syllabic verse which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.

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Children's poetry

Accentual verse is particularly common in children's poetry; nursery rhymes and the less well-known skipping-rope rhymes are the most common form of accentual verse in the English Language. The following poem, "Baa Baa Black Sheep," has two stresses in each line but a varying number of syllables. Bold represents stressed syllables, and the number of syllables in each line is noted.

Baa, baa, black sheep, (4)
Have you any wool? (5)
Yes sir, yes sir, (4)
Three bags full; (3)
One for the mas-ter, (5)
And one for the dame, (5)
And one for the lit-tle boy (7)
Who lives down the lane. (5)

Accentual verse derives its musical qualities from its flexibility with unstressed syllables and tends to follow the natural speech patterns of English.

History

English

Accentual verse was a traditionally common prosody in Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland and Britain. [2] Accentual verse has been widespread in English poetry since its earliest recording, with Old English poetry written in a special form of accentual verse termed alliterative verse, of which Beowulf is a notable example. Anglo-Saxon poetry generally added two further basic elements to the basic four-beat accentual verse pattern: alliteration of three of the four beats, and a medial pause (caesura). [2] Anglo-Saxon poets made frequent use of epithets to achieve the desired alliteration, and had various other more complex rules and forms, though these have not been as popular in later poetry.

Accentual verse lost its dominant position in English poetry following the Norman conquest of England when French forms, with their syllabic emphasis, gained prominence. Accentual verse continued in common use in all forms of Middle English poetry until the codification of accentual-syllabic verse in Elizabethan poetry; thereafter it largely vanished from literary poetry for three hundred years while remaining popular in folk poetry. A notable example from this period is William Langland's Piers Ploughman, here retaining the alliteration:

I loked on my left half || as þe lady me taughte
And was war of a woman || worþeli ycloþed.
I looked on my left side || as the lady me taught
and was aware of a woman || worthily clothed.

A well-known source for accentual verse from the post-Elizabethan period is Mother Goose's Melody (1765). Accentual verse experienced a revival in the 19th century with the development ("discovery") of sprung rhythm by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Although Hopkins' example was not widely adopted in literary circles, accentual verse did catch on, with some poets flirting with the form, and later poets more strictly following it. A modern codification was given by Robert Bridges in 1921, in his Bridges' Prosody of Accentual Verse section of Milton's Prosody. Modern literary use includes W. H. Auden, and it has notably been advanced by Dana Gioia. [2]

Outside of children's poetry and literary poetry, accentual verse remains popular in verse composed for oral presentation, such as cowboy poetry and rap. [2]

Prosody of Accentual Verse in English

In modern literary use, in addition to the detailed codification given in Bridges' Prosody of Accentual Verse, three basic rules are followed: [2]

  1. Four stresses per line;
  2. A medial pause, with two stress on each side;
  3. Generally, three of the four stresses alliterate.[ citation needed ]

Some variations and other subtleties are found: [2]

  • Rather than a triple alliteration in a line, having two pairs of double alliterations on either side of the pause, or only having a single double alliteration, with one alliterating stress on each side of the pause.
  • Alliteration falls on the (first) stressed syllable of a word, not the first syllable of the word.
  • Minor stresses are often eliminated to reduce ambiguity.
  • While individual lines may have a regular syllabic structure, this is not kept constant over the poem – only the stress pattern is consistent – as otherwise the poem becomes accentual-syllabic verse.

Special forms

A number of stricter forms of accentual verse exist, including:

Polish

In Polish literature, as in French one, syllabic verse is dominant. Accentual verse was introduced into Polish poetry in 20th century. Jan Kasprowicz was the first poet to use accentual verse in his book Księga ubogich (The Book of the Poor) that was published in 1916. [3] He used lines with three stresses.

Rzadko na moich wargach -
Niech dziś to warga ma wyzna -
Jawi się krwią przepojony,
Najdroższy wyraz: Ojczyzna.
(Jan Kasprowicz, Rzadko na moich wargach)

The poet wrote, that the word dearest to him, "mother-country", is on his lips very rarely. [4] The scansion is:

' x x ' x ' x
x ' x ' x x ' x
' x x ' x x ' x
x ' x ' x x ' x

This pattern became the most popular. There is also six-stress pattern. This was used among others by Julian Tuwim. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.

Poetry Form of literature

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, utilising this principle.

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs. More broadly, a rhyme may also variously refer to other types of similar sounds near the ends of two or more words. Furthermore, the word rhyme has come to be sometimes used as a shorthand term for any brief poem, such as a nursery rhyme or Balliol rhyme.

In literature, alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of identical initial consonant sounds in successive or closely associated syllables within a group of words, even those spelled differently. As a method of linking words for effect, alliteration is also called head rhyme or initial rhyme. For example, "humble house", "potential power play", "picture perfect", "money matters", "rocky road", or "quick question". A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". "Alliteration" is from the Latin word littera, meaning "letter of the alphabet"; it was first coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Alliteration is used poetically in various languages around the world, including Arabic, Irish, German, Mongolian, Hungarian, American Sign Language, Somali, Finnish, Icelandic.

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable. This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.

Caesura Pause or break in poetry or music

A caesura, also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. It may be expressed by a comma (,), a tick (✓), or two lines, either slashed (//) or upright (||). In time value, this break may vary between the slightest perception of silence all the way up to a full pause.

Alliterative verse Form of verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.

Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.

Scansion, or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. In classical poetry, these patterns are quantitative based on the different lengths of each syllable. In English poetry, they are based on the different levels of stress placed on each syllable. In both cases, the meter often has a regular foot. Over the years, many systems have been established to mark the scansion of a poem.

Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates a line of five "feet".

Milton's Prosody, with a chapter on Accentual Verse and Notes is a book by Robert Bridges. It was first published by Oxford University Press in 1889, and a final revised edition was published in 1921.

Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical foot, or a specific pattern of metrical feet, is used throughout the entire poem; thus one can speak about a poem being in, for example, iambic pentameter. Poets naturally vary the rhythm of their lines, using devices such as inversion, elision, masculine and feminine endings, the caesura, using secondary stress, the addition of extra-metrical syllables, or the omission of syllables, the substitution of one foot for another.

On Translating <i>Beowulf</i> Essay on Old English poetry and metre by J. R. R. Tolkien

"On Translating Beowulf" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the difficulties faced by anyone attempting to translate the Old English heroic-elegiac poem Beowulf into modern English. It was first published in 1940 as a preface contributed by Tolkien to a translation of Old English poetry; it was first published as an essay under its current name in the 1983 collection The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays.

This is a glossary of poetry.

The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by literary historians to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional verse form of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem prior to the Revival was Layamon's Brut, which dates from around 1190.

Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is Beowulf, but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition. The most salient feature of Old English poetry is its heavy use of alliteration.

Ferskeytt is an Icelandic stanzaic poetic form. It is a kind of quatrain, and probably first attested in fourteenth-century rímur such as Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar. It remains one of the dominant metrical forms in Icelandic versifying to this day.

Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. Poems are created out of poetic devices composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essential tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.

Irish syllabic poetry, also known in its later form as Dán díreach (1200-1600), is the name given to complex syllabic poetry in the Irish language as written by monastic poets from the eighth century on, and later by professional poets in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.

References

  1. ↑ Cuddon, John Anthony (1998). A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory . Wiley. p.  7. ISBN   9780631202714.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Accentual verse", Dana Gioia
  3. ↑ Lucylla Pszczołowska, Wiersz polski. Zarys historyczny, Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, Wrocław 1997, p. 283.
  4. ↑ Monica M. Gardner, Jan Kasprowicz.
  5. ↑ Wiktor Jarosław Darasz, Mały przewodnik po wierszu polskim, Kraków 2003, p. 108, 116.
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