The Rhythms of English Poetry (English Language Series) by Derek Attridge

Author:Derek Attridge [Attridge, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317869498
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

The first tremor in the rhythm occurs with the feminine ending of the first line, creating a double offbeat over the line juncture. The effect is then repeated much more disturbingly within the third line, where the syntactic pause in the double offbeat increases its rhythmic disruptiveness and momentarily suspends the rhythm; this gives the repeated ‘aweary’ an emotionally charged emphasis, as the movement of the line drags against the underlying rhythm, to fall back into the heavy, inescapable alternation of the final statement. One only has to substitute monosyllables for ‘dreary’ and the second ‘aweary’ – say ‘bad’ and ‘sad’ – to realise how much expressive force the refrain would lose if it maintained the strict syllabic form of the stanza.

It may be thought that verse which exerts control over the syllable count by means of the pairing conditions is more distant from the movement of speech than verse based entirely on stress-rhythms, but this is not so; in being less dominated by the stress-timed rhythm of the underlying beats, syllabically strict verse can be more subtle in its reflection of speech, as the vivid imitation of spoken language in accentual-syllabic verse by writers like Shakespeare and Browning testifies. Whereas strong-stress verse observes only the stress principle of English rhythm, syllabics only the syllabic principle, and free verse, while using both stress and syllabic rhythms, turns its back on elementary rhythmic forms, accentual-syllabic verse exploits to the full all three of these rhythmic resources.

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