The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio

Author:Kim Addonizio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1997-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

Scansion is the term used to talk about reading poetry in this way, paying attention to the prevailing meter. Scansion is not always, however, a precise technique. How do you pronounce the word “details”? Some people say DEtails, pronouncing it as a trochee. Many newscasters choose the iamb: “Rock star pleads not guilty, deTAILS at six.” One of your authors says TEEvee for the television; the other hears it as a spondee: TEEVEE. Such regionalisms may affect your reading of a line; and some stressed syllables may sound, to your ear, more stressed than others, though there’s no system of notation for this. And, finally, here’s the real trick to meter: it’s more appropriately considered as the pattern behind the sounds you actually hear.

Confused? It is really not as complicated as it seems. Think of how boring it would be to always clump along going daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM in everything you wrote. You’d sound, pretty quickly, like a nursery rhymer and not a poet. Many nursery rhymes, in fact, are written in that strict a meter. That’s why they’re so easy to remember: strict meter, strict rhyme. But poets try for more subtle effects. You’re not out to hit your reader over the head. When meter is working well, it announces its presence clearly but quietly. It hums along steadily behind the actual sounds of the words, keeping the beat without intruding.

The best way to understand this is first to read and hear poems written in meter, and then to practice writing some yourself. Read Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets to get a feel for iambic pentameter—or just about any other poet writing in English since Chaucer’s time. Then get hold of some contemporary examples (there are some suggestions for reading at the end of this chapter), so you don’t think that you need to include a lot of “thee”s and “thou”s and “fie on’t”s in your own efforts. You don’t want to sound old-fashioned just because you’re using something from the past. Language has changed since Shakespeare, and writing in the living language means your poems will be alive, too, not mummified in dead syntax and usages.

Let’s look for a minute at how Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, so you get a feel for what we mean when we say that meter is the pattern behind the actual sounds of the words. This example is from Hamlet:

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