Often stopped and gazed imploringAt the trembling Star of Evening,At the tender Star of Woman;And they heard him murmur softly
Now look at the following two four-stress lines, which reiterate the point I made earlier about question and answer: the obvious but crucial difference in the way each foot as it were distributes its weight.Trochees end their lines in weaknessIambic lines resolve with strength
But as we know, iambic lines don’t have to end with a stressed syllable: you can add an extra weak syllable (hypermetric addition). Similarly, trochaic lines can have their weak ending dropped (catalectic subtraction). In both cases you’re either adding or subtracting a weak syllable: the number of stresses stays the same.Tyger, tyger burning brightIn the forests of the night
Blake’s famous opening lines drop the natural weak ending of the fourth trochees, giving a seven syllable count and a strong resolution.Dum-di, dum-di, dum-di dum
orTrochee, trochee, trochee troke
The full trochaic line ‘Tiger, tiger burning brightly’ would be rather fatuous, don’t we feel? The conclusiveness of a strong ending frames the image so much more pleasingly. Here is the opening to Keats’s poem ‘Fancy’:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home:At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Both lines of the first couplet (a couplet is a pair of rhyming lines) have their final weak endings docked. The second couplet is of four full trochees. Why?
Well, at the risk of taking us back to English classes, it is worth considering this, for the sake, if not of appreciation, then at least of one’s own poetry. The strong endings of the opening give a sense of the epigrammatic and purposeful: they offer a firm opening statement:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home:
The weak endings of ‘melteth’ and ‘pelteth’ (after all, in his time Keats could perfectly well have said ‘melts’ and ‘pelts’) echo the meaning of the image by melting and popping to their end rather than banging to a solid conclusion. Sweet Pleasure’s evanescence is evoked by the evanescence of the metre. At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Did he consciously set out to do this and for that reason? Well, I think someone with a sensitive ear for the rhythms and cadences of verse wouldn’t need to be taught something like that. To anybody with the slightest instinct such use in metre would come as naturally as finding the right musical phrase for the right emotion comes to a composer. It is true, however, that Keats from an early age completely soaked himself in poetry and (despite being labelled a ‘Cockney poet’ by literary snobs of the time) experimented all his life with poetic form and constantly wrote about prosody and chewed over its nuances passionately with his friends and fellow poets. A mixture of absorption in poetry, obsession with technique and, of course, natural talent culminates in what you might call ‘poetic taste’–a feel for precisely which techniques to reach for.
Incidentally, for some reason Keats’s ‘Fancy’ was one of my favourite poems when I was a mooncalf teenager. Don’t ask me why: it is after all a slight work compared to ‘Endymion’, ‘Lamia’ and the great Odes.
MIXED FEET
Let us consider the whole issue of mixing feet within a poem. The end of writing poetry is not to write ‘perfect’ metre with every line going da-dum or dum- da into the distance, it is to use the metre you’ve chosen to reflect the meaning, mood and emotional colour of your words and images. We’ve already seen how subtle variations such as pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions stand as perfectly acceptable ways of bringing iambic pentameter to life. What about mixing up whole lines of iambic and trochaic metre in the same verse?He bangs the drums and makes a noiseScaring girls and waking boys
Nothing necessarily wrong with that either. Don’t get hung up on writing perfectly symmetrical parades of consistent rhythm. Utterance, sung or spoken, underlies poetry. Human utterance, like its heartbeat and its breathing, quickens, pauses and breaks its patterns according to states of relaxation, excitement, passion, fear and all manner of moods and feelings: this is precisely why I took so long over caesura and enjambment earlier. No one could say that the above two lines are wrong, it is surprisingly rare, however, to find two metres mixed in this fashion (in ‘literary’ verse, as opposed to popular ballad and song lyrics, at least) and you would want to alternate trochaic and iambic lines for a good reason: the ‘ear’ of the reader would note (however subconsciously) the variation and expect something from it. Perhaps in the above example the alternating trochaic lines could form a kind of chorus or explanatory aside:He bangs the drums and makes a noise(Scaring girls and waking boys) He makes a row till dawn unfurls(Waking boys and scaring girls) I never knew a greater pest(Even squirrels need a rest)He drives his wretched family wild(Spare the rod and spoil the child)
So long as you are in control of the metre, using its swing and balance to fit the mood, motion or story of your poem there is no reason not to use a variety of beats within the same piece. I would only repeat this observation: well-made poems do not mix up their metric scheme carelessly. Have you ever seen a parish magazine or some other flyer, newsletter, brochure or poster where the designer has got too excited about the number of fonts available on his computer and created a great crashing mess of different typefaces and sizes? Musical pieces often go into double time or modulate up or down for effect, but generally speaking such techniques are crass and ugly unless there is a good purpose behind it all. Most of the paintings we admire use a surprisingly small palette of colours. A profusion of herbs in a dish can cancel out each flavour or drown the main ingredients. You get the idea.
Having said all that, let’s look at the whole first stanza of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.Tyger, tyger, burning brightIn the forests of the nightWhat immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?
