the lines before and didn’t know their author would I forgive them their clumsiness and ill-made infelicities? I don’t know and I don’t really care. It is a work concerned with innocence after all. And, lest we forget, this is the poem that begins with the quatrain (a quatrain is a stanza of four lines) that might usefully be considered the Poet’s Credo or Mission Statement.To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.
The metre is shot to hell in every line, but who cares. It is the real thing. I think it was worth spending this much time on those lines because this is what you will do when you write your own verse–constantly make series of judgements about your metre and what ‘rules’ you can break and with what effect.
Poetry Exercise 5
It is now time, of course, to try writing your own verse of shorter measure. Here is what I want you to do: give yourself forty-five minutes; if you haven’t got the time now, come back to the exercise later. I believe it is much simpler if you have a subject, so I have selected Television. As usual I have had a go myself. Rhyming seems natural with lines of this length, but if you’d rather not, then don’t. I remind you once again that it is the versification that matters here, not any verbal or metaphysical brilliance. This is what I would like, with my attempts included.
Two quatrains of standard, eight-syllable iambic tetrameter:
They’re always chopping bits of meat–Forensic surgeons, daytime cooks.Extracting bullets, slicing hamDetecting flavours, grilling crooks.My new TV has got no knobsIt’s sleeker than a marble bowl.I’m sure this suits designer snobs,But where’s the damned remote control?
Two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter:
Big Brother’s on the air again,Polluting my TV.Who was it said, ‘Mankind can’t bearToo much reality?26Sir Noel Coward drawled, when askedWhich programmes he thought shone:‘TV is not for watching, dear–It’s just for being on.’
Two quatrains of trochaic tetrameter: one in ‘pure trochee’ a la Hiawatha, and one with docked weak endings in the second and fourth lines, a la ‘Tyger’.
Soap stars seem to do it nightly–Slap and shag and rape each other.If I heard the plot-line rightlyDarren’s pregnant by his brother.News of bombs in Central London,Flesh and blood disintegrate.Teenage voices screaming proudly,‘Allah akbar! God is great!’
So, your turn. Relax and feel the force.
IV
Ternary Feet: we meet the anapaest and the dactyl, the molossus, the tribrach, the amphibrach and the amphimacer
Ternary Feet
Now that you are familiar with four types of two-syllable, binary (or duple as a musician might say) foot–the iamb, the trochee, the pyrrhic and the spondee–try to work out what is going on metrically in the next line.In the dark of the forest so deepI can hear all the animals creep.
Did you get the feeling that the only way to make sense of this metre is to think of the line as having feet with three elements to them, the third one bearing the beat? A kind of Titty- tum, titty-tum, titty-tum triple rhythm? A ternary foot in metric jargon, a triple measure in music-speak.
Such a titty-tum foot is called an anapaest, to rhyme with ‘am a beast’, as if the foot is a skiing champion, Anna Piste. It is a ternary version of the iamb, in that it is a rising foot, going from weak to strong, but by way of two unstressed syllables instead of the iamb’s one.
Any purely anapaestic line is either a monometer of three syllables…Unconvinced
…a dimeter of six…Unconvinced, at a loss
…a trimeter of nine…Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent
…or a tetrameter of twelve…Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent, in a fix.
And so on. Don’t be confused: that line of twelve syllables is not a hexameter, it is a tetrameter. It has four stressed syllables.
Remember: it is the number of stresses, not the number of syllables, that determines whether it is penta-or tetra-or hexa-or any other kind of - meter:
Now look at the anapaestic tetrameter above and note one other thing: the first foot is one word, the second foot is two thirds of a single word, foot number three is two and a third words and the fourth foot three whole words. Employing a metre like the anapaest doesn’t mean every foot of a line has to be composed of an anapaestic word:
That would be ridiculous, as silly as an iambic pentameter made up of ten words, as mocked by Pope–not to mention fiendishly hard. Nor would an anapaestic tetrameter have to be made up of four pure anapaestic phrases:
