Stephen Sondheim:
I like the city of San Juan
I know a boat you can get on
And for the chorus:
I like to be in America
Everything’s free in America.
You have to wrench the rhythm to make it work when speaking it, but the lines fit the music exactly as I have marked them. America, you’ll notice, has three stressed final syllables, a kind of ternary spondee, tum-tum-tum.
THE MOLOSSUS AND TRIBRACH
The tum-tum-tum has the splendid name molossus, like Colossus, and is a foot of three long syllables———or, if we were to use it in English poetry, three stressed syllables,. Molossus was a town in Epirus known for its huge mastiffs, so perhaps the name of the foot derives from the dog’s great bow-wow-wow. If a spondee, as Poe remarked, is rare in spoken English, how much rarer still is a molossus. We’ve seen one from Sondheim, and songwriting, where wrenched rhythms are permissible and even desirable, is precisely where we would most expect to find it. W. S. Gilbert found four triumphant examples for his matchless ‘To Sit in Solemn Silence’ from The Mikado.To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock,In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!
The molossus, like its smaller brother the spondee, is clearly impossible for whole lines of poetry, but in combination with a dactyl, for example, it seems to suit not just Gilbert’s and Sondheim’s lyrics as above, but also call and response chants and playful interludes, like this exchange between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.Why do you bother me? Go to hell! I am your destiny. Can’t you tell? You’re not my father. Eat my shorts.Come to the dark side. Feel the force.
As you might have guessed, that isn’t a poem, but a children’s skipping rhyme popular in the eighties. Lines three and four use a trochaic substitution for the dactyl in their second foot, but I wouldn’t recommend going on to a playground and pointing this out.
I suppose Tennyson’sBreak, break, breakAt the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
could be said to start with a molossus, followed by two anapaests and a spondee.
If a molossus is the ternary equivalent of the spondee, is there a ternary version of the pyrrhic foot too? Well, you bet your boots there is and it is called a tribrach (literally three short). A molossus you might use, but a tribrach? Unlikely. Of course, it is very possible that a line of your verse would contain three unstressed syllables in a row, as we know from pyrrhic substitution in lines of binary feet, but no one would call such examples tribrachs. I only mention it for completeness and because I care so deeply for your soul.
THE AMPHIBRACH
Another ternary, or triple, foot is the amphibrach, though it is immensely doubtful whether you’ll have cause to use this one a great deal either. Amphi in Greek means ‘on both sides’ (as in an amphitheatre) and brachys means ‘short’, so an amphibrach is short on both sides. All of which means it is a triplet consisting of two short or unstressed syllables either side of a long or stressed one: --—-or, in English verse: . ‘Romantic’ and ‘deluded’ are both amphibrachic words and believe me, you’d have to be romantic and deluded to try and write consistent amphibrachic poetry. Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.Don’t do it I beg you, self- slaughter is faster
Goethe and later German-language poets like Rilke were fond of it and it can occasionally be found (mixed with other metres) in English verse. Byron experimented with it, but the poet who seemed most taken with the metre was Matthew Prior. This is the opening line of ‘Jinny the Just’.
And this of ‘From my own Monument’:
You might think amphibrachs (with the weak ending docked) lurk in this old rhyming proverb:
But that’s just plain silly:27it is actually more like the metre of Browning’s ‘Ghent to Aix’: anapaests with the opening syllable docked.If wishes were horses then beggars would rideI sprang to the saddle and Joris and he.
Just as my amphibrachic doggerel could be called a clipped anapaestic line with a weak ending:Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.Don’t do it I beg you, self- slaughter is faster
Some metrists claim the amphibrach can be found in English poetry. You will see it and hear it in perhaps the most popular of all verse forms extant, they say. I wonder if you can tell what this form is, just by READING OUT THE RHYTHM?
Ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti- tum-tiTi-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-
