The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

5

6

7

8

9

10

He

bangs

the

drum

and

makes

a

dread

ful

noise

Ten syllables where in this metre the accent always falls on the even-numbered beat. Notice, though, that there aren’t ten words in this example, there are only nine. That’s because ‘dreadful’ has two syllables.

Bangs, drum, makes, dread and noise are those even-numbered accented words (and syllable) here. You could show the rhythm of the line like this:

Some metrists would call ‘he’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’ and ‘-ful’ DEPRESSIONS. Other words to describe a non-stressed syllable are SLACK, SCUD and WEAK. The line has a rising rhythm, that is the point: from weak to strong, terminating in its fifth stressed beat.

The most usual way to SCAN the line, in other words to demonstrate its metric structure and show the cardiogram trace as it were, is to divide the five feet with this mark| (known as a VIRGULE, the same as the French word for ‘comma’ or ‘slash’ that you might remember from school) and use symbols to indicate the accented and the weak syllables. Here I have chosen to represent the off-beat, the depressed, unaccented syllable, and for the beat, stress or accented syllable.

There are other accepted ways of marking SCANSION: using–or u or x for an un accented beat and / for an accented one. If you were taught scansion at school or have a book on the subject you will often see one of the following:

For the most part I shall be sticking to and however, as I find they represent the ti and the tum more naturally. Besides, the other scansion marks derive from classical metre, which was concerned with vowel length rather than stress.

The Great Iamb (and other binary feet)

The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-tum, beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an IAMB.

I remember this by thinking of Popeye, whose trademark rusty croak went:I yam what I yam…Iamb, iamb, iamb

We will concentrate on this foot for the rest of this section, but you should know that there are three other feet in the same BINARY (two unit) family.

The TROCHEE is a backwards iamb, a falling rhythm, tum- ti:

The trochee obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with poky or choky.

Thus was born my Hiawatha,Thus was born the child of wonder;LONGFELLOW: The Song of Hiawatha

As a falling rhythm, a tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, it finishes on an unaccented syllable–an ‘and’ if you’re counting and clapping musically:

The SPONDEE is of equal stressed units:This also obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with the name John Dee. You may feel that it is almost impossible to give absolutely equal stress to two successive words or syllables in English and that there will always be some slight difference in weight. Many metrists (Edgar Allan Poe among them) would argue that the spondee doesn’t functionally exist in English verse. Again, we’ll think about the ramifications later, for the time being you might as well know it.