Poetry Intro 2:
Iambic Pentameter and Line Breaks.
Ulysses: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Take a look at the above excerpt from Ulysses.
Hear the cranky (to say the least) and aging king Ulysses, ranting––perhaps even stamping his feet as he emphasizes the last word of each line––rising to a furious screech with the final ME!!!
In fact we don’t just hear Ulysses, he’s in the room with us, spitting and fuming.
First try to read the excerpt emphasizing the meter, which is iambic pentameter:
In Iambic pentameter each line is ten syllables long, like this:
It lit—tle pro—fits that—an id—le king,
By this—still hearth—among—these bar—ren crags,
Match’d with—an ag—ed wife—I mete—and dole
Une—qual laws—unto—a sav—age race,
That hoard—and sleep—and feed—and know—not me.
The ten syllables are grouped into five pairs (called iambs), like this:
1 2—3 4—5 6—7 8—9 10
The emphasis is placed on the even (2,4,6,8,10) syllables, like this:
1 2—3 4—5 6—7 8—9 10
Finally, the first Syllable of each line is also given a little extra stress, like this:
1 2—3 4—5 6—7 8—9 10
Hence:
It lit—tle pro—fits that—an id—le king,
or
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18).
or
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
(Elizabeth Barret Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese #43).
When we recite iambic pentameter we don’t want to emphasize the meter per se, especially as it cuts right through the middle of some of the words, such as ‘lit—tle’.
We don’t want any any device that interferes with the meaning.
When a poet uses iambic pentameter it’s intended only as a pattern of composition, and perhaps as a mnemonic.
Here is Sonnet 43 in full:
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806 – 1861.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Line Breaks:
Let’s look at this poem, INTRODUCTION TO POETRY by Billy Collins.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
What if we read this poem simply as prose?
How does it change the meaning?
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
What do we lose? We lose the emphasis on certain words, particularly the last word in each of the original lines:
poem….hive…waterski…race…means…
The ideas become flattened out, and we lose the absurdity of the original which is perhaps the whole point.
Line breaks without any punctuation have been described as a ‘half comma,’ a short pause, not quite long enough to take a breath. This pause gives slight emphasis to the word that precedes it.
If we had Billy Collins in the room with us he could have read the poem putting all the accents and stresses in the right place, and emphasizing words such as ‘waterski’ and ‘rope.’
But we do not have him here, so the line breaks give us that subtle emphasis that the poem requires.
So, when we read aloud, give a little emphasis to the final word of each line, but be aware that there are three levels of emphasis.
1: Line break with no punctuation.
2: Line break with a comma.
3: Line break with a period.
A Caesura is a pause within a line, as in:
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
There is a caesura between ‘chair’ and ‘with.’
An end-stop is a final word is given the greatest possible stress, such as the word ‘means’ in this excerpt.
Here’s another Billy Collins. Read it aloud and see how the line breaks help give the poem a pattern of stresses and accents.
BOOKS
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.
Exercise: Line breaks:
Write a poem of at least 14 lines (or 120 words––the length of a sonnet), but don’t write it actually as a sonnet because I want you to play with the line breaks.
1: Write it first as prose.
2: Add the line breaks to give it the shape of a poem.
3: Now change the line breaks, and see what happens.
4: Finally change the line breaks a third time.
5: End result: type up and print out the three different drafts of the poem, and bring them to the next class.
Ed Asher Briant 