A METREMIC ANALYSIS OF THE POETRY OF YEATS
ABSTRACT
Throughout his literary career, William Butler Yeats commented often
on the subject of literary style. His comments on form and structure in
poetry, however, are usually impressionistic, rather than technical. His
comments on poetic form, therefore, require explanation based on a
systematic, technical study of the poetry. The idea that "a poem comes
right with a click like a closing box," for example, can be explained by a
close metrical analysis of Yeats's poetry.
The field of contemporary metrical analysis, however, is marked by a
sharp conflict between two major theoretical schools; that which bases its
analysis on traditional metrical theory, and that which bases its analysis
on current advances in linguistics. But these two theoretical viewpoints
are reconcilable, and in this thesis I present a method of analysis which
reconciles the two theoretical schools. This system of analysis is then
applied to several poems, in order to give empirical corollary to Yeats's
impressionistic comments.
In the conclusion, I suggest several possible applications of this
system, which is called metremic analysis, to the study of poetry in
general. These applications include a structural analysis of free verse
poetry, and a way to do statistical analysis that gives clear and
meaningful results.
Supervisor: Dr. C. Doyle
Readers: Dr. J. Tucker, Dr. B. Harris, Dr. Michael Hadley
c. Robert Ragnar Einarsson, The
Table of Contents
Table of Contents iii
Chapter I 1
Chapter II 11
Chapter III 35
Chapter IV 73
Notes 80
Bibliography 86
CHAPTER I
The great difficulty attending the study of English prosody, and the
cause of the fact that no book hitherto published can be said to
possess actual authority on the subject, arises from the other fact
that no general agreement exists, or ever has existed, on the
root-principles of the matter, or it may be added, on its terminology;
whence it results that there is no subject on which it is so difficult
to write
without being constantly misunderstood.
Saintsbury, Manual
of Prosody *1
What, then, is the upshot of the whole matter? This, for certain;
that we have as yet no established system of prosody, Much analytic
enquiry has yielded no synthesis authoritative and generally accepted.
That the synthesis will come is surely past question. When it does
come, I suspect it will be found less and not more complex than its
many predecessors. Omond, English Metrists *2
The correction of prose, because it has no fixed law, is endless, a
poem comes
right with a click like a closing box.
Yeats, Letters on
Poetry *3
Throughout his literary career, William Butler Yeats made many
comments about artistic style. More specifically, many of Yeats's remarks
were made in reference to poetic structure, rhythm, and metrical analysis.
Many of the ideas he put forth were also applied to his own style. Dorothy
correspondence, however, which suggests the way in which his comments
should be read:
Once, when we were going over a poem of mine, W. B. Y. said to me: "I
don't understand this line." I replied: "I believe that syntax is
one of my weaknesses." To this he answered: "There is nothing wrong
with your syntax; it is perfectly all right." I then said: "I must
confess that I have never understood the true meaning of syntax. I
have always believed it to be the relation of one word with another."
"Neither have I understood it," he replied. At the end of five
minutes' discussion upon this subject he said: "Go and fetch a
dictionary! I think perhaps we OUGHT to know what syntax is." *4
Indeed, at age seventy-three Yeats ought to have known what "syntax" means,
since he made and had printed many comments throughout his life about
syntax and other technical subjects. Usually, however, Yeats's comments
are impressionistic, rather than technical, and read from this point of
view they are useful and interesting.
I hope in this thesis, then, to apply a system of analysis to the
poetry of Yeats that illustrates the ways in which his work embodies his
philosophy of style, as noted from his comments on the subject. In what is
essentially a manifesto for an English counterpart of the French Symbolist
movement, "The Symbolism of Poetry," for example, Yeats makes this
penetrating impressionistic comment:
The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the
moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake,
which is the moment of creation, 3¯ by hushing us with an alluring
monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that
state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the
pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. *5
Many other comments have a clear and direct connection to the study of
Yeats's metrical practices. In the same essay, from IDEAS OF GOOD AND
EVIL, he writes
With this change of substance, this return to imagination, this
understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the
world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style,
and we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of
a man running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes
always on something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those
wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the emboidment of the
imagination. Nor would it be any longer possible for anybody to deny
the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can expound
an opinion, or describe a thing when your words are not quite well
chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the
senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of
mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. *6
But before it will be possible to follow up some of Yeats's intriguing
metaphoric suggestions, such as the simile he makes between a poem and
images of a flower or a woman, it will be necessary to establish some
method of analyzing the poetry. Metrical analysis is one way to give
empirical support to Yeats's impressionistic comments.
There has been a substantial amount of metrical theorizing in recent
years, and the study itself dates to ancient times. The conflict between
traditional and the latest contemporary analytical theory, that which may
be called "linguistic-scientific" metrical analysis, will figure in the
following Chapter, where I plan to sketch the field of metrical analysis,
with the aim of developing and 4¯ justifying an analytic technique for this
thesis. The argument of Chapter Two will lead into Chapter Three, which
will consist of close analysis of Yeats's poems, using the technique just
outlined.
Before proceeding to the conflict in contemporary metrical analysis,
however, I may state several continuing features of the subject. Among the
basic concepts of metrical studies are those of accent, paradigm, and
syntagm.
ACCENT
Accent has long been a point of contention, with metrists arguing over what
exactly constitutes it. T. S. Omond, in a standard work on the history of
metrical theory, ENGLISH METRISTS, seems to have settled the matter, at
least for the purposes of this thesis:
Any device which distinguishes a syllable from its fellows (pitch, force,
or/and duration) and makes it conspicuous is what we really mean by
"accent." *7
In scanning a poem, accented syllables are marked to distinguish them
from unaccented syllables. The ways of marking these syllables vary a
great deal, as is shown by these three examples of scansion, all dating
from within the last ten years:
a. Gall
4/4
Palace in smoky light, /
boundary stones, / ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! /
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows! *8
b. Barry, The Waste Land V
/ / / . /
341 000 00 00 0000
/ / / / /
344 00 00 00 00 0 *9 5¯
c. Powell
- | / / / | - - / ^
The sea's claw gathers them outward.
/ - / / - - /
Scilla's dogs snarl at the cliff's base,
- | / / / | ^ / - - /
The white teeth gnaw in under the crag. *10
In example (a), Sally M. Gall does what is known as a musical
scansion. *11 Musical scansion was applied to Pound's poetry because, as
Gall says,
Whatever the general merits of such notation for poetic analysis, it
is extremely helpful in the case of a poet who sought to compose "in
sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome." *12
The "musical phrase," however, is actually a group of notes which may begin
or end at any point in the bar, while Gall's scansion indicates not the
phrases, but the bars only. Musical phrasing, as an analogy for poetic
rhythm, is a concern of contemporary analysis, and examples (b) and (c) are
methods of scansion which also try to reveal the "music" of verse. As
well, Gall's scansion equates accent with quantity, or the length of time
it takes to utter a syllable. From our point of view, however, the
argument against quantity as the essential factor in scansion was ended
when Omond defined accent as ANY emphatic feature, since "accent may
shorten as well as lengthen a syllable." *13 Accent is marked in the
musical scansion by notes of relatively high or low value, from the whole
note through its divisions into quarter, eighth, or sixteenth notes.
Example (b) above is from AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROSODIC STRUCTURE 6¯ OF
SELECTED POEMS OF T. S. ELIOT, by Sister M. Martin Barry. This is an
example of linguistic-scientific analysis, based almost entirely on the
article on prosody by Craig LaDriere in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POETRY AND
POETICS. *14 In this type of scansion four levels of accent are usually
marked, and the marks are made over a lower case "o," which represents a
syllable. Of these four levels of accent, the "centroid," or primary
accent, is marked by an "o" with an "accent aigu" above it: "o/." *15 The
idea of the centroid is that a primary accent will somehow (presumably
thorough a grammatical-phonological-syntactical aspect which is missing
from LaDriere's explanation) cause secondary, tertiary, and weak accents to
coalesce around it, forming a group of syllables called the "cadence-unit."
syllable groups of this sort are, in fact, more like musical phrases than
are the bars in Gall's scansion, since they group syllables, not into rigid
bars of predetermined length, but into groups that seem to have a
rhythmical integrity of their own. In my analysis of Yeats, the idea that
certain groups of syllables are pronounced as rhythmical units will be
important. The four level accentual system, and the use of the "o,"
however, are two of the points which I will not adopt from linguistic-
scientific analysis.
In example (c), James A. Powell, also exploring music in the verse of
Pound, shows why, even though the verse has no set form or paradigm, "Few
of us fail to hear and respond to the intense rhythmic articulation which
charges many lines in Pound's work." *16 This interesting method of
scansion dates to classical poetry, when poems were written in highly
elaborate, predetermined accentual patterns. *17 Even though the
predetermined form in missing from Pound's poems, Powell claims, certain
accentual patterns are repeated, giving the 7¯ verse a sense of rhythm
without a predetermined form. The idea of accentual pattern repetition as
an element of poetic rhythm will form an important part of my analysis of
Yeats. Powell's accentual markers are from traditional analysis, and I
will be using two of them in this thesis: the slash (/) marks an accented
syllable, and the dash (-) marks an unaccented syllable. Other than these,
my metrical code includes round and square brackets, underlining, and the
asterisk, which will be introduced later.
PARADIGM
Given accented and unaccented syllables, poets and metrists have
traditionally also worked with the idea of a poetic verse form, or
paradigm. The term "paradigm" is meant to incorporate every predetermined
structural feature of the poem. The sonnet, for example, has several such
features. These include an accentual pattern, which, in each of fourteen
lines, is this: -/-/-/-/-/. Within this pattern further divisions are
made between each pair of markers, so that the line is seen to consist of
five feet: -/ -/ -/ -/ -/. It is called a pentameter line because it has
five accentual units, or feet, and an iambic line because each of these
feet has the accentual pattern of the iamb. The sonnet is thus an
accentual-syllabic form, since both the number of syllables and their
accentual pattern are taken into account in the paradigm.
As well as fourteen iambic pentameter lines, the sonnet also has
several characteristic rhyme schemes. The Shakespearian sonnet rhyme
scheme, for example, is abab cdcd efef gg. In the shakespearian sonnet, as
well as in the Petrarchan sonnet, there is also 8¯ a relationship between
the paradigmatic verse structure and the structure of the theme or argument
in the poem:
The rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a
statement of problem, situation, or incident, with a resolution in the
sestet. *18
The Shakespearian sonnet is divided, not, as the Petrarchan sonnet, between
an octet and a sestet, but between three quatrains and a rhyming couplet,
the "gg" couplet ending the rhyme scheme above. This final couplet
"usually imposes an 'epigrammatic' turn at the end." *19 It is in this
epigram that the relation between prosodic and thematic structure is
clearest: the precision of the rhyming couplet ending Shakespeare's
sonnets does indeed lend itself to an epigrammatic, a brilliant, clever, or
poignant expression of the poem's theme, as the couplet ending
Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" shows:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The rhyming iambic pentameter couplet, itself, is the basis of a verse
form called the heroic couplet, in which, although I will be exploring
Yeats's use of the form, Alexander Pope wrote a large body of work. In
Pope's heroic couplet, as in the sonnet, there is a connection between
verse structure and the structure of poetic argument. In Pope's "Essay on
Criticism," the couplet unit tends to resolve itslef into an epigrammatic
unit, quite detatchable from, although perfectly consistent with, the
surrounding lines:
Tis not a Lip or Eye we Beauty Call,
But the joint Force and full Result of All (ll. 245-246)
9¯ Pope's poems proceed from one such brilliant statement, unified and made
concise by the rhyme, to the next, with no necessary predetermined length,
or hierarchy of ordering between the couplets. In the sonnet, on the other
hand, an elaborate structure organizes several ideas into a much longer,
rhetorically composed statement. Logic and verse structure go hand in hand
as the octet and sestet, or as the three quatrains and the couplet form the
stages of an argument, or a hierarchic, hypotactic relationship between the
ideas in the poem, and, likewise, between the sections of the poem. Logic
and verse structure go hand in hand in Pope, also, but in a less elaborate
way. It will be one of my endeavours in this thesis to find out the
relation between verse structure and the structure of the thought, or
theme, in Yeats's poems.
SYNTAGM
Associated with the concept of paradigm is that of syntagm, or variations
on the paradigm. In Yeats's own terminology, the paradigm presents an
"alluring monotony" while the syntagmatic instances "hold us waking," just
as the singing of a golden bird "keeps a drowsy emperor awake," as they
produce interesting variations:
All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake on an
interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects. But . .
. it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed to,
and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns to find
a variety as incalculable as the outline of faces or in the expression of
eyes. *20
Translated into more technical terms, monotony is paradigm and variety is
syntagm.
The ideas of accent, paradigm, and syntagm are basic to metrical
10¯ analysis, but there is much theory laid on this foundation, and much of
this theory is contentious. Before going into a study of Yeats, then, it
will be necessary to look further at the field of metrical analysis, and to
reject some notions and accept others in the process of oulining my own
technique. This I propose to do in Chapter Two.
CHAPTER II
Perhaps the best place to start an appraisal of contemporary metrical
analysis is at the turn of this century, where contemporary diversity
originates. In 1906 and 1907 two histories of English prosody were
published, George Saintsbury's A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSODY FROM THE
TWELFTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT DAY *21 and T. S. Omond's ENGLISH METRISTS.
In these two metrists, the current debate between traditional and
linguistic-scientific schools of metrical analysis begins. *22 The
conflict can be seen in later books by Saintsbury and Omond, which outline
theories rather than just histories of metrics. These are Omond's STUDY OF
METRE *23 and Saintsbury's HISTORICAL MANUAL OF ENGLISH PROSODY. *24
Chapter Five of Saintsbury's manual contains forty two "Rules of the
Foot System." The foot system is accentual-syllabic metre, in which
accented and unaccented syllables, and their order of alternation are the
determining factors in scansion. Omond, in his STUDY, clearly breaks from
this traditional mode: "To base prosody on accentuation seems hopelessly
futile, so long as our word-accent is thus at the mercy of our
sentence-accent, and the latter is a thing capricious and fugitive and
chameleon-like in its changes." *25 Approaching, for example, Tennyson's
line "It little profits that an idle king," the two metrists would find
these different patterns:
-/ -/ -/ -/ -/;
- /- /- /- /- /.
In PRINCIPLES OF RHYTHM, the Reverend Richard Roe made a suggestion
which was taken up by Omond and the linguistic-scientific school, as he
stated that "no word naturally occupies more than one foot." *26 13¯ This
attention to word rather than predetermined accentual pattern is also
supported in an article by Wimsatt and Beardsley, where they note "the
interplay between the rising iambic motion of the line and the falling
trochaic character of a series of important words" *27 in Tennyson's line.
This line may be used to illustrate the difference between traditional and
linguistic-scientific metrical analysis.
In traditional analysis, the most important thing about this line is
that it is based on the paradigm of iambic pentameter. Thus, it is scanned
like this:
-/ -/ -/ -/ -/
It lit- tle pro- fits that an i- dle king
George Saintsbury, the epitome of traditionalist metrical analysis, makes
this comment: "It is, I think, a mistake to try to make foot- correspond
with word-division: the best metre is often that which divides words
most." *28 Thus, the above scansion is traditional, since the abstracted
accentual pattern is iambic and independent of the particular words. In
noting the lexical unity of the trochaic bisyllables, "little," "profits,"
and "idle," however, Wimsatt and Beardsley emphasize not the paradigm, but
something inherent in this particular fulfillment of the paradigm. Wimsatt
and Beardsley would probably scan the line like this:
- /- /- /- /- /
It little profits that an idle king,
and the similarity to Omond's scansion above is apparent.
14¯ Rule 19 of Saintsbury's "Rules of the Foot System" states that
Substitution must not take place in a batch of lines, or even (with rare
exceptions) in a single line, to such an extent that the base of the metre
can be mistaken. *29
The fact that Wimsatt and Beardsley's scansion, given above, contains
no iambs would be abhorrent to Saintsbury. Yet, this scansion is very
similar to those coming from the linguistic-scientific school of metrical
analysis. The summary of what I have said so far is that traditional and
linguistic-scientific have different emphases. Traditionalists emphasize
the versification, that is, the iambic pentameter paradigm of the poem,
while linguistic-scientific metrists, on the other hand, emphasize word
groupings which coalesce around a centroid.
Important forerunners in the field of linguistic-scientific metrics
are George L. Trager, working with Henry Lee Smith, and Roman Jackobson.
In "Rhythm-Morphology-Syntax-Rhythm," Marina Tarlinskaja states that
Jackobson, in his 1977 essay called "Yeats's Sorrow of Love' Through the
Years," "was actually the first to discover a link between rhythmical and
grammatical line patterning in English verse." *30 In the introduction to
his book, THE FOUNDING OF ENGLISH METER, on the other hand, John Thompson
emphasizes the importance of Trager and Smith's 1951 essay, "An Outline of
English Structure" to current linguistic-scientific theory. *31 However,
Roe's comment from PRINCIPLES OF RHYTHM (1832), which, when quoted in
Omond's ENGLISH METRISTS, and later adopted 15¯ as a valid principle in his
STUDY OF METRE (1920), and so was brought to the attention of anyone
studying metre in any depth, contains the germ of this conflict, and
reveals the essence of the controversy between linguistic-scientific and
traditional approaches to metrics. In stating that "no word naturally
occupies more than one foot," Roe emphasizes the lexical, and by extention
the syntactic syllable group, as opposed to the traditional foot paradigm.
I believe that both approaches have some validity, but that neither is
adequate. At the end of her essay "Rhythm-Morphology-Syntax-Rhythm,"
Tarlinskaja states that "The expressive function of word boundary await
further study." *32 In my opinion, this further study should focus upon
the relationship between word boundary, syntactic unit boundary, and the
traditional paradigm, and this is the kind of study I intend to do in this
thesis. In doing so, I shall be taking into account both the concerns of
linguistic-scientific and those of traditional metrics.
The ideas of paradigm, syntagm, and meta-syntagm may be brought into
the discussion here. Both traditionalist and linguistic-scientific
metrists use the concept of paradigm. The paradigm is set up "a priori" by
the poet, who chooses and writes ostensibly in a certain established verse
form. Then there is the idea of syntagm, or as it is termed in
traditionalist metrics, "substitution." This line from
LOST, "Say, Muse, their names then known, who first, who last" (Bk. 1, l.
376), for example, is an iambic pentameter line in which a spondaic
substitution has been made in the first position: there is a clear
replacement of 16¯ the iambic foot in the first two syllables as "Say,
Must," a spondee, takes the place of the iamb.
To a traditionalist, then, a syntagmatic line is one in which a
definite substitution has been made. Linguistic-scientific analysis,
however, goes one step further, into the realm of what may be called the
meta-syntagm, where lexical and syntactic syllable divisions are
superimposed upon the paradigm. Tennyson's line may be used to reveal all
three of these layers. It has an iambic accentual pattern, and so may be
divided into five iambs, with no syntagmatic, or substitutional
differences: -/ -/ -/ -/ -/. Traditionalist analysis stops here, since in
this line there are no substitutions; that is, the syntagm is identical to
the paradigm. In the linguistic-scientific approach the focus in shifted
to supra-segmentals, *33 and the syllabic groups they form. Thus, a
meta-syntagmatic pattern, based on the trochaic bisyllables "little,"
"profits," and "idle," is found in the line: - /- /- /- /- /. At the same
time, however, this approach tends to disregard the paradigm altogether,
analyzing all poetry, in effect, as though it were free verse, with no
overriding, regularizing verse form.
The essential distinction between linguistic-scientific and
traditionalist theories, then, is in the different emphases they place upon
the total rhythmical pattern of the poem. The traditionalist school
emphasizes the relationship between the paradigm and the syntagm, as is
shown by Saintsbury's careful delineation of forty-two rules to account for
substitutions and other syntagmatic variations. The linguistic-scientific
school, on the other hand, focusses upon the 17¯ meta-syntagm, denying the
importance of the traditional paradigm. Neither system, because of their
exclusive emphasis, therefore, is quite adequate.
One limitation of traditional metrics is its inability to deal with
extremely a-paradigmatic lines. Because it insists on the importance of
paradigm, lines of increasing variation are increasingly difficult to cope
with. Yeats is an excellent example of a poet whose "substitutions"
eventually produce lines that are syntagmatic at all points. The
traditionalist claim -- "An English versifier must so arrange words that
their chief accents shall coincide with and distinctly locate enough of the
rhythmical ictuses to enable the mind unconsciously, or at least with
slight effort, to locate the other rhythmical ictuses" *34 -- falls through
in many of Yeats's lines, where rhythmical ictuses are lost in highly
syntagmatic lines.
Paul Fussell, in POETIC METRE AND POETIC FORM, notes the metric
irregularity of many of Yeats's lines. Fussell is a traditionalist, and
tries to account for this irregularity by reference to a complex
substitution formula:
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce.
Hardly a regular line at all here, and yet the variations are
conducted with such tact that we are never permitted to forget the
pattern of the basic meter that underlies the texture. The variations
are managed not merely with a fine colloquial illusion but also with a
highly formal sense of balance: for example, against the four-stress
base, the first 18¯ line -- with its five stresses -- gives an
effect of excessive weight which may suggest imbalance; but the
balance is carefully restored in line 4, which offers now three
instead of the expected four stresses. And line 3,
-- -/ // -/
That had / a sound / fly-fish / er's wrist, /
balances its initial pyrrhic against a spondee in the third position
so that, although an illusion of flexible colloquial utterance is
transmitted, the illusion is not bought at the cost of any lessening
of formality.
"Adam's Curse" is another metrically irregular Yeats poem. Out of
thirty-eight lines, only twenty fit the iambic pentameter paradigm. By
noting meta-syntagmatic accentual patterns in the analysis, however, it is
possible to account for the rhythmical integrity of the poem.
Linguistic-scientific theory would be capable of revealing this kind of
balance and formality, except for two things; first, the system ignores the
paradigm of the poem, and the effects of its presence on the rhythm, and
second, the system is very complex and so tends to obscure accentual
patterns rather than to reveal them. Traditionally, metrists have used few
symbols. The slash (/) represents an accented syllable; the dash (-)
represents an unaccented syllable; and a vertical line is sometimes used to
mark the division between feet. In contrast, here is a list of symbols
used by Adelyn Dougherty in A STUDY OF RHYTHMIC STRUCTURE IN THE VERSE OF
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS:
I have adopted the following symbols to represent the abstracted
prosodic elements:
o = a single syllable of weak or unemphatic value
o/ = a syllable bearing primary stress
o" = a syllable vearing secondary stress in excess of
adjacent secondary stress 19¯
o\ = a syllable bearing secondary stress
o. = a syllable bearing tertiary stress
oo^ = a possible elision
The straight comma / is used to mark the break between rhythmic
groups, the caret ^ for longer pause (in this study only that which is
graphically indicated by pause-punctuation in the text) at more open
junctures, and the dotted caret ^. for a pause of indeterminate length
(that is graphically indicated.) *36
This set of markers is taken directly from LaDriere, who ignores
traditional metrical analysis entirely. Here is an extract from
Dougherty's scansion of "Adam's Curse":
We sat together at one sum- / / . \/ /
met's end 00/ 000/ 0000/ 0
That beautiful mild woman \/ . \/ .\/
your close friend 0000/ 000/ 000
And you and I, and talked / / / / .
of poetry. 00/ 00^ 00/ 0000^.
I said 'a line will take us \/ / / / /
hours maybe, 00/ 00/ 000/ 0/ 00
Yet if it does not seem a / .\/ / /
moment's thought 0/ 00000/ 000/ 0
Our stitching and unstitch- / /\ \ /
ing has been naught. 000/ 0000/ 000^.
It would be possible to circle, underline, or bracket repetitive patterns,
showing that, in spite of irregularity in terms of paradigm, there is
formality and balance in the regular repetition of meta-syntagmatic
variations, but I have reserved this for chapter Three, when this type of
scansion will have been modified.
To begin with the most obvious difference between linguistic-
scientific and traditionalist schools, the linguistic-scientific school
uses a lower case "o" to represent a syllable in the scansion. In
separating the scansion from the words in this way, things are made awkward
for the reader, but this is done because of the five 20¯ level system of
accentuation Dougherty employs: an "o" with nothing represents a "weak
stress;" since every syllable has an "accent," or is marked by a peak on a
speech contour chart, there are no unaccented syllables. LaDriere himself,
however, does not recognize the relativity of accent, that is, that a
syllable is accented or unaccented in relation to its immediate neighbors,
saying that the assignment of accent to syllables depends on where the
cadence-units are divided. *38 But if the important relationship is
between adjacent syllables, then all that is really needed is a binary
code, such as metrists have used for centuries.
The concept of a centroid and the attendant four or five level
accentual system is necessary to linguistic-scientific metrics as it
stands, because the centroid, or primary accent, is the determining factor
in cadence-unit division. Barry reveals her adherence to the notion of
centroid in the first paragraph of her ANALYSIS OF T. S. ELIOT, and at the
same time explains the concept as it relates to the cadence-unit:
Since rhythm in verse is determined by the recurring alternation
of stronger and weaker syllables and the patterns resulting from such
combinations, and since the most obvious of such patterns are those
which depend upon the tendency of unstressed or lightly stressed
syllables to unite themselves to one that is strongly stressed, the
first step in the analysis of a rhythm is the determination of such
groupings of its syllables. *39
The primary accent is the centroid, which is somehow supposed to cause less
heavily accented syllables to unite themselves into a cadence-unit. I
believe, and intend to show, however, that the division of syllables into
meta-syntagmatic accentual patterns 21¯ is better determined by things like
juncture and syntax in relation to the accentual paradigm of the poem. It
this is so, the centroid and the attendant four level accentual system
become unnecessary.
The first problem in effecting a synthesis of traditional and
linguistic-scientific metrical analysis is to deal with the different
concepts of the smallest metrical groupings, the foot versus the cadence-
unit. In her analysis of Yeats, for example, Dougherty abandons the
concept of foot, even though many of Yeats's poems in fact show a simple
pattern of feet. On the other hand, an idea like the cadence-unit may be
useful in regard to Yeats's less regular poems. Ideally, a system of
scansion should generate iambic units when dealing with an iambic poem, and
yet be able to reveal the balance and formality such as that suggested for
yeats's highly syntagmatic poems, "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" "Adam's
Curse," and others. That is to say, a system of scansion should be able to
reflect the relative complexity or simplicity of the poems it deals with,
as it responds to the poetry itself. A simple poem, therefore, should not
tax a system of scansion to its fullest, whereas a complex poem should
evoke a relatively complex response from the analysis.
The "cadence-unit," the "bar," the "variable foot," the "foot," and so
on, are similar terms, but they are not identical. They are all
realizations of a single concept that is basic to all metrical studies, and
that is, that a poem's total accentual arrangement may be divided into
smaller arranged groups. The difference between a foot and a cadence-unit
is that feet make up a specific, pre- 22¯ determined paradigm or verse
form, while cadence-units are derived from the phrasing of a line
superimposed upon the paradigm. The quality that both the foot and the
cadence-unit share, then, is that both are considered to be the smallest
distinctive unit in an accentual pattern. In the system of analysis I have
developed to deal with Yeats's poems there is also a smallest distinctive
accentual unit, but since it is, in a sense, an amalgam of the ideas of
foot and cadence-unit, I will need a new term, since either of these terms
is limited to one or another theoretical framework. Since the suffix
"-eme" is the morpheme used inlinguistics to mean'the smallest distictive
unit,' and because "metre" means 'an accentual pattern,' the term I have
chosen for the smallest unit in an accentual pattern is the "metreme."
This term, I hope, will sythesize the contending theories, as I try to
incorporate the concerns of both linguistic-scientific and traditionalist
metrical theories.
Traditional terminology may still be incorporated into metremic
analysis, however, because the accentual patterns dealt with are often
identical to accentual arrangements that are named in Greek prosody. A
choiramb, /--/, may thus be present in a poem as a metremic unit, as a
"choirambic metreme." In traditionalist English versification, we would
note a trochee, /-, followed by an iamb, -/, but metremic analysis is
likely to turn up the longer units, the diamb, -/-/, the amphibrach, -/-,
and others. Thus, in a simple poem that conforms to its iambic paradigm,
metremic analysis will be very similar to traditional analysis; it is only
at the points where traditional analysis does not adequately explain the
meter that the sophistications of metremic analysis become apparent.
23¯ At this point I would like to pause and make a brief summary
before continuing. As I hope is clear, my aim is to make a synthesis of
contemporary traditionalist and linguistic-scientific metrical theories.
There are, of course, other types of metrical analysis, and also variations
in theory within the two schools. But quantitative metres, musical
scansions, classical metres, generative metrics and other eclectic schools
are of marginal interest here. Ideas from these schools may be easily
incorporated into metremic analysis, however, when they are consistent and
useful. Now, I would like to look at some factors that metrists have
deemed important in determining their smallest metrical units, and then to
turn to a set of principles developed with these factors in mind, in order
to justify separating the marks on a page of scansion into metremes.
Ironically, cadence-units in LaDriere's scientific system seem in
practice to be determined purely on intuitive grounds. Cadence units, to
be useful entities, must reflect an intuitively felt rhythmical quality.
But LaDriere's definition of cadence does not incorporate the fact that
dividing one unit from another is left entirely to intuition. At the same
time, however, he gives no other criterion for the division:
Cadence is the pattern of successive or positional relation of
prominent ('strong' or 'emphtic') elements to less prominent ('weak'
or 'unemphatic') elements . . . . Cadence involves the two aspects of
'span' (the number of elements over which a unitary pattern a extends)
and 'direction' (the positional or successional order of the
elements." *40
The "number of elements over which a unitary pattern extends" is 24¯ not
given, so the only way to decide which unaccented syllables go with which
centroid is by intuition. Yeats himself gives a much clearer definition of
what seems to be the same thing. Here, the emphasis is on intuition, as
Yeats uses "a drop of dye" as a metaphor for a cadence-unit, and thus gives
at least some indication of the length of such a unit:
Consider:--
In the mid hour of night when the stars are weeping I fly
To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye.
the stress falling and "mid," on "weep," on "lone," on "warm,"
syllables not sufficiently isolated to systain it, compels us to speak
"mid hour" "are weeping" "lone vale" "shone warm" slowly, prolonging
the syllables; it is as though the stress suffused itself like a drop
of dye. *41
In an effort to reflect the quality of felt unity, cadence-units have
been called "rising" if the centroid falls at the end, "falling" if it
comes at the beginning, and "undulating" if it comes in the middle. *42
Such descriptive terms, however, do not really equate a cadence-unit to a
felt quality. Shakespeare's phrase from the opening of TWELFTH NIGHT, "a
dying fall," for example, is in "rising" metre. The whole idea of equating
certin metrical patterns "a priori" with certian feelings or effects is
probably futile.
Nonetheless, it is legitimite to consider the intuitively felt unity
of some syllable groups as an important feature in dividing the accentual
pattern of a poem into units. "A dying fall," then, may be neither
"rising" nor "falling," but it does seem to contain a single rhythmical
impulse. On the other hand, it may be seen, and 25¯ was seen by
Shakespeare himself, to consist of two iambs, that is, two units of a
predetermined accentual pattern. Two of the factors, then, that have been
deemed important in the determination of feet, cadence-units, and so on,
have been the predetermined verse form or paradigm, as well as feelings or
intuitions about how words group themselves rhythmically. These two
factors, among others, will be considered in the principles for the
determination of metremes.
There are four principles for the determination of metremes. They are
the principles of lexical integrity, of iambic cohesion, of syntactical
grouping, and the principle of allometric categorization. The first of
these principles, which are not set down in any hierarchical order, was
noted by Roe and later by Wimsatt and Beardsley, and it is based on the
belief that the grouping of syllables into words affects the rhythm of the
line. According to this principle the trochaic bisyllable "candles," for
example, forms part of a single metreme. This is so even if the word
occurs in an iambic poem, and is thus preceded by an unaccented syllable,
such as "the."
Adding to this the second principle, the principles of iambic cohesion
and lexical integrity together also make the phrase "the candles" into a
single metreme, because, on the one hand "the can-" is iambic, and on the
other the following "-dles" is lexically related to "can-." It may be
added that closed polymorphic relationships may weaken the principle of
lexical integrity, while open monomorphism tends to make polysyllaic words
more integral.
These two principles, further, make the entire phrase "the candles 26¯
light" into a single metreme, bound internally by the trocahaic bisyllable,
and bound externally by the fitting of the exterior syllables into the
iambic pattern of the poem. Traditionally we would have two iambs, -/ -/.
in linguistic-scientific analysis we would have an amphibrach and a
catalexis, -/- /. and in metremic analysis we incorporate the effects of
both the bisyllable and the paradigm, and we get a diamb, -/-/.
This metreme, "the candles light," also complies with the third
principle, that of syntactic grouping. What syntactic grouping itself is,
however, is vague. On the one hand, a sentence is a syntactical group, but
on the other hand, each and every morpheme also forms a syntactical unit.
Metremes usually fall somewhere between these two extremes, as things like
prepositional phrases, verb phrases, subordinate clauses, and so on,
syntactic groups that seem by intuition to be rhythmically integral, form
the outlines of metremic units. Principle three, syntactic grouping,
states that a new metreme is introduced upon a determiner, a pronoun, a
preposition, a conjunction, or a transitive verb. There is, further, a
hierarchy within this principle, so that a transitive verb incorporates its
determiner or preposition into the same metreme, and a preposition or
conjunction incorporates a following determiner into the same metreme.
The fourth principle, that there are allometres of the same metreme,
is a useful device, whereby small differences between the accentual
patterns of metremes are, under certain conditions, ignored, so that very
similar metremes are considered to be members of the 27¯ same allometric
category. One of the most important conditions in which two accentual
patterns may be considered in this way as allometres of the same metreme is
if an inner pattern common to both accentual patterns occurs repeatedly or
is in some way, in linguistic terms, foregrounded. In these lines from
William Carlos Williams' poem "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower," for example,
a strict metremic analysis reveals seven distinct metremes: they are the
iamb, i.e. "I come," the diamb, i.e. "Of asphodel," the triamb, "upon its
branching stem," the catalexis, "save," the anapest, "that it's green, "
the amphibrach, "and wooden," and the phrase "like a buttercup," whjich has
this accentual pattern: --/-/:
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem --
save that its green and wooden --
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you. *44
If each of these metremes is considered a unique pattern there is little
that may be said about the passage, except that, having seven separate
metremes, it would appear to be rhythmically chaotic. It is not, however,
rhythmically chaotic, and, using the principle of allometric
categorization, it is possible to show that there are really only two
rhythmical tendencies, which, in fact, work in opposition to one another,
creating rhythmical tension and resolution. In the principle of allometric
categorization, then, there is a clue for a metrical analysis of free verse
poetry, which, because of the lack of a grounding accentual paradigm to
which the actual poem may be related, has been done with difficulty and
little success.
28¯ These are the seven metremes, with the number of their occurrences
in the passage:
1 - save
4 -/ I come, my sweet
to sing to you
2 -/-/ of asphodel
that greeny flower
1 -/-/-/ upon its branching stem
1 --/ that it's green
1 -/- and wooden
1 --/-/ like a buttercup
Three of these, the iamb, diamb, and triamb, may be easily put into one
category, since their accentual essence, the alternation from an unaccented
to an accented syllable, is the same. Grouping these metremes in this way
accounts for seven of the eleven metremes in the passage. The passage,
then, is clearly iambic in overall texture.
Of the four remaining metremes, three occur in a single line: the
catalexis, the anapest, and the amphibrach make up line three, "save that
it's green and wooden." These, then, may be considered syntagmatic, or
substitutional metremes, since they interrupt the iambic flow of the
passage as a whole. The remaining figure, --/-/, constitutes a problem in
metremic analysis, since, having five syllables, there is no applicable
name for it from ancient Greek prosody. In this case, however, I would
like to consider this metreme an allometer of the iambic metreme since,
except for a single unaccented syllable at the beginning, it would be a
diamb, and especially since the diamb and its counterparts have been
heavily foregrounded. In another poem, "Memory," by Yeats, discussed at
the end of this chapter, 29¯ however, it is more useful to look at this
accentual pattern, --/-/, as a distinct metreme, since it occurs
repeatedly, and there I try to give it a name. Iambic metremes and their
allometres are underelined in this passage here quoted a second time, and,
as I see it constitute the statictical paradigm of this free verse poem.
The bracketed protion, therefore, contains syntagmatic variations. As
metrists often observe in traditional verse, the paradigm here is
established, played upon, and restored:
OF ASPHODEL, THAT GREENY FLOWER,
LIKE A BUTTERCUP
UPON ITS BRANCHING STEM --
(save that it's green and wooden --)
I COME, MY SWEET,
TO SING TO YOU.
With these principles it should be possible to scan any poem logically
and sensitively at once. Determining the scansion, however, is only part
of the problem. Metrics must have a higher goal. This could be, as in
Dougherty's case, to analyze stylistic changes statistically, but even
after we find out, as she shows, that Yeats enjambed more lines in his
later poetry, it is still important to look at the lines themselves in
their poetic context, that is, in relation to his style as it develops its
effects, or as I plan to discuss, in relation to what Yeats himself
believed he was doing stylistically. Traditional theory, therefore,
provides the ultimate purpose, if not all the technique and terminology, of
metremic analysis. 30¯ In 1787, in the second of his LECTURES ON THE ART
OF
to solve a poetical problem . . . which, though often attempted,
remains to this hour unexplained: and that is, to account for the
peculiar beauty of that celebrated couplet in Sir John Denham's poem
on Cooper's Hill, where he gives us a
description of the
Tho deep ' yet clear " tho gentle ' yet not dull,
Strong ' without rage " without o're flowing ' full.
In which the chief beauty of the versification lies in the happy
disposition of the pauses and semi-pauses, so as to make a fine
harmony in each line, when their portions are compared, and in the
couplet, when one line is compared with the other. But this solution
could never occur to those who never once dreamed of the demi-cesura,
and the happy effects which it may produce in verse. *45
"To solve a poetical problem," namely to account for Yeats's thought on
style as seen enacted in his poetry, is the purpose of this thesis. As
well, the 'demi-caesura" is really the key concept in the metrical system
developed in this chapter, since after every metremic unit there is either
a pause or a perceived pause that separates it from the following unit.
To conclude this Chapter, I will apply the principles I have outlines
in analyzing Yeats's poem "Memory":
One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain. *46
The pivotal word in this poem is "Because," in line four. This word marks
the turn from the tenor to the vehicle *47 in a poem that 31¯ is
essentially a metaphoric comparison: the women's charm and loveliness are
in vain "Because" they are like the empty hare's nest. This bipartite
metaphoric structure is supported in certain structural features of the
poem. The rhyme scheme, abc abc, for example, emphasizes the division, as
does the total number of syllables in the line, which is six, six, and
seven in lines one, two, and three, and four, five, and six respectively.
Turning to the accentual pattern, other structural features become evident.
This is the poem's accentual arrangement:
/ - - / - /
- / - / - /
- / - / - - /
- - - / - /
- / - / - /
- - / - / - /.
Traditionally, these marks would probably be divided into groups such as
these:
/- -/ -/
-/ -/ -/
-/ -/ --/
-- -/ -/
-/ -/ -/
--/ -/ -/.
But this division goes against the principles of metremic determination 32¯
in several points. First, in violation of the principle of lexical
integrity, three of the bisyllables -- "lovely," "mountain" in line four,
and "mountain" in line six -- are divided between feet. Amending this
produces these patterns in lines one, four, and six:
/ - -/- /
- - -/- /
--/- / - /.
Now, however, the scansion contravenes the principle of iambic cohesion,
since in each of these lines an accented syllable is separated from a
preceeding unaccented syllable. Further amending the scansion produces
these patterns in lines one, four, and six:
/ - -/-/
- - -/-/
--/-/ - /.
Lines one and four, however, are still in violation of the principles. In
line four, "because" is a conjunction, and so should incorporate the
following determiner into its own metreme. The line, "Because the mountain
grass," must therefore be scanned as one metreme, having this accentual
pattern: ---/-/. The remaining violation of the principles is in line
one, where "had," a transitive verb, must begin the unit, "had a lovely
face." Line one, therefore, scans like this: / --/-/. The principles
outlined in this chapter, then result in the following accentual pattern:
33¯ / --/-/
-/ -/ -/
-/ -/ --/
---/-/
-/ -/ -/
--/-/ -/.
This scansion reveals two metremes; the iamb, and this pattern --/-/.
Principly because of the trochaic bisyllables in lines one, four, and six,
the syllable groups "lovely face," mountain grass," and "mountin hare" form
cretic units, which have this pattern: /-/. For various reasons, the
pyrrhics, that is, two unaccented syllables, --, which in each case precede
these cretics are also added to the metreme, and the resulting
"pyrrhicretic" pattern, --/-/, occurs in three of the six lines of the
poem. This metreme occurs abundantly in Yeats's poetry. For example, it
is the important metreme in "The lake Isle of Innisfree" -- "for the
honey-bee," "in the bee-loud glade," "of the linnet's wings," "on the
pavements grey," "I will arise and go" -- which Yeats called "my first
lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music." *48 The beginning of
"Innisfree," "I will arise and go," thus replicates the accentual pattern
of line one of "Memory": "One had a lovely face." In "Memory," the
pyrrhicretic (underlined) alternates with iambic units (left unmarked) line
by line, until the last line, where both metremes occur. It is as if the
two patterns are kept separate until the poem's last word, "lain," where,
being the only full rhyme in the abc pattern, the poem clicks shut, like a
box:
ONE HAD A LOVELY FACE,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
BECAUSE THE MOUNTAIN GRASS
Cannot but keep the form
WHERE THE MOUNTAIN HARE has lain.
If this explanation goes anywhere in accounting for the peculiar beauty of
the poem, and for the sense of completion and aesthetic unity we feel on
reading Yeats's poem, then metrical analysis will have done its job.
CHAPTER TWO 36¯
Throughout his career, W. B. Yeats insisted on the importance of
tradition to both the themes and techniques of poetry. Much of what he
thought about tradition, originality, and his own poetry is distilled in
his essay, "A General Introduction for my Work," written in 1937. He was,
emphtically, a traditionalist: "Talk to me of originality and I will turn
on you with rage." *49 Paradoxically, however, metrists have had
difficulty scanning Yeats's poems in the traditional manner.
This difficulty has been encountered by one such metrist, Thomas
Parkinson, in his book W. B. YEATS: THE LATER POETRY, where he discusses,
among other things, Yeats's "ottava rima" poems. Yeats wrote several of
his best known poems, such as "Among School Children," "A Prayer for my
Daughter," and "Sailing to
consists of eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming abababcc. As Parkinson
points out, however, many lines in Yeats's "ottava rima" verses do not seem
to fit their paradigm. That Yeats was aware of this paradigm, however, may
be seen from comments made in his "General Introduction."
In the "Introduction," Yeats explains his own personal need to write
in traditional forms:
Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I
compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed
with the
language. Ezra Pound, Turner,
verse, I could not. I would lose myself, become joyless . . . . *50
Also, he explains his understanding of the traditional forms, saying that
even though a particular line does not replicate the paradigm 37¯ of the
poem, the paradigm nonetheless remains present in the poet's and the
reader's minds:
If I repeat the first line of Paradise Lost so as to emphasize its
/ / /
five feet I am among the folk singers -- "Of man's first disobedience
/ /
and the fruit," but speak it as I should I cross it with another
/ / /
emphasis, that of passionate prose -- "Of man's first disobedience and
/ / / /
the fruit" ; or "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit" ; the folk
song is still there, but a ghostly voice, an unvariable possibility,
and unconscious norm. What moves me and my hearer is a vivid speech
that has no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly voice.
*51
Thus Yeats had the traditional conception of a poem as "a spume that plays
/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;" that is, he believed that each poem
he wrote was a syntagmatic instance of a traditional verse paradigm.
Given this, the problem remains that many of Yeats's lines,
purportedly for example iambic pentameter lines, do not seem to incorporate
their paradigm. It becomes useless, Parkinson himself suggests, to talk
about the iambic pentameter paradigm in reference to a poem which contains
lines such as, for example, "Calculations that look but casual flesh, put
down," which is a line from an "ottava rima" poem called "The Statues,"
from Yeats's "Last Poems." *52 This line has thirteen instead of ten
syllables, and it has this accentual pattern: --/--/-/--///. In
attempting to deal with such 38¯ lines, Parkinson proposes a "very flexible
prosody" in which "a five-stress line is the equivalent of a ten-syllable
line, and the two are interchangeable." *53 Encountering the line
"Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down," however, even
Parkinson admits that his prosody, although designed to allow as many
syntagmatic instances as possible, fails, since the line is neither iambic
nor pentameter, nor visibly patterned by balances and parallels.
Parkinson's explanation becomes impressionistic when he finally claims that
a strict metrical analysis of Yeats's poetry is not really feasible.
Yeats's poem, "The Statues," is about Pythagorean exactness in
sculpted art, and it justaposes the passion in a lover's living face with
the mathematical precision in the sculpted face of a statue: the lover has
slipped into the museum "And pressed at midnight in some public place /
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face." It is my belief that in the meter
of this poem "passion and precision are one," *54 just as they are
juxtaposed in the image of the kiss. Parkinson, on the other hand, claims
that passion takes over, as the paradigm, and thus the possibility of
adequate metrical analysis, is distorted:
A passion that cannot be balked over-powers the formal requirements
and establishes another norm (that of the casual flesh) that distorts
the expected shape. It can be justified prosodically but largely, I
think, because we want to justify it, because of its cogency and the
articulation of the stanza, rather than the norms of any prosody. *55
I agree with Parkinson that the line in question is not justifiable in
traditional metrical analysis, but I disagree in two points: that "one has
to say that here Yeats's 39¯ prosody breaks down" *56 that is, that "formal
requirements" are not met in this line, and second, that the line is not
justifiable in any prosody.
Traditional rules for foot substitution do not account for a line
occurring in an iambic pentameter stanza that has this accentual pattern:
--/--/-/--///. The nearest that it can be seen to resemble its paradigm
would be in this foot division: --/ --/ -/ --/ //. It is possible to scan
five feet, but only the third will be an iamb. One iamb per line is not
enough for traditionalist metrics, as Saintsbury establishes in his Rule
19, that substitution may not take place "to such an extent that the base
of the metre can be mistaken." *57 Two metrists who base their study on
Saintsbury, Paul Fussell and Robert Beum, go even further to delineate
traditional substitution rules. Beum is co-author with Karl Shairo of A
PROSODY HANDBOOK. Beum, working alone, also wrote THE POETIC ART OF
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, *58 an engaging example of traditionalist metrical
analysis. According to the HANDBOOK, "The last (fifth) foot is always
iambic." *59 The only exception allowed, which occurs so rarely "as to be
negligible," *60 is a trochee in the last position. Thus a spondee in the
last position is not even considered. And yet Yeats's line "Calculations
that look but casual flesh, put down" contains a spondee in the last
position, and at the same time it does not contain enough iambs to be
recognizably iambic pentameter. Fussell, in POETIC METER AND POETIC FORM,
expresses a similarly conservative attitude toward substitution. *61
40¯ In spite of Parkinson, Fussell, and the other traditionalists,
however, I think that it is clear that in at least half of the lines of
"The Statues," the iambic pentameter "ghostly voice" is not exorcised. For
example, the following line, "All Asiatic vague immensities," can be seen
to fit the iambic paradigm. And, although a linguistic-scientific analysis
of the second line in the following couplet would still imply an
/ / / \ /
a-paradigmatic cadence-unit division -- it would be 000/ 0 000 000 -- both
a traditionalist and a metremic analysis would agree in showing an iambic
pattern in both lines of this couplet:
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness (ll. 23-24).
I hope at this point to have suggested two things about "The Statues":
one, that the poem contains enough iambic material to be called an iambic
pentameter poem, and two, that other, varied passages of the poem form
repetitive patterns and so formalize themselves on a higher, meta-
syntagmatic level. A metremic scansion of the poem will show that "formal
requirements" are maintained even in extremely syntagmatic lines, and thus
that in "The Statues," as always in Yeats, Pythagorean precision is the
mode of passionate expression.
According to the method outlined in the previous chapter, the lie
"Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down" divides into these
metremes: --/--/ -/--/ //. The line, then, contains two metremes;
mainly, the choriamb, /--/, which occurs allometrically both times, and the
spondee, //. There is formality in the line in 41¯ the repetition of the
choriamb, and in the poem as a whole, since both metremes are repeated
throughout: "Of solitary beds," "Knew what they were," "Knowledge
increases," and "Mirror on mirror" are all choriambic metremes, while "Live
lips," "One image," "Pearse summoned," "What stalked," and "We Irish" are
spondaic. At the same time there is ample support for the iambic ghostly
voice, in lines containing strings of iambic metremes.
In his "General Introduction" Yeats makes a comment about the rhythm
of certain biblical passages:
The translators of the Bible . . . when translators still bothered
about rhythm, created a form midway between prose and verse that seem
natural to impersonal meditation; but all that is personal soon rots;
it must be packed in ice or salt. *62
Michael Fishbane, in his collection of "Close Readings of Selected Biblical
Texts" called TEXT AND TEXTURE, says that "Psalm 19," a highly formalized,
"impersonal" lyric, "is a religious prayer whose various interlocking
features appear under the aspect of speech." *63 "Psalm 19," then, is
neither exactly poetry, since it follows no precise paradigm, yet neither
is it prose, since it contains certain poetic "interlocking features" which
merely "appeare under the aspect of speech":
The language of praise is thus not human discourse but rather the
rhythmic and mighty "language of creation" as it courses silently
through time and space." *64
Beum, in his HANDBOOK, characterizes biblical language as "cadence
verse" 42¯
A useful term describing rhythm that follows stress and tempo of the
spoken language, without being metrical. The poetry, for example, of
the King James Bible and of Walt Whitman is cadence poetry. *65
But Beum reduces the idea of cadence to "lines of poetry, or portions of
lines, THAT WILL NOT (and were not intended to) ANALYZE INTO FEET OR OTHER
SYMMETRICAL COMPONENTS, that have broken entirely out of all metrical
framework." *66 Inadvertently perhaps, Beum claims that the rhythm of the
language of the King James Bible is the same as every-day, spoken language.
This is evidently not true, and further, I disagree that such verse is not
analyzable into symmetrical components. These components, such as
Saintsbury discovers in prose, will simply have to be an average of four or
five syllables long, instead of two, in order to reveal the symmetry of
prose and "cadence-verse" foot units.
In "Psalm 19," the formal structure is based on syntactical
parallelism. *67 And the style of this psalm can be seen, I believe, to be
that "form midway between prose and verse" that Yeats applauded the King
James translators for achieving. A simple ordering based on syntax
formalizes this passage, verse 18 and 19 of "Psalm 19":
The statues of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart:
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever:
the judgements of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
As well, this "form midway between prose and verse" seems to be a
feature of Yeats's own poetry. Accentual patterns such as the choriamb and
the spondee -- which, according to Saintsbury, 43¯ closely examining the
metrical practices in English poetry up to the turn of the century, are
"certainly rare, and are perhaps never wanted in English verse, though they
are plentiful in prose" *68 -- occur repeatedly in "The Statues." Thus
prosaic accentual patterns occur in Yeats's "ottava rima" stanzas, but,
unlike in prose, these patterns are concentrated, so that only a few occur
in close-knit repetition.
The first stanza from "The Statues" will suffice to demonstrate this
repetition. The metremes repeated are the choiramb, placed between
asterisks, */--/*, the pyrrhicretic, in capital letters, --/-/, the
spondee, [//], the amphibrach, (-/-), and the iamb, which is left unmarked.
When two or more instances of a particular metreme follow one another, the
marking is placed around the entire group, and the individual metremic
occurrences are distinguished by three typewriter spaces. Also, there is
one case of overlapping metremes in line three of stanza. This phenomenon
will be discussed later:
*Pythagoras planned it.* WHY DID THE PEOPLE STARE?
(His numbers,) though they moved or seemed to move
(In *marble) or in bronze,* [lacked character.]
But boys and girls, PALE FROM THE IMAGINED LOVE
*Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough*
And pressed (at midnight) IN SOME PUBLIC PLACE
[Live lips] upon a plummet-measured face. 44¯
According to Beum, the "ottava rima" stanza
must have delighted Yeats, for besides being roomy, allowing a pithy
couplet when needed, and offering in its repeated rhymes the
possibility of an incantatory effect, it reconciles contraries. It
was both highly traditional (in Italian poetry and vicariously in
English) and yet -- as Yeats wanted to develop it, as a texture of the
compact and the symbolic at home with the conversational -- little
tried by English poets. *69
It is interesting that Beum notes that Yeats's poetry is both "incantatory"
and "conversational." The explanation for this paradox of tone of voice, a
tone both formalized and informal, is, for Yeats's other "ottava rima"
poems, similar to that just given for "The Statues." Yeats formulates
meta-syntagmatic order our of what may seem to be merely arbitrary
syntagmae.
Beum attributes the close and subtle attention to rhythmical pattern
to Yeats's ideas about aristocracy, ceremony, and order:
Yeats preferred anything to anarchy. It is more important to
recognize this passion for order than to debate whether Yeats was more
favorable to traditional aristocracy or the the new nationalistic and
emotional order of fascism. Order within the self and then, by
extention, within the society was the important thing; the particular
type of political structure -- feudal or fascist state, limited
monarchy or Burkean stratified republic -- would be almost a matter of
indifference if it could produce a settled commonwealth and at the
same time encourage other Yeatsian prime values such as beauty,
imaginativeness, individuality, variety and a healthy moral tone. *70
Northrop Frye, in THE GREAT CODE, makes a similar observation about the
relationship between literature and politics, stating that for Plato's
REPUBLIC it is not the political system per se, but the imaginative, poetic
society that is important: "As an 45¯ allegory of the wise man's mind, the
REPUBLIC is a powerful vision." *71 That Yeats was more interested in the
poetics of politics than in politics itself is apparent in a verse from
"The Old Stone Cross" --
A statesman is an easy man
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbors vote *72 --
-- as it is in Yeats's poem "Politics":
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of was and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms! *73
Politics, or people living harmoniously together under some ordering
principle, however, is a large part of Yeats's poetry, and this theme can
be seen working in the high level of order, or ceremony, that Yeats tries
to incorporate into the structure of his poetry. Yeats, then, is not
merely writing about ceremony in, for example, the last stanza of "A Prayer
for my Daughter," *74 but is employing ceremony in his style, as he chooses
words that form ceremonious, or ordered, accentual patterns:
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
"A Prayer for my daughter" consists of ten "ottava rima" verses. It
is, as the title suggests, a prayer, or meditation, and so may be seen to
be a kind of ceremony or ritual in itself. Yeats's characteristic use of
meta-syntagmatic accentual ordering can also be found in this poem.
Of eighty lines only seven are strictly iambic pentameter (ll. 19, 25,
29, 37, 42, 56, and 72). The "ottava rima" paradigm itself, however, is
varied here, as in each eight line verse, lines six and seven are iambic
tetrameter rather than pentameter. Of these twenty tetrameter lines, five
are iambic. Altogether, forty-one of the lines are heavily syntagmatic,
and many would fail to be considered iambic lines even under the most lax
of traditional substitution rules. Perhaps the ceremony involved in the
accentual pattern of "A Prayer for my Daughter," however, can be most
easily seen in the accentual pattern of the word "ceremony" itself,
occurring in line 74, "Where all's accustomed, ceremonious." Here
"ceremonious" is isolated syntactically, and forms an amphibrachic pattern,
--/--, representing this metreme in one word.
Occasionally, in the scansion I am about to present, a metremic unit
will incorporate up to six syllables or more in 47¯ an accentual pattern
which actually consists of the patterns of two distinct metremes. An
example of this is the phrase "Lose natural kindness" which combines a
spondee, "Lose nat-" with a choriamb, "natural kindness." For various
reasons these syllables must be grouped into a single metreme, but at the
same time both accentual patterns will be noted. In this way, both the
spondee (bracketed) and the choriamb (between asterisks) are marked, and
the whole group of syllables is separated from surrounding groups by three
typewriter spaces:
[Lose *na]tural kindness* and maybe.
Another similar example is found in line five:
// -// [-/*/]--/*
Whereby the haystack- [and roof-*lev]elling wind.*
Cases such as these where metremes contain more than one accentual pattern
are rare, and do not interfere with the phenomenon of meta-syntagmatic
ordering as shown by the scansion, but rather they contribute to it,
showing an interweaving of rhythmical patterns within patterns. This
superior level of ordering is especially visible in lines 53-54, where they
meta-syntagmatic patterns are repeated in the same order in verbatim
repetitions:
[Nor but] (in merriment) begin a chase,
[Nor but] (in merriment a quarrel.)
In this poem, as well, the three lines 70-72 form the longest purely
iambic passage in the poem. Yeats believed in a correlation 48¯ between
rhythm and tone, as he said in the "Dramatis Personae" section of his
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: " . . . only in those lines where the beauty of the passage
comes to its climax must the rhythm be obvious." *75 It is noteworthy,
then, that in what are the most intense, tender moments of "A Prayer for my
Daughter," the accentual pattern returns clearly to the iambic pattern. A
condensed example of this phenomenon is found in "A Bronze Head," *76 lines
20 and 21, where the mother's cry of desperation re-establishes the iambic
paradigm after preceding words had created a trochaic and dactyllic
cross-rhythm. The most passionate moment, then, is in the obvious,
paradigmatic accentual pattern: "I had grown wild / And wandered murmuring
everywhere, "MY CHILD, MY CHILD!"
In "A Prayer for my Daughter," also, the iambic passage is the passage
in which the theme of the poem is expressed most directly and earnestly.
In this "ottava rima" stanza, the last three lines re-establish the iambic
pattern as the periodic sentence, which constitutes the entire stanza,
draws to a close, and the theme of the poem as a whole is clearly stated:
*Considering that,* [all hatred] driven hence
The soul (recovers) *radical innocence*
And learns at last THAT IT IS SELF-DELIGHTING,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
[And that its own sweet will] is heaven's will;
[She can,] though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
49¯ The stanza that follows this is the last stanza in the poem, and it is
full of meta-syntagmatic accentual patterns, suggesting that the metrical
pattern is an emblem, or embodiment of the subject of the stanza itself,
that is, elaborate order, or ceremony. Here is the scansion of the entire
poem. Spondaic metremes and their allometres are in square brackets, [//];
amphibrachic metremes are in round brackest, (-/-); the choriamb is
surrounded by asterisks, */--/*; the pyrrichretic is underlined, [capital
letters] --/-/; and the traditional fare of iambs, trochees, and so on, is
left unmarked. Metremic units are separated by three typewriter spaces:
A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER
[Once more] the storm (is howling,) [and half hid]
*Under this cra*dle hood and cover lid
My child [sleeps on. There is no obstacle]
*But Gregory's wood* [and one bare hill]
[Whereby the haystack- and roof-*lev]elling wind,
Bred on the
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because [of the great gloom that is in my mind.]
I HAVE WALKED AND PRAYED [for this young child] an hour
And heard [the sea-wind scream] upon the tower
(And under the arches) OF THE BRIDGE AND SCREAM
IN THE ELMS ABOVE the flooded stream;
(Imagining in excited) reverie
THAT THE FUTURE YEARS had come, 50¯
Dancing TO A FRENZIED DRUM,
Out (of the *murderour) innocence* of the sea.
May she be granted beauty [and yet not]
*Beauty to make* a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being [made *beautiful] o*vermuch,
Consider beauty A SUFFICIENT END,
[Lose *na]tural kindness* (and maybe)
The heart-revealing intimacy
that chooses right, and never find a friend.
Helen being chosen [found life flat] and dull
(And later) [had much trouble] from a fool,
[While that great Queen, that rose out] of the spray,
Being *fatherless could [have* her way]
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
(It's certain) [that fine women] eat
(A crazy) salad [with their meat
Whereby] the horn of Plenty [is undone.]
(In courtesy) I'd have her chiefly learned;
*Hearts are not had* as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not *(entirely) beautiful:*
(Yet many,) THAT HAVE PLAYED THE FOOL
(For Beauty's) very self, has charm made wise,
(And many) [a poor man] that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
[From a glad kindness] CANNOT TAKE HIS EYES. 51¯
May she become *a flourshing hid*den tree
[That all her thoughts] may like the linnet be,
[And have no business] BUT DISPENSING ROUND
Their magnanimities of sound,
[Nor but] (in merriment) begin a chase,
[Nor but] (in merriment a quarrel.)
*O may she live* [like some green laurel]
*Rooted in [one* dear] (per*petual) place.*
[My mind,] because the minds that I have loved,
The sort (of beauty) that I have approved,
*Prosper but little,* [has dried up] of late,
[Yet knows] THAT TO BE CHOKED WITH HATE
[May well be of all evil] chances chief.
[If there's no hatred] in a mind
Assualt (and battery) of the wind
Can never tear (the linnet) from the leaf.
An intel*lectual hatred* is the worst,
[So let her think] (opinions) are accurst.
[Have I not seen] *the loveliest woman* born
*Out of the mouth* of Plenty's horn,
Because of her *opinionated mind
Barter that horn* and every good
By quiet natures understood
[For an old bellows] FULL OF ANGRY WIND?
*Considering that,* [all hatred] driven hence,
The soul (recovers) *radical innocence* 51¯
And learns at last THAT IT IS SELF-DELIGHTING,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
[And that its own sweet will] is heaven's will;
[She can,] though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
And may [her bride groom bring her] to a house
Where all's (accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred) are the wares
Peddled IN THE THOROUGHFARES.
*How but in custom* (and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty) born?
*Cerremony's a name* [for the rich horn,]
(And
custom) FOR THE SPREADING
Nearly everything that has just been said about "A Prayer for my
Daughter" can also be said of Yeats's other well known "ottava rima" poem,
"Among School Children." *77 There is, for example, the same interweaving
of accentual patterns within metremic units: "I dream (of a *Ledaen)
body.* And, the most carefully patterned passage of "Among School
Children," as it was in "A Prayer for my Daughter," is the last verse.
Here, in the apparent ease with which accentual patterns are woven
together, Yeats's own
Labour (is blossoming or dancing) where
(The body) [is not bruised] to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born OUT OF ITS OWN DESPAIR, 53¯ [?page]
[Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O Chestnut-tree great rooted] blossomer,
Are you the leaf, (the blossom,) or the bole?
(O body) swayed (to music,) O brightening glance,
*How can we know* (the dancer) from the dance?
"Adam's curse," *78 although not an "ottava rima" poem, is another
of Yeats's poems in which variant metremes are isolated and repeated. The
poem contains thirty-eight lines. Of these, only twenty are satisfacctory
iambic pentameter, that is, twenty lines can be scanned to contain five
feet of which at least three, one of which is in the last position, are
iambs. This leaves eighteen highly syntagmatic lines, nearly half of the
poem. Five of these, furthermore, end in spondees. Metremic analysis,
however, shows two things: one, that many of the syntagmetic lines contain
some iambic metremes, and two, that the remaining variations are limited
and repetitive and so order themselves on a meta-syntagmatic level.
In scanning this poem I have isolated ten distinct metremes. Of
these, I have put six into what may be called a metremic category of common
iambic variants. These are metremes which comply with traditional
substitution rules. These are, first, the iamb, -/, which is the main
accentual pattern in the English poetic tradition; and second, the anapest,
--/, which is a common iambic substitution; third, the trochee, /-, which,
although sometimes the basic foot of a verse, is the most common
substitution in the first, and less often in the second, third, and fourth
positions 53¯ [?page] of an iambic pentameter line. Fourth, the dactyl,
/--, is to the trochee what the anapest is to the iamb, and it, too, is an
allowable substitutional foot.
Other than these there are two metremes that fit into traditional
substitution rules. They are the catalexis, a single accented syllable,
and this accentual pattern: -/-/-, which represents a segment of a line
that is, in a sense, both iambic and trochaic. It occurs when two trochaic
bisyllables are brought together into a single syntactic-semantic unit,
such as "a kitchen pavement," and also occurs on the trochaic word,
"contrapuntal" in line 10 of "The Lady's Third Song": "That I may hear if
we should kiss / A contrapuntal serpent hiss." *79
Setting these six metremes apart as paradigmatic, unproblem- 55¯
atical units, there remain four accentual patterns. They are the
amphibrach, -/-, the pyrrhicretic, --/-/, the spondee, //, and the
choiramb, /--/. It is in passages where these accentual patterns occur
most abundantly that traditional analysis runs into problems. The fact,
however, that the variant metremes are limited to four in thirty-eight
lines argues that variation is not rampant in this poem. It argues, in
fact, that there is exacting precision in control of rhythm, tone, and the
voice of the persona.
Of these four metremes, the pyrrhicretic is usually created by the
combination of pyrrhic, such as "by the," a trochaic bisyllable, such as
"noisy," and an accented monosyllable, such as "set," which forms a
rhythmic-syntactic, semantic unit, "by the noisy set." Foregrounding,
furthermore, can turn another kind of word grouping into a pyrrhicretic
metreme. For example, the phrase "who thought love should be" scans into
these metremes: --/ -/. But because "who thought love should be" -- along
with its isometremic counterparts, "that her voice is sweet," "at the
name of love," "it had been a shell," and "as they rose and fell" --
occurs in context with several true pyrrhicretics -- "at one summer's end,"
"upon your marrow-bones," and "by the noisy set" -- the two accentual
patterns, --/-/ and --/ -/, are considered to be allometres of the same
metreme and, althought the division between words in examples such as "who
thought love should be" remains in the scansion, both patterns are
underlined [capatalized] as pyrrhicretics.
The next a-paradigmatic metreme is the amphibrach, -/-. The 55¯
amphibrachic metreme nearly always contains a trochaic bisyllable. An
exception to this is in the case of an amphibrachic trisyllable, such as
"beloved," which is, incidentally, foregrounded in Yeats's "The Two Trees,"
which will be the last poem discussed in this Chapter. As well, the
amphibrachic metreme must be followed by either an unaccented syllable
beginning the next metreme, or else by an enforced pause. "An idler" in
line 12 of "Adam's Curse" is one such metreme, since it is followed by an
unaccented syllable beginning the next metreme, the pyrrhicretic "by the
noisy set." "The martyrs," in line 14, on the other hand, is not an
amphibrachic metreme. It is followed by an accented monosyllable, and so
the iambic ghostly voice speaks up, making "The martyrs call" into a diamb,
an allometre of the iambic metreme.
This leaves two a-paradigmatic metremes, the spondee and the choriamb.
These occur, respectively, twenty-four and three times throughout the poem.
The spondee occurs in several allometric forms. The essence of the metreme
is two adjacent accented syllables. Around this centre several allometric
syllables may coalesce: (-) (-) (-) / / (/) (-) (-). The bracketed
syllable markers are optional in this metremic diagram, which demands the
essential spondee. The choriamb echoes during the poem between three
occurrences: "Better go down" in line 7, "there's many a one" in line 16,
and "That it had all" in line 37.
Several features of the poem, on the other hand, may be marshalled as
evidence to show that the iambic ghostly voice is not exorcised in this
poem. Of these, one is the fact that only four 57¯ of the thirty-eight
lines contain an extra, eleventh syllable. Having largely decasyllabic
lines, it is easy to confirm the "pentameter" part of the paradigm, simply
by dividing the syllables into groups of two. In the poem, as well, the
iambic metreme, or a valid traditional substitution, accounts for sixty of
the total one hundred twenty-three units. Often it occurs allometrically,
as a diamb or triamb, and so the ghostly voice is heard clearly in about
fifty per cent of the poem.
Another way in which the poem supports the iambic pentameter paradigm
is in its rhyme scheme. The pentameter line and the aabb rhyme scheme
combine to form the paradigm traditionally called the heroic couplet. In
rhyme scheme, as in the iambic line, however, Yeats is hesitant to give a
full, obvious replication of the paradigm: many of the lines in the poem
end in half-rhymes, others in feminine rhymes, both of which de-emphasize
the rhyming paradigm. In distancing the poem from its heroic couplet
paradigm in these ways, Yeats achieves a tone of intimate conversation,
rather than a tone, say, of rhetorical recitation, of which Alexander Pope
is the master in heroic couplets.
This difference of tone is demonstrated by these two quotations. The
first is from Pope's "Essay on Criticism," showing his mastery of the
heroic couplet as a vehicle of an impersonal, oratorical tone:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. (ll. 362-363)
58¯ The following quotation contains two heroic couplets from "Adam's
Curse," showing how Yeats has used rhyme words to convey a more personal
tone:
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these . . . . (ll. 7-11)
Both authors here are demonstrating their virtuosity, their ability to
dance, or to articulate sweet sounds in verse. Pope does so by masculine
rhymes, words rhyming on accented syllables, such as "chance" and "dance,"
which give firm support to the heroic couplet paradigm. Yeats's first
couplet here quoted, rhyming on "bones" and "stones," has this same
quality, but the following couplet has a feminine rhyme, words rhyming on
an unaccented syllable, such as the "-er" of "weather" and "together," to
emphasize the delicacy of poetry. This weakens the unity, as it reduces
the oratorical emphasis of the couplet. The couplet's unity is further
weakened by the fact that the semicolon after "weather" divides it between
two complete sentence units. Distancing the poem from its paradigm in
these ways, Yeats is able to establish a tone of spoken, intimate language.
Yeats aimed at this tone deliberately, as he wrote in a letter to Dorothy
Wellesley, "I feel that one's verse must be as direct and natural as spoken
words." *80
The tone of "Adam's Curse" is, I believe, "direct and natural." The
poem begins by setting a subdued romantic scene, wherein a man speaks
directly to a woman. Here he recalls to her imagination a 59¯ conversation
that had taken place at an earlier time:
We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
The tone of this passage is relaxed and personal, and I think that this
tone may be in part accounted for by the rhythm of the language and by
Yeats's treatment of the heroic couplet paradigm.
In Pope's time, the paradigm of the heroic couplet had to be carefully
and strictly maintained in every line. Both the original readers and the
author of the "Essay on Criticism," for example, shared the belief about
poetry that it was composed according to rules. "Tone" itself arises from
attitudes shared by the author and the reader in reference to the content
of the written material. *81 Pope and his audiene, however, also shared
attitudes toward form as well as content, and, regardless of this
distinction, as I will attempt to show at the end of this chapter in
reference to Yeats's "The Two Trees," form in fact makes up part of the
semantic content of a poetic text. The tone of "Adam's Curse" is informal
and relaxed because the treatment of the heroic couplet paradigm is
relaxed.
Although the meter of "Adam's Curse" is "loose" in this sense, there
is still a clear iambic texture in the poem. The couplet 60¯ making up
lines three and four, for example, consists largely of iambic (bracketed)
metremes, although feminine rhymes and syntactic division de-emphasize the
paradigm:
(And you and I, and talked) of poetry.
I said, (a line will take us hours) maybe.
The apparent looseness of accentual patterning in the poem as a whole is
further accounted for, since Yeats creates elaborate and subtle
meta-syntagmatic rhythms out of the repetition of syntagmatic accentual
patterns. The spondaic metreme (underlined), for example, occurs in each
of the following lines, lines 34 to 38, and at each repetition the tone of
voice gains emphasis and sincerity. On the other hand, the last line
clearly re-states the iambic paradigm:
I had a thought for no one's but YOUR EARS:
That you were beautiful, and I STROVE
To love you in the old HIGH WAY of love;
That it had all SEEMED HAPPY, and yet WE'D GROWN
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
I would now like to present a metremic scansion of the whole poem.
This scansion will show the basic iambic texture of the unmarked portions,
and the repetitive quality of the other metremes. These other metremes are
listed here, with their allometres:
amphibrachic metreme (-)(-) -/- (-)
spondaic metreme (-)(-)(-) // (/)(-)(-)
pyrrhicretic metreme (/)(-) --/-/
choriambic metreme (-) /--/.
The bracketed syllable markers in this list are optional, so the essential
patterns, -/-, //, --/-/, /--/, are visibly the estab- 61¯ lished bases of
their allometric instances. In this scansion the metremes are bracketed,
(-/-), [//], underlined [capatalization] --/-/, or surrounded by asterisks,
*/--/*. A higher level of formality is shown in the repetition of these
four metremes. On the whole, the accentual pattern is very carefully
organized, giving form to apparent informality, supporting the tone of
sincerity and earnestness, and maintaining the notion of poetry writing as
careful composition:
ADAM'S CURSE
We sat (together) AT ONE SUMMER'S END,
(That beautiful) [mild woman, your close friend,]
And you and I, and talked (of poetry.)
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet [if it does not seem] a moment's thought,
(Our stitching and unstitching) has been naught.
*Better go down* UPON YOUR MARROW-BONES
And scrub a kitchen pavement, [or break stones
Like and old pauper, in all kinds] (of weather;
For to articulate) [sweet sounds] (together)
[Is to work harder than all these,] and yet
Be thought (an idler) BY THE NOISY SET
(Of bankers,) schoolmasters, (and clergymen)
The martyrs call the world.'
(And thereupon
That beautiful) [mild woman for whose sake]
*There's many a one* [shall find our all heartache] 61¯
(On finding) that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ['To be born woman] is to know --
Although they do not talk of it at school --
That we (must labour to be beautiful.')
I said, ('It's certain) [there is no fine thing]
Since Adam's fall but needs [much labouring.
There have been lovers] WHO THOUGHT LOVE SHOULD BE
So much (compounded) [of high courtesy]
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents (out of beautiful) [old books;]
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'
We sat [grown quiet] AT THE NAME OF LOVE;
We saw [the last embers] of daylight die,
(And in the trembling) [blue-green] of the sky
A moon, worn as if IT HAD BEEN A SHELL
Washed [by time's waters] AS THEY ROSE AND FELL
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought (for no one's) [but your ears:]
That you (were beautiful,) [and that I strove]
(To love you) [in the old high way] of love;
*That it had all* [seemed happy,] and yet [we'd grown]
As weary-hearted AS THAT HOLLOW MOON.
This scansion shows that the following comment that Yeats made in
reference to Japanese art may also be applied to his own verse: 63¯
I have just been running over a book of Japanese paintings.
here there is delight in form, repeated yet varied, in curious
patterns . . . . In every case the artist, one feels, has had to
consciously and deliberately arrange his subject. *82
In "Adam's Curse" Yeats produces a tone of personal intimacy by
de-emphasizing the heroic couplet paradigm of the poem. At the same time,
he maintinas a sense of formality and order in the repetition of a few
specific metremes. In another poem, "The Two Trees," *83 Yeats fits the
accentual pattern of the poem almost perfectly into the iambic tetrameter
paradigm. Nonetheless, a metremic analysis encourages a more fulfilling
appreciation of the poem's structure than to simply call it an iambic
tetrameter poem with a few substitutions. As well the iambic tetrameter
rhythmical impulse, there is also a metremic pattern at work in these
lines, a rhythmic impulse that compliments the iambic pattern.
"The Two Trees" consists of two stanzas, each twenty lines in length,
which rhyme in quatrains, abab. Each stanza is given unity and identity by
the repetition of the first line as the last line: "Beloved, gaze in thine
own heart" begins and ends the first stanza, as "Gaze no more in the bitter
glass" does the second. Further, thw two stanzas are self-unified and
opposed in that they put forth opposite symbolic propositions. In the
first, Yeats discusses the biblical tree of life, taken from Revelation.
In Revelation, one of the structural principles behind some of the
imagery is concentric circularity. In Chapter Four, as the spectacle of
the throne unfolds it takes on a pattern on concentric circles in which the
throne is surrounded by a rainbow, seven burning 63¯ lamps, four beasts,
twenty-four elders, and a sea of glass. Within this pattern, the various
characters engage in highly ritualized, repetitive actions. Likewise, in
the image of the new Jerusalem, the tree of life is central: "In the midst
of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of
life, which bare twelve manner of fruits . . . (22:2). The tree in stanza
one of "The Two Trees" is also characterized by "The changing colour of its
fruit," and it is at the centre of the imagery, or landscape, which
radiates concentrically. More precisely, "joy" is at the centre, and
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear
. . .
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways.
Yeats's other tree, which figures in stanza two of "The Two Trees," on
the other hand, is not characterized by centrality and order. It is the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which Yeats associates with the
disordered imagery of post-lapsarian vegetation: "Thorns also and thistles
shall [the earth] bring forth . . ." (3:18). Thus, in stanza two the tree
is splintered, and through its dessicated branches "go / The ravens of
unresting thought":
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
In "The Two Trees," then, Yeats is clearly working with a bi- 65¯
partite, symmetrical form, both in stanza division and structure, and in
thematic or allegorical reference. Not surprisingly, therefore, the two
stanzas are markedly different in tone. The first stanza is idyllic, and
has a tone of sincere coaxing, as the speaker urges the woman he addresses
to gaze at the tree of life growing within her heart. Stanza two, on the
other hand, has a much more urgent, even desperate tone, as the speaker
pleads with the woman not to taste the fruit of the tree on the knowledge
of good and evil, not to gaze in "the bitter glass." It sould be possible,
given this bipartite structure of tone and theme, to find a corresponding
metremic dipody.
The problem with establishing such a pattern, however, is that most of
the lines in both stanzas seem to be simply regular iambic tetrameter,
scanning in most cases into two diambs per line. Such are lines 2 and 39:
"The holy tree is growing there;" "Thy tender eyes grow all unkind."
Yet there is a rhythmical distinction to be made between these two stanzas,
and it is in the use of an amphibrachic metremic tendency in the first, as
opposed to a cretic tendency in the second. The two stanzas, while
containing opposite thematic material, are also, in spite of being nearly
identical in a traditional foot scansion, based upon exactly inverted
metremic patterns, the amphibrach, -/-, in stanza one, as opposed to the
cretic, /-/, in stanza two.
Because of the principle of allometric categorization, the first line
of "The Two Trees" shows an amphibrachic pattern:
-/- / -/- /
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. 66¯
This scansion is in part in violation of the principle of iambic cohesion,
since "in thine own heart" would normally resolve into a diamb. But there
is a conflict with the other principle of allometric categorization, which
relies on foregrounding: since "Beloved" is an amphibrach foregrounded by
its syntactic distinction -- it is a noun phrase preceeding an independent
verb phrase in the imperative voice -- the amphibrachic impulse is imposed
upon the following diambic accentual pattern. A true amphibrach must be
followed by either an enforced pause, such as the comma following
"Beloved," or by an unacented syllable beginning the next metreme, such as
in line (: "(The shaking) OF ITS LEAFY HEAD." In stanza one, then, true
amphibrachs (ll. 1,6,7,9, 10, 17, 20) alternate with potential amphibrachs,
which occur whenever a trochaic bisyllable follows an unac ented syllable
in the same metremic unit. In all of these occurrences, both true and
potential amphibrachs work in contrast to, or more properly, in harmony
with the iambic tetrameter paradigm, and this rhythmical interplay gives
the verse its rhythmical unity, and contributes to the consistent tone of
voie, in which delicacy, gentleness, and sincerity combine with wonder and
amazement, as the beauty of the tree of life is described:
BELOVED, gaze IN THING OWN heart
THE HOLY tree IS GROWING there
From joy THE HOLY branches start,
And all THE TREMBLING flowers they bear,
THE CHANGING colours of its fruit
HAVE DOWERED the stars WITH MERRY light;
THE SURETY of its hidden root
HAS PLANTED quiet in the night; 67¯
THE SHAKING of its leafy head
HAS GIVEN the waves their melody,
And made my lips AND MUSIC wed,
Murmuring A WIZARD song for thee.
There the Loves A CIRCLE go,
THE FLAMING circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
TEMEMBERING all THAT SHAKEN hair,
And how THE WINGED sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full OF TENDER care:
BELOVED, gaze IN THINE OWN heart.
In stanza two of "The Two Trees" the subject matter and the tone
change. Likewise, the metremic pattern is inverted. In lines one and
twenty of verse two the cretic is foregrounded, as it occurs twice, with a
pyrrhic transition between the two occurrences:
/-/ -- /-/
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
The cretic contains two accented syllables, whereas the amphibrach contains
only one. Even though both stanzas are written in an iambic tetrameter
paradigm, therefore, the emphasis of the cretic in the second stanza, as
opposed to the amphibrach in the first, produces a more emphatic tone,
which is more suited to the urgency of the second stanza:
GAZE NO MORE in the BITTER GLASS
The demons, with their SUBTLE GUILE,
Lift up before us WHEN THEY PASS,
Or ONLY GAZE A LITTLE WHILE;
For there a FATAL IMage grows 68¯
That the STORMY NIGHT receives,
Roots half hidden UNDER SNOWS,
BROKEN BOUGHS and BLACKENED LEAVES.
For ALL THINGS TURN to barrenness
In the dim glass the DEMONS HOLD,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in TIMES OF OLD.
There, through the BROKEN BRANCHES, go
The ravens of unRESTING THOUGHT;
Flying, crying, TO AND FRO,
CRUEL CLAW and HUNGRY THROAT,
Or else they stand and SNIFF THE WIND,
And shake their RAGGED WINGS; alas!
Thy TENDER EYES grow ALL UNKIND:
GAZE NO MORE in the BITTER GLASS.
This dual embodiment, or amalgamation, of two accentual impulses, the
amphibrach and the diamb in stanza one, the cretic and the diamb in stanza
two, creates the "subtle hesitating rhythm" *84 that Yeats wanted, as the
voice is uncertain which impulse, iambic or amphibrachic, iambic or cretic,
to follow.
John Reed's comment from DECADENT STYLE can be applied to the rhythm
of "The Two Trees":
Decadent style consciously exploits unfulfilled anticipations. It
purposely violates expectations while creating a new structure to
replace the apparently implied structure assumed by the audience. *85
In "The Two Trees," the apparently implied structure is iambic tetrameter.
The new structure is based upon the amphibrachic and cretic accentual
patterns.
There is a concept from traditionalist metrical analysis which 69¯ may
be useful in revealing the full significance of the shift in accentual
emphasis which occurs between stanzas one and two of "The Two Trees." The
concept of imitative harmony is that the physical qualities of a word or
group of words may bear a metaphoric relation to the subject matter of the
verse. On the lowest level, then, imitative harmony is onomatopoeia, or
vocal imitation. In a passage from "The Three Hermits," *86 for example,
Yeats uses onomatopoeia to give his hearers a direct vocal echo of an event
in the poem --
While he'd rummaged rags and hair,
Caught and cracked his flea, the third,
Giddy with his hundredth year,
Sang unnoticed like a bird (ll. 29-32) --
as the work "cracked" imitates the sound of the flea's shattering
exoskeleton. On a higher level, imitative harmony takes place over a
longer stretch of syllables. In these lines from the "Essay on Criticism,"
Pope explains and demonstrates imitative harmony:
Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an Echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The horase, rough verse should like the torrent roar
(ll. 364-369)
On a still higher level of imitative harmony, Yeats, in "The Two
Trees," establishes a certain accentual pattern in a representative
relation to certain thematic contents. The imitative harmony here resides
in two tones of voice created in order to represent two emotional states.
The amphibrach supports a tone of voice appropriate to the beauty and
ceremony which 70¯ characterize the holy tree. It is used as a "light" or
"dancing" metreme, and so imitates the dancing of the Loves within the
poem. The cretic, likewise, is in direct representation of, or in a
metaphoric relationship to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and
the imagery surrounding this tree.
In SOUND AND FORM IN MODERN POETRY, Harvey Gross re-states one of the
most obscure notions in metrical studies:
I venture that rhythmic structure neither ornaments conceptual meaning
nor provides a sensuous element extraneous to meaning; prosody is a
syumbolic structure like metaphor and carries its own weight of
meaning. *87
This same idea comes up in an essay called "Aesthetic Pace in Music" by
George Sherman Dickenson, where he describes rhythm as "the time aspect of
pattern in all its parts." *88 Dickenson states that a pattern of
increasing and decreasing tension contributes to the meaning or "musical
idea" of the piece, and he emphasizes the importance of rhythm to this
pattern: "The rhythm aspect of melody collaborates in its pitch movements,
and may either modify their tensity, or increase it, or surpass it." *89
As well, in "The Symbolism of Rhythm in W. B. Yeats," *90 Daniel Leonski
discusses, in a very general way, the question of how meaning can be
derived from rhythm. In "The Two Trees," I believe that meaning is derived
in part from tone, and that tone is derived in part from the rhythm of the
verse. The meaning of "The Two Trees," then, resides in part in the
rhythms of the two opposing stanzas, which may be described as amphibrachic
versus cretic.
I think that this concept may best be explained through the idea, 71¯
coming from the current deconstructionist school of literary criticism, of
"isomorphism," where the literary text is seen to be a kind of second
embodiment of its subject. In terms of "The Two Trees," stanza one is an
isomorph, or equivalent of the tree of life, and stanza two is an isomorph
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Part of this isomorphic
relationship is in the rhythm of the two verses, so that Yeats incorporates
the amphibrach and its rhythmical quality into our total idea of the tree
of life, and the cretic rhythm becomes part of our idea of the other tree.
It may be that rhythm used as metaphor is a distinguishing feature of
poetic versus non-poetic texts. When the rhythm becomes successfully
incorporated into the system of signifiers that the text presents, the
dignified is given one more, a very abstract and intuitively felt, feature
of description. Peculiar things happen when rhythm is used metaphorically.
For one thing, the text becomes finished to a greater extent than prose
texts, since the very words that the poet writes are necessary to the full
meaning. Stanza one of "The Two Trees," then, in its rhythm as well as its
allegorical content, is a perfect strophe, like the lid of an elaborately
decorated box, to the anti-stropne of stanza two. That this box is closed,
furthermore, is apparent in that the meaning is mysteriously locked away
inside, since it can only really be gotten at by intuitive understanding of
the poem's rhythm. Yeats himself made this close connection between rhythm
and meaning from early in his career, in, for example, his 1903 essay
"Speaking to the Psaltery": 72¯
I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its
rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a
wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would
never open a book of verses again. *91
CHAPTER IV
73¯ Throughout this thesis I have tried to show something about the
relationship between Yeats's ideas on style and his own style as it occurs
in his poetry. The relationship is, I believe, that on an intuitive level
Yeats was deeply aware of the form of his art, and that in many cases he
succeeded in implementing his ideas about art in rich and various ways in
the poems themselves. In the conclusion to this thesis, I would like to
say some things about the kind of analysis I have applied to Yeats's
poetry.
In "On Measure," William Carlos Williams gives a description of the
variable foot. THis description is rather vague and imipressionistic; as
Williams himself admits, the variable foot is something that he is still
seeking:
Measure, an ancient word in poetry, something we have almost forgotten
in its literal significance as something measured, becomes related
again with the poetic. We have today to do with the poetic, as
always, but a RELATIVELY stable foot, not a rigid one. That is all
the difference. It is that which must become the object of our
search. *92
The metreme is a very similar idea to the variable foot, since the
principle of allometric categorization groups accentual patterns that are
not necessarily identical, but are nonetheless relatively stable, since
certain internal accentual patterns are present in all allometric
instances.
As a means to study free verse, in terms of repetition of accentual
patterns rather than in terms of a predetermined paradigm, metremic
analysis may be useful. It may be that Yeats's position at the interface
between modern and pre-modern poetry can be seen in terms of the metreme.
In Yeats's poetry, metremes 75¯ are used in conjunction with the
traditional forms, while in free verse the traditional lines are taken
apart, and each metreme is given a line of its own.
Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac, in NOTES SUR LA TECHNIQUE
POETIQUE, discuss the inherent rhythmical unity of the lines of free verse
poetry:
"L'unit‚ du verse peut se d‚finir: Un fragment le plus court possible
figurant un arret de voix et un arrˆt de sens." Cela est si vrai que
la traduction … peu prŠs litt‚ral et vers … vers d'un poŠte ‚tranger
aligne des membres de phrase qui, pour n'ˆtre ni rhythm‚s ni rim‚es,
n'en gardent pas moins cette allure charact‚ristique qui les fait
consid‚rer et chanter somme des verse, selon l'ordre et les pauses de
leur lyrisme int‚rieur. *93
The suggestion that lines in free verse have a syntactical, and therefore a
rhythmical unity, and that they retain this unity in trnaslation, will need
to be explored, but it seems to be a reasonable idea. The first line of
"Memory," "One had a lovely face," for example, retains its pyrrhicretic
pattern in a simple French translation such as "L'une avait un beau visage"
or "Elle eut un beau visage."
Further, since the repetition of certain metremes has a connection to
the tone of voice of the speaker, metremic analysis could be used in
statistical studies to group poems according to tone of voice, or to
demonstrate the different rhythms characterizing different personae. In
two poems, "A Prayer for my Daughter" and "Among School Children," the
persona is very close to Yeats himself. He uses the first person pronoun
early in each poem: "For an hour I have walked and prayed" and "I walk
through the long schoolroom 76¯ questioning." A statistical analysis shows
that the order of occurrence of the different metremes in nearly the same
in these poems:
A Prayer for my Daughter Among School Children
distribution
order:
1 -/ 101 51.27% 89 54.26%
2 -/- 27 13.7 24 14.63
3 // 39 19.8 23 14.02
4 --/-/ 15 7.61 16 9.76
5 /--/ 15 7.61 12 7.32
Totals 197 164
In a third poem, "Ribh Considers Christian Love Insufficient," *94
Yeats makes use of a different persona, where the first person pronoun is
not Yeats, but a character named Ribh. Ribh is a character Yeats posits of
a mad poet or sage, similar to the mystic Michael Robartes, and in the
tradition of Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Accordingly, Ribh's tone is very
emphatic, as he describes his intense visionary experiences. A statistical
analysis of metremic distribution shows that the choiramb occurs much more
often in ":Ribh Considers," being second in occurrence rather than last as
in "A Prayer" and "Among School Children": 76¯
distribution order:
1 -/ 38 64.41%
2 /--/ 11 11.64
3 -/- 4 6.78
4 // 3 5.08
5 --/-/ 3 5.08
Total 59
The choriamb lends support to the emphatic tone of Ribh's voice, and this
emphasis is most apparent in the last four lines, where the choriamb is
repeated at the beginning of each line:
What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bit her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!
As a means to statistical analysis, it seems that the metreme is capable of
giving fairly clear and meaningful results.
Metremic analysis, as a kind of metrical analysis, then, has all the
applications that metrical analysis may be put to, but at the same time, it
is more versatile than most kinds of metrical analysis as presently
undertaken. One advantage that metremic analysis has over traditionalist
analysis, for example, is that, while recognizing the rigid, predetermined
form it is at the same time independent of this form, and one advantage
that metremic analysis has over linguistic-scientific analysis is that,
while independent of the predetermined form, it recognizes it. Metremic
analysis, then, is a synthesis of the major techniques and concerns of 78¯
the two main schools of contemporary metrical analysis.
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English Prosody, 6.
2 T. S. Omond, English Metrists, 240.
3 William Butler Yeats, Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley, 24;
letter dated September 8, 1935.
4 Yeats, Letters, 192-193; conversation took place in the fall of
1938.
5 Yeats, "The Symbolism of Poetry," in Ideas of Good and Evil, 247.
6 Yeats, Ideas, 254-255.
7 Omond, English Metrists, 254-255.
8 Sally M. Gall, "Pound and the Modern Melic Tradition." PAIDEUMA 8
1979 1, 46.
9 Sister M. Martin Barry, An Analysis of the Prosodic Structure of
Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 132.
10 James A. Powell, "The Light of Vers Libre." PAIDEUMA 8 1979 1, 24.
11 Major works in this field are Julie Parker Dabney's The Musical
Basis of Verse (1901) and Sidney Lanier's Music and Poetry (1904).
12 Gall, 36.
13 Omond, English Metrists, 50.
14 Craig LaDriere, "Prosody." The Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, 1974.
15 Omond, in English Metrists, traces the notion of the centroid to
Edward Wheeler Scripture's 1902 book, Elements of Experimental Phonetics,
lathough he suggests that the idea existed earler under the rubirc
"monopressure." Cf. Omond, 229-230.
16 Powell, 3.
17 Cf. A. Thomas Cole, "Classical Greek and Latin." Versification:
Major Language Types, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (1972), 66-88. I am indebted to
Dr. Janis Svilpis of the University of Calgary for information regarding
classical metres, and for the loan of this book.
18 M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary terms, 1981, 181.
19 Abrams, 181.
20 Yeats, "Speaking to the Psaltery." Ideas of Good and Evil, 25.
21 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth
Century to the Present Day (1906).
22 Writing at the same time, a minor metrist, Adelaide Crapsey, in A
Study in English Metrics (1918) quotes both Saintsbury and Omond, and the
disagreement inherent in their divergent theories results in confusion in
Crapsey's study, since she respectfully tries to incorporate everything
from both men.
23 Omond, A Study of Metre (1920).
24 Saintsbury, Historical Manual.
25 Omond, Study, 23.
26 Richard Roe, Principles of Rhythm (1823), 42; quoted in English
Metrists, 116.
27 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Concept of Meter: An
Exercise in Abstraction." PMLA 74 1959 585-598.
28 Saintsbury, History 1.387.
29 Saintsbury, Manual, 32.
30 Marina Tarlinskaja, "Rhythm-Morphology-Syntax-Rhythm." STYLE 18
1984 1, 3.
31 Thompson, The Founding of English Meter (1961).
32 Tarlinskaja, 32.
33 Supra-segmentals are "generally considered to be stress, juncture
and tune;" Michael Cummings and Robert Simmons. The Language of Literature
(1983), 51.
34 Thomas G. Goodell, "Quantity in English Verse." TRANSACTIONS OF
THE AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION 16, 83; quoted in English Metrists,
194.
35 Paul Fussell, Poetic Metre and Poetic Form (1965), 100.
36 Adelyn Dougherty, A Study of Rhythmic Structure in the Verse of
William Butler Yeats, (1973), 15.
37 Dougherty, 75-76.
38 Cf. The encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 675: "Composite groups
include more than one potential primary or nuclear accent, all but one
reduced to secondary level, under a single intonation-contour; a group is
composite there fore when it is susceptible of optional utterance as a
sequence of more than one group by imposition of additional contours of
accentuation and intonation with secondary accents of the composite group
as nuclear centers (UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, \o\/o.o, optionally e.g.
/o / /o\o). A composite group is thus a hypotactic incousion of two or
more potentially independent groups under the dominance of the coutour and
nuclear accent of one."
39 Barry, 1.
40 LaDriere, 672.
41 Yeats "Anglo-Irish Poetry," in A BROADSIDE (Dublin: Cuala, 1935),
[Sig C1v-C2r].
42 LaDriere, 672.
43 Cf. John P. Broderick, Modern English Linguistics (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1975).
44 W. C. Williams. Selected Poems (1968), 142.
45 Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading (London: J.
Dodsley, 1787), Lecture II, 298.
46 Yeats, Collected Poems (1950), 168.
47 Abrams, Glossary, 64.
48 Yeats, Autobiography (1950), 94.
49 In Essays and Introductions, 522.
50 Essays and Introductions, 521.
51 Essays and Introductions, 524.
52 Yeats, Collected Poems, 375-376.
53 Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (1951), 203.
54 "Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation," Collected Poems, 106.
55 Parkinson, 230. [?page]
56 Parkinson, 230.
57 Saintsbury, Manual, 32.
58 Robert Beum, The Poetic Art of William butler Yeats (1969).
59 Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro, A Prosody Handbook (1965), 147.
60 Beum, Handbook, 147.
61 Fussell, 23.
62 Essays and Introductions 522.
63 Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture (1979), 86.
64 Fishbane, 86.
65 Beum, Handbook, 185.
66 Beum, Handbook, 185.
67 Cf. Perry B. Yoder, "Biblical Hebrew." Versification, 52-65.
68 Saintsbury, Manual, 31.
69 Beum, The Poetic Art, 124.
70 Beum, The Poetic Art, 47-48.
71 Northorp Frye, The Great Code (1983), 131.
72 Collected Poems, 365.
73 Collected Poems, 393.
74 Collected Poems, 214.
75 Autobiography, 263-264.
76 Collected Poems, 382-383.
77 Collected Poems, 242-245.
78 Collected Poems, 88-90.
79 Collected Poems, 345.
80 Letters, 120; dated December 4, 1936.
81 Abrams, Glossary, 136.
82 Joseph Hone, William butler Yeats 1865-1939 (1942), 296.
83 Collected Poems, 54-55.
84 Letters, 47; dated December 21, 1935.
85 John Reed, Decadent Style (1985), 9.
86 Collected Poems, 127-128.
87 Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (1964), 4.
88 George Sherman Dickinson, "Aesthetic Pace in Music." JOURNAL OF
AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM 15 1957 3, 311.