In the previous workshop notes, I said that Halliday's
phonometric metrical system might be criticised by some
linguists and literary scholars for its dependence on only two
degrees of stress. But as I said in the workshop, the degrees of
stress in spoken language are conveniently reduced in the
articulation of poetry to only two significant units.
There may of course be more than just two degrees of stress when
one phonetically analyses the oral reading of a poem, but we seem
to psychologically recognise only two significant degrees, and
this is what ultimately counts in the analysis of poetry.
A stronger challenge to the validity of the phonometric
metrical system may centre on the question of whether it actually
works well in the analysis of English poetry in general. Halliday
believes that his phonometric approach is generally more
suitable for the analysis of English poetry than classical
metrics. He claims in the first edition of his Introduction
that 'the received tradition of English metrical analysis, which
is based on the classical metrics of Latin and Greek, does not
accurately account for the rhythmic properties of English verse'
(p. 10). However, one needs to qualify Halliday's view here, as
the metrical tradition in Latin
and Greek is quantitative, and not, as is
the dominant tradition in English poetry, accentual-syllabic
(see below).
Whether the phonometric approach is suitable for most
English poems is debatable, but its advantage, I feel, cannot be
denied for at least some types of English verse. One
notices for instance, that most of the examples given by Halliday
are nursery rhymes or children's verse. One recognises the
appropriateness of the phonometric approach for these
types of verse. However, Halliday is less successful in the phonometric
analysis of more serious poetry. For example, in his analysis of a
stanza from Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard,
the phonometric analysis, which Halliday claims 'relates verse
rhythm to the rhythm of the spoken language', would have been more
successful had there been five stresses in the final line
of the stanza, as the other lines of that stanza
also have five stresses (see p. 14 of the first edition of
Halliday's Introduction for this). In the classical
approach (at least as it is practised by modern prosodists),
one can either subject the penultimate foot of the final line
(i.e. 'leaves the world to darkness and to me') to the normativeiambic foot, or have a pyrrhic substitution
there. In nursery rhymes, limericks and other simple verse in
English however, the number of stresses per lineis significant, and not quite the repetition of weak
and strongstresses in an ordered sequence in each
foot. Hence the phonometric approach seems to be
more appropriate for these verse genres, but this does not mean
that it will work satisfactorily for the analysis of all poetic
genres in English.
The phonometric system has some similarities with the accentual
metrical system. Some English poems are written with accentual metres (see Leech
pp. 118-9). Poems written with this metre were prevalent in Old
and Middle English, save that accentual metre in Old and
Middle English poetry is virtually synonymous with what is known
as alliterative metre
(i.e., the combination of bothstressandalliteration). We will be
restricting ourselves to poems written in modern English for this
course, but accentual metre does survive in modern English verse;
we see it not only in nursery rhymes and other simple verse, but
there are also some interesting examples of more serious poems in
modern English which use accentual metres, and you may
encounter some of them in your reading and analysis.
The dominant mode of versification for many poems written in
modern English is not accentual, but accentual-syllabic. As
you may know, one is not only interested in the number of stresses
per line in the accentual-syllabic approach to
versification, but also in the number of syllables per
line; the stresses must also be regularly arranged in
relation to the syllables. One reason why stress-based
approaches, like the phonometric approach, may not always
be adequate, is that both the number of stressesandsyllables per line, are significant for the
analysis of many poems written in modern English.
There have also been experiments which attempt to write English
poems which concentrate on only the number of syllables
per line. The most famous practitioner of this mode of
versification was the American poet Marianne Moore. The number of
syllables of a line in a stanza of a poem written
with syllabic metre, is the
same for each of the corresponding lines of the other stanzas.
Yet another minor (but historically important) metrical
tradition, is the quantitative.
In the quantitative approach to metre, one takes into
consideration not only the number of syllables per line,
but also the duration or length
of each syllable. Instead of looking at strong and weakstresses, one sees whether the vowel in each
syllable in a poem is long or short. These long and shortsyllables
form themselves into ordered patterns in a rather similar way to
the way the lines and feet of poetry written with
accentual-syllabic metre are organized. There were some
English versifiers who had tried to use this metre, in
imitation of Latin and Greek verse, but the English language does
not seem to be entirely comfortable with this kind of metre,
although it must be acknowledged that duration does seem
to have an important role to play (in addition to phonetic
stress) in the notion of stress as it is understood
in the literary analysis of English poetry.
With regard to duration, one must also recognise the
contribution that vowel length
and sound duration in general have to make to the speed of articulation of
poetry. An analysis of vowel length, together with the
analysis of the presence and absence of diphthongs,
triphthongs, consonants and consonant clusters, may
reveal the connection of these features not only with the poem's speed
of articulation as a whole and in relation to its specific
parts, but also, with the poems's style and meaning, which as you
know, are significant considerations in the analysis of all
literary works. In this connection, you may also want to consider
using the following terms, which you should be familiar with, as
they were used in courses in phonetics and phonology at a lower
level: sibilant, nasal, plosive,
liquid, fricative,
aspirate, affricate,
and voiced/unvoiced.
You should also know (or find out about) the following literary
terms: assonance, consonance, rhyme
(including feminine, masculine, half
(or para-), and imperfect rhymes), and onomatopoeia. In relation to the literary
terms, you may refer to Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms.
Chapter 6 of Leech's A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry
contains a brief discussion of most of the linguistic and literary
terms mentioned above.
In addition to the features mentioned, another factor which you
may want to consider in the analysis of poetry, is pause or silence
(see Leech pp. 107-8). Apart from the arbitrary pauses
which may be encountered in the actual reading of poetry, there
are more significant instances where pauses are created by
any or all of the following divisions of units in a poem: the grapho-metric
division between lines and stanzas; the orthographic
divisions between sentences, and
between colon and comma units; and the grammatical
divisions between clauses and between certain significant
clause constituents. If a pause is created by a grammatical
division, the word juncture is also used in phonology
(although - like the concept of stress in poetry, which
involves more than just phonetic stress - more
than just pause may be involved in the phonological
concept of juncture).
In literary criticism, if the grapho-metric unit of the
line does not coincide with the relevant grammatical
and orthographic unit, an enjambment
is created (see Leech, pp. 123-5 for a fuller discussion; it must
be noted here however that Leech limits his definition to the lack
of coincidence between the line and a corresponding grammatical
unit). An enjambment results in what is known as a run-on line. The opposite of run-on
line is end-stopped line,
where there is a coincidence of the line with the relevant
orthographic and grammatical units; in most cases,
the end-stopped line coincides with the clause,
and with the sentence or colon unit.
However, even if the divisions of orthographic and grammaticalunits do not occur at the ends of lines, they have
a part to play in creating the pauses in a poem. The pauses
created by grammatical and orthographic divisions
which occur somewhere in the middle of the lines of a
poem, are known as caesurae in
traditional metrics. If a caesura takes the place of a
missing stressed syllable, what Leech calls a silent stress occurs (p. 108). It
has also been claimed that silent stresses or what
Halliday calls silent beats
occur at the end of lines which have an odd number of feet (eg. in
trimeters
and pentameters, but not in tetrameters
and hexameters).
In addition to Blake's 'The Tyger',
Frost's 'Acceptance', and some
other poems which will be distributed during the workshop, we
will be discussing the following extract in today's workshop:
from Thomas Gray's 'Elegy
Written in a Country Church-yard':
The Curfeu tolls the Knell of parting Day
The lowing Herd winds slowly o'er the Lea
The Plow-man homeward plods his weary Way
And leaves the World to Darkness, and to me.
from Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard':
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