/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6460627]

>poetic meter
>Rhythm
>iambic feet
>stress vs unstress

These seem arbitrary and subjective as fuck.
Sorry I don't have a more nuanced argument, but I tried bringing this up in class and the only response I got was a shrug and 'it just sounds natural, you just hear it' which seemed pretty bullshit.

Well, I don't 'hear(though I'm reading it so, idk)' blank verse as being any different from standard prose. And if it's based on verbal recitation, isn't that irrelevant to the written word and just a subjective artifact of happenstance due to the way we're conditioned to speak?

Example from wikipedia
'So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see'

Allegedly this is 'unstressed stressed, unstressed stressed' but isn't that just saying the 'unimportant' words like 'so as can or' are unstressed because they'd be shorter when pronounced? If the oral language shifted so that we pronounced 'as' as 'ayyyyz' instead of 'ahz' would that also change meter?

'Long men breathe eyes see, so as can or can'

What's the verse on this? Is it stressedx5, unstressed x5? Is it still stressed/unstressedx5 if I read it aloud with the exact same cadence as I read the first one? Seems like I could read it 'naturally' in all manner of different ways, stressing different words to achieve different emphasis and meaning.

If it's subjective, that's fine. But the impression I got from class was like this 'meter' is some objective truth, a verifiable DNA code of poetry that I'm inexplicably blind towards, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills since I was the only one who seemed to have problems identifying this.

[Anonymous No.6460837]

Anyone know/care about meter?

[Anonymous No.6460867]

i think there is an element of subjectivity in prosody, but i think it's usually fairly easy to figure out. the counter example you gave, for instance, feels as you said, like five stressed syllables and five unstressed syllables, but the only reason that's the case is because 'long men breathe eyes see' doesn't really make grammatical sense

[Anonymous No.6460891]

>>6460867
sorry, and just to go further: the point isn't that it doesn't really make grammatical sense, it's that a poet might do something like that to create that rhythm, but it's not something you would normally see on the page or hear aloud. that's kind of the power of poetry. using the sound of words (even if it's only in your mind) to create a certain effect. what you wrote, for example, is very similar to sprung rhythm, which is when a poet intentionally writes a line so that it has more stresses than you would normally hear or expect to find

[Anonymous No.6460914]

I think that you will get much by going the objective vs subjective route, I don't think that's the issue. You could argue that it is circular in a way, that the natural way is the traditional way because the tradition feels natural to us.

But I have a huge problem with prosody and meter myself and I also feel as an odd one out that is just missing something. Whenever I try to analyze verse, the very act of paying attention to how it sounds makes me think of three or four possibilities.

[Anonymous No.6460923]

>>6460914
read w.h. auden if you want to see more possibilities

[Anonymous No.6461427]

>>6460627
When you're talking about rhythm in speech, it goes beyond the explicit meaning of the words being said- it's really just about the patterns of stress and relaxation in the sounds your mouth is making. And it so happens that the easiest pattern to learn is "on-off-on-off" so that's where you start with meter.
There are lots of different verbal patterns you can make, but you'd never know without first identifying meter as a concept.
The meter of a text is like the drumline of a song- it doesn't help the singer at all, but that doesn't mean it's not important.

[Anonymous No.6461442]

>>6460627
You are doing it the wrong way. It seems like you are pronounciating exactly like you speak and simply don't get the difference.

Rhythm and Poesy is the musical notes that alludes to how you pronounce.

And if you can't hear the difference it's because you dont know enough about these things yet.

[Anonymous No.6461470]

>>6460627
Always wondered about that as well. I can't tell when monosyllabic words are stressed or unstressed, especially when they're between two words that are also monosyllabic.

[Anonymous No.6461479]

>Allegedly this is 'unstressed stressed, unstressed stressed' but isn't that just saying the 'unimportant' words like 'so as can or' are unstressed because they'd be shorter when pronounced? If the oral language shifted so that we pronounced 'as' as 'ayyyyz' instead of 'ahz' would that also change meter?

No.

It's nothing to do with the length of sounds. "Contract", in the sense of the legal document, is two syllables. The first one is shorter, but is also stressed.

This is the major difference between the poetry of English and the poetry of the classical language Greek and Latin.

In Latin, the rhythm varies between long and short vowels. If the vowel in a syllable takes a long time to be pronounced, it is equivalent to a stress in English prosody. If it's short, it's 'unstressed'.

When English poets during the Elizabethan period tried to create a metre native to the English language so that their poetry could compete with Italian and French poetry, they found that this couldn't work. English, being a Germanic language, was far more suited to stress on syllables being the unit of rhythm.

[Anonymous No.6461494]

I have never understood English meter. I don't get it.

Now for meter in my language, as well as other Latin languages, it all makes so much sense and it's all so absolutely and extremely easy.

Why is English meter so difficult?

[Anonymous No.6461558]

Is there a youtube-video or something?

[Anonymous No.6461583]

>>6461494
Because in English, to know where to stress in a word you need to be able to know how to pronounce it, and also know how that pronunciation can be modified in the context of a sentence. And pronunciation in English is notoriously difficult for non-native speakers.

Verse in Romance languages is syllabic, meaning you just have to count the number of syllables in a line. There's obviously more rules than that, but any idiot can get the basic gist of it.

[Anonymous No.6461590]

>>6460627
OP: Try to scan this passage:

Bathe now in the stream before you,
Wash the war-paint from your faces,
Wash the blood-stains from your fingers,
Bury your war-clubs and your weapons,
Break the red stone from this quarry,
Mould and make it into Peace-Pipes,
Take the reeds that grow beside you,
Deck them with your brightest feathers,
Smoke the calumet together,
And as brothers live henceforward!

Can you find a rhythm in it? Does it sound like standard prose to your ear?

[Anonymous No.6461595]

>>6461494
English is stress-timed, unlike Romance languages, so the most common English meters are based on stresses