Alliterating the beats guides you to them, as English, like all stress-timed languages, elides all unstressed syllables between beats so that they take about the same time to recite as a single stressed syllable. Germanic stress is word-initial, but this does not mean that the line’s first syllable must be stressed instead, the beat must be on the natural stress of the phrase’s most important word. Each line has four natural beats - phrase stresses. The first widespread English meter wasn’t iambic or end-rhyming it was an alliterative meter common to all Germanic languages.
Keep in mind here, I’m no expert I’m just sharing the things I know. To this end, I’m looking to learn about scansion. I want to have better control of rhythm over my work. But, for older and wiser me, subconscious command isn’t good enough, anymore. I am a poet, it turns out my prose draws its power from an almost subconscious command of poetic language. Lately, perhaps under the influence of a significant other, I’ve been getting back into writing poetry.
#Line scansion free
Eventually, I got bored of free verse - as one does - and stopped writing poetry in any sort of “serious” way, mostly because I wanted to focus my effort on work I could get paid for. You can’t just put together a 10-syllable line and call it “iambic pentameter”.īut I was a kid without any real knowledge of line construction or ways to find information about it. This is, of course, not true French poesy is syllabic because French doesn’t have useful stress or syllable timing, but English is a stress-timed language. “Iambic pentameter” and “hexameter” were terms encountered in Lit textbooks, and not really applicable to the practice of poetry, where the only real distinction was between rhymers and non-rhymers (usually angsty teenage males forewent rhyming).Īt that time I thought that just making a 10-syllable line counted as “iambic pentameter”. When I was an angsty adolescent poet (don’t lie, we all were), I free-versed.
0 kommentar(er)
