![]() It’s probably the most metrically conservative poem Frost wrote after his first book of poetry. Trochaic meters are less forgiving as far as variant feet go and if only for this reason, Frost departs from the hendecasyllabic meter only once. As you can hear, Frost reads this first foot as a spondee. All the following lines are the same except for the first foot of line 12. In the scansion above, I only marked the first line. So, when scanning the poem, what do we do? Do we scan it according to the poet’s intentions, or how the lines actually work in the English language? Frost may have been imitating a Latin meter, but the language is English. The first two might be called a Pentameter Hendecasyllable and the last might be called a Tetrameter Hendecasyllable. The first foot is cretic, the second anapestic, the third Iambic and the last a feminine ending, or an amphibrach.Īll the variations above are hendecasyllabic. This makes the meter tetrameter (four foot) rather than pentameter. Others taunt| me with hav|ing knelt | at well-crubs We naturally bias our readings toward Iambs. Being English speakers we prefer to hear Iambs rather than trochees. By modern standards, this would be a perfectly acceptable variant line within a larger Iambic Pentameter poem. This is essentially Iambic Pentameter with two variant trochaic feet (the first and second foot) with a feminine ending. Others | taunt me | with ha|ving knelt |at well-curbs Here is how most of us will read the line: If you were being asked to scan this poem for a class, then this is how the professor would probably expect the poem to be scanned (and I’ll provide this scansion), but as far as the English language goes. This is essentially Trochaic Pentameter with a variant dactylic second foot. Others | taunt me with | having | knelt at | well-curbs For example, if Frost’s poem were written in Latin, here is how we would unflinchingly scan the first line. What do I mean by this? I mean that, at the first chance, the reader will want to read a line as Iambic rather than trochaic. No poet, to my knowledge, has succeeded through and through. Trochaic meters are extremely difficult to pull off in English. The problem is that the hendecasyllabics of Catullus, when transliterated into English, make for a trochaic meter. So, what does all this have to do with Frost’s poem? It’s the reason Iambic meters, rather than Trochaic meters, are the dominant meters of English poetry. This feature of the language has nothing to do with regional or dialectal inflections. In a previous post, one commenter objected that I didn’t take into consideration regional or dialectal inflections. Also, all of our prepositional phrases prefer a rising stress (iambic or anapestic). We can do this because English is an accentual language. (The former also makes sense, but the exception proves the rule.) By stressing the, we draw attention to the fact that the car is singular. In nominal phrases, we don’t normally say the car, we say the car. The English language is a naturally Iambic and Anapestic language (meaning that the language prefers a rising stress). On the other hand, a distinction can be made between Latin quantitative Hendecasyllabics and the accentual Hendecasyllabics of the later Romance Languages, but that appears unrelated to the whether the word is used as a noun or adjective. Hendecasyllabic, according to Webster’s and to Princeton, is simply the adjectival form of Hendecasyllable (an eleven syllable line or word). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics makes no such distinction. However, the author or authors of the Wikipedia article offer no citations to back up their assertions. I notice that Wikipedia makes much ado about the difference between Hendecasyllable and Hendecasyllabic, (Hendecasyllabic Verse or Hendecasyllabics).English is an accentual language, meaning that words receive more or less stress dependent on their usage. English is not a quantitative language (meaning that syllables are long or short). What makes the poem difficult to scan is that the English language simply does not do what Latin did. Frost was imitating the Latin meter of Catullus – said to be one of his favorite Latin poets. It’s also one of the most devilish to scan. It’s written, nominally, in hendecasyllabics. While Robert Frost’s, For Once, Then, Something, isn’t the most memorable of his poems, it’s one of his most unique.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |