Timothy Steele Condensed

form Timothy Steele's 'all the fun's in how you say a thing':

Meter and Rhythm

Metrical practice is more complex than metrical description. Actual versification involves rhthmical nuances and subtleties that can be only roughly indicated by scansion.

1. Conventional metrical description postulates merely two values: unaccentedness and accentedness
2. To put another way, versification involves the concurrent but distinguishable phenomena of meter and rhythm.
a. Meter is the basic norm or paradigm of the line, an analytical abstraction.
b. Rhythm is the realization in speech of this pattern.

Sometimes lines coincide with the abstraction. Lines will consist of five sucessive two-syllable, rear-stressed verbal units::
But we, alas! are chased, and you, my friends
The earth, the seas, the light, the days, the skies
Above, below, without, within, around

More frequently, the rhythm may involve an alternation of weak and strong syllables that approximates the norm fairly closely
Although the course be turned some other way
Perhaps, if summer ever came to rest
And here we dwell together, side by side

But because poets write not only in feet, but also in phrases, clauses, and sentences, most iambic lines exhibit a fluctuation between lighter and heavier stresses that is not absolutely regular, but is sometimes more emphatic, sometimes less.
Many have fewer than 5 strong syllables:
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep (4)
The bosom of his Father and his God (3)

sometimes more:
No selfish wish the moon’s bright glance confines (6)
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids (7)
True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up (8)
Milk hands, rose cheeks, or lips more sweet, more red. (9)

In this respect we may think of iambic lines as mountain ranges. Peaks and valleys alternate. But every peak is not an Everest, and every valley is not a Grand Canyon.

The key thing in English iambic verse is the fluctuation of the strength of the stresses. And the practice of traditional iambic meter involves the poet taking this basic alternating norm and modulating it internally