Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Here’s a wonderful example of what a poet can do with line: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool:”

And another from John Donne:

The syntactical phrases break out of the pentameter lines, creating a strong tension. The technical name for a phrase that runs over into the next line is enjambment. It is a form of syncopation.

What happens to the rhythm and to the meaning if we take the enjambments out of “We Real Cool”?

No, I can’t go on. We can also desecrate Donne’s quatrain by following the syntax and abandoning the pentameter: the same words exactly, but without the rhythmic tension given by enjambment:

Not only is the structure weakened by the loss of the emphatic rhymepattern, but the tense, powerful beat of the lines has gone flabby.

I did not desecrate Brooks and Donne only to show the power of the line in poetry, but also as an indication of why poets may seek strict, formalised patterns to work in. The observation of a pattern, even an arbitrary pattern, can give strength to words that would otherwise wander bleating like lost lambs.

This is why it can be harder to write prose than to write poetry.

Free verse has no regular meter; but there are stress-patterns in most free verse, just as there are often plenty of rhymes and other rhythmic devices, though not in predictable places. Finding the flexible, changing patterns in free verse is a matter of listening intently, using your own ear to catch the poet’s beat.

For example, in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” you’ll find the hypnotic, gentle beat of that title line recurring, here and there, changed and varied, throughout the long poem: TUMtata TUMta / TUMtata TUMta….

Free verse that avoids stress patterns and doesn’t use the line end as a pause may compensate by other rhythmic devices, other kinds of pattern and recurrence. One is the regular repetition of lines or parts of lines. Left to its own devices, English poetry seems to do this only in refrains; but it has imported exotic forms, such as the sestina and the pantoum, which not only set up a pattern by strict repetition, but control the range of emotion and meaning by restricting the choice of words.

The ideal of free verse is that the poem itself will find/create its own internal pattern, as unpredictable and inevitable as any fir tree, any waterfall.

Tentatively, I propose the following statement: There are two elements to stress-rhythm in prose: first, actual syllabic stresses; second, syntactical phrases or word groups, following syntax, punctuation, sense, stress, and breath. These groups are what I call “bars.”

By reading a passage of prose aloud you will hear both the syllabic stresses and the slight pauses or rise-and-fall of intonation that break the sentence into bars. Almost certainly none of us will read or hear or “scan” it in the same way. That doesn’t matter. Prose has a whole lot of latitude.

The thing to remember is that good prose does have a stress-rhythm, subtle and complex and changing though it may be. Dull prose, clunky narrative, hard-to-read textbook stuff, lacks the rhythm that catches and drives and moves the reader’s body and mind and heart.

There are no rules for finding and feeling the rhythm of prose. It is a gift, but it is also a learnable skill—learned by practice. Probably the best practice is reading out loud. You know how an uncomprehending reader reads out loud, a scared fourth-grader, stumbling and missing the beats? A poor reader can’t dance to the prose.

But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

The only rule of prose “scansion” I know is: listen to what you are reading (or writing) as closely as you can, listen for its beat, and follow your own ear. There is no right way. The way that sounds right to you is the way. (Tao Rules, OK?) Don’t worry if you mark the stresses differently at different readings. Don’t worry if others disagree.

Don’t WORry if OTHers disaGREE

DON’T WORry if OTHers DISagree

Don’t WORry if OTHers DISaGREE

With repetition and emphasis, a regular beat tends to establish itself. My last reading of that casual prose sentence, with just a wee bit of elision, is iambic tetrameter. We are rhythmical animals. But prose refuses to give us predictability. If in prose one sentence is an iambic tetrameter, all you can predict is that the next one won’t be. True prose rhythm is always just ahead of us, elusive, running ahead, leading us on.

Prose rhythm is made up of many elements, repetitions of sound, parallels in syntax and construction, patterns of imagery, recurrences of mood, but just now I am sticking to the stress, the brute beat of it.

I think that if Virginia Woolf (in the quotation that opens this book) is right, that style is all rhythm—and I think that she is right, and that yes, she is profound—then even just the brute beat of a sentence might tell you something about what the sentence is and does. Do certain kinds of prose have certain characteristic stress-rhythms? Do authors have a characteristic beat of their own?

What follows are some very crude and simple investigations into the stress-rhythms of some bits of prose narrative. Mostly I just wanted to find out what would turn up if I counted the stresses. I had some expectations. I thought I might find clear, immediate differences in the stress-rhythm of different types of prose. And I wondered if I would find measurable differences in the stress-rhythms of different authors.

What I am counting here are oral stresses. These are the rhythms of the voice —not of silent reading, which is a mysterious activity far too fleet and delicate for my coarse net. It is my strong belief, however, that all prose worth reading is worth reading aloud, and that the rhythms we catch clearly in reading aloud, we also catch unconsciously when reading in silence.

As there are no rules of scansion in prose, anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s. My method consists of reading the sentences aloud; the second or third time through, I start marking the stresses (an accent mark over stressed syllables).

In many cases you will probably disagree with where I put the stresses. I probably do too. Also, there are (alas) degrees of stress. Some are unmistakable, TUM! some are arguable, TUM; some are weak, a substress, a mere tumlet to get one through a long series of tatas. I may or may not mark these feeble ones. There are many inconsistencies. I have been over these samples many times, but have never arrived at a final judgment in many places; my mind will never be easy about some of my decisions. Anyhow, if you haven’t already skipped this section, you can disagree with me by striking out my stresses and putting in your own.

The selection of samples is whimsical. I picked writers whose style interested me and whose books were handy at the moment, and let my finger fall on a passage without any real selection, though I did avoid passages with back-and-forth dialogue. “The Three Bears” is included as an oral touchstone. Twain, Tolkien, and Woolf are here because I admire them as stylists. The textbook was chosen because it is a well-written one, not a horrible example of academic mumble. Darwin is here because I wanted some good mid-Victorian narrative, Austen because I wanted some good pre-Victorian narrative. Stein is here because I thought she’d come out wildly different from all the others, which she didn’t.