Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

Here are a few examples of hendecasyllabic iambic pentameter, quoting some of the same poets and poems we quoted before. They all go:

OUT WITH YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THEM UP: don’t forget to SAY THEM OUT LOUD to yourself to become familiar with the effect of the weak ending.So priketh hem nature in hir corages;Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages 13CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales , General PrologueA woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 20That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice , Act IV, Scene 1How heinous had the fact been, how deservingContempt, and scorn of all to be excludedMILTON, 14 Samson Agonistes Our Brethren, are from Thames to Tweed departed,And of our Sisters, all the kinder hearted,To Edenborough gone, or Coacht, or Carted.DRYDEN: ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’What can enable sots, or slaves or cowards?Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.POPE: 15 Essay on Man It gives to think that our immortal being…WORDSWORTH: 16The PreludeA thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothingness;KEATS: Endymion , Book OneAnd like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,ROBERT FROST: ‘Spring Pools’With guarded unconcerned accelerationSEAMUS HEANEY: ‘From the Frontier of Writing’There’s far too much encouragement for poets–WENDY COPE: ‘Engineers’ Corner’

Substitutions

I hope you can see that the feminine ending is by no means the mark of imperfect iambic pentameter. Let us return to Macbeth, who is still unsure whether or not he should stab King Duncan:To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other.–How now! what news?

We have cleared up the first variation in this selection of three lines, the weak or unstressed ending. But what about this ‘vault ingambition’ problem? Keats has done it too, look, at the continuation to his opening to Endymion :A thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will never Passinto nothing ness; but stillwill keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleep Fullof sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

The first feet of lines 3 and 5 are ‘inverted iambs’ or trochees . What Keats and Shakespeare have employed here is sometimes called trochaic substitution , a technique, like weak endings, too common to be considered a deviation from the iambic norm. It is mostly found, as in the above instances and the following, in the first foot of a line. You could call it a trochaic substitution, or the inversion of an iamb–it amounts to the same thing.

Mix’din each other’s arms, and heart in heart,BYRON: Don Juan , Canto IV, XXVII Wellhave ye judged, well ended long debate,Synod of gods, and like to what ye are,MILTON: Paradise Lost , Book II Farfrom the madding crowd’s ignoble strifeGRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ShallI compare thee to a summer’s day?SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 18

That’s an interesting one, the last. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet opens in a way that allows different emphases. Is it ShallI compare thee, Shall Icompare thee or Shall Icompare thee? The last would be a spondaic substitution . You remember the spondee, two equally stressed beats? 17What do you feel? How would you read it out? There’s no right or wrong answer.

Trochaic substitution of an interior foot is certainly not uncommon either. Let’s return to the opening of Hamlet’s great soliloquy:

Here, the fourth foot can certainly be said to be trochaic. It is helped, as most interior trochaic switches are, by the very definite caesura, marked here by the colon. The pause after the opening statement splits the line into two and allows the trochaic substitution to have the effect they usually achieve at the beginning of a line. Without that caesura at the end of the preceding foot, interior trochaic substitutions can be cumbersome.

That’s not a very successful line, frankly it reads as prose: even with the ‘and’ where it is, the instinct in reading it as verse is to make the caesural pause after ‘makes’–this resolves the rhythm for us. We don’t mind starting a phrase with a trochee, but it sounds all wrong inserted into a full flow of iambs.

That’s better: the colon gives a natural caesura with which to split the line allowing us to start the new thought with a trochee.

For this reason, you will find that initial trochaic substitution (i.e. that of the first foot) is by far the most common. Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fenWORDSWORTH: ‘Milton!’ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!KEATS: ‘Ode to Autumn’

Just as it would be a pointless limitation to disallow unstressed endings to a line, so it would be to forbid stressed beginnings . Hence trochaic substitution.

There’s one more inversion to look at before our heads burst.

Often in a line of iambic pentameter you might come across a line like this, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes

How would you scan it?

‘Contracted tothine own bright eyes’ is rather ugly, don’t we think? After all there’s no valuable distinction of meaning derived by hitting that innocent little particle. So has Shakespeare, by only the fifth line of his great sonnet sequence already blown it and mucked up his iambic pentameters?

Well no. Let’s scan it like this: 18

That third foot is now pyrrhic , two unaccented beats: we’ve taken the usual stress off its second element, we have ‘demoted’ the foot, if you like. We have, in metrical jargon, effected pyrrhic substitution .

This is most likely to occur in the third or fourth foot of a line, otherwise it disrupts the primary rhythm too much. It is essential too, in order for the metre to keep its pulse, that the pyrrhic foot be followed by a proper iamb. Pyrrhic substitution results, as you can see above, in three unaccented beats in a row, which are resolved by the next accent (in this case own).