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

Metre

Poetry is metrical writing.

If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.

J.V. CUNNINGHAM

I

Some very obvious but nonetheless interesting observations about how English is spoken–meet metre–the iamb–the iambic pentameter–Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

YOU HAVE ALREADY achieved the English-language poet’s most important goal: you can read, write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. If this were a book about painting or music there would be a lot more initial spadework to be got through.

Automatic and inborn as language might seem to be, there are still things we need to know about it, elements that are so obvious very few of us ever consider them. Since language for us, as poets in the making, is our paint, our medium , we should probably take a little time to consider certain aspects of spoken English, a language whose oral properties are actually very different from those of its more distant ancestors, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek and even from those of its nearer relations, French and German.

Some of what follows may seem so obvious that it will put you in danger of sustaining a nosebleed. Bear with me, nonetheless. We are beginning from first principles.

How We Speak

Each English word is given its own weight or push as we speak it within a sentence. That is to say: Each English wordis given its own weightand pushas we speakit with ina sentence.

Only a very badly primitive computer speech programme would give equal stress to all the words in that example. Throughout this chapter I use boldtype to indicate this weight or push, this ‘accent’, and I use italics for imparting special emphasis and SMALL CAPITALS to introduce new words or concepts for the first time and for drawing attention to an exercise or instruction.

A real English speaker would speak the indented paragraph above much, but certainly not exactly , as I (with only the binary choice of heavy/light available to me) have tried to indicate. Some words or syllables will be slid over with hardly a breath or a pause accorded to them (light), others will be given more weight ( heavy).

Surely that’s how the whole world speaks?

Well, in the Chinese languages and in Thai, for example, all words are of one syllable ( monosyllabic ) and speech is given colour and meaning by variations in pitch , the speaker’s voice will go up or down. In English we colour our speech not so much with alterations in pitch as with variations in stress: this is technically known as ACCENTUATION. 1. English, and we shall think about this later–is what is known as a STRESS-TIMED language.

Of course, English does contain a great many monosyllables (many more than most European languages as it happens): some of these are what grammarians call PARTICLES, inoffensive little words like prepositions ( by, from, to, with ), pronouns ( his, my, your, they ), articles ( the, an, a ) and conjunctions ( or, and, but ). In an average sentence these are unaccented in English.From timeto timeand for as longas it takes.

I must repeat, these are not special emphases , these are the natural accents im parted. We glide over the particles (‘from’, ‘to’, ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘as’, ‘it’) and give a little push to the important words (‘ time’, ‘long’, ‘takes’).

Also, we tend to accent the operative part of monosyllabic words when they are extended, only lightly tripping over the -ing and -ly, of such words as hoping and quickly. This light tripping, this gliding is sometimes called scudding .

We always say British, we never say Brit ishor Brit-ish, always mach ine, never machine or mach-ine. The weight we give to the first syllable of British or the second syllable of ma chineis called by linguists the TONIC ACCENT. Accent here shouldn’t be confused either with the written signs (DIACRITICAL MARKS) that are sometimes put over letters, as in café and Führer, or with regional accents–brogues and dialects like Cockney or Glaswegian. Accent for our purposes means the natural push or stress we give to a word or part of a word as we speak. This accent, push or stress is also called ictus , but we will stick to the more common English words where possible.

In many-syllabled or POLYSYLLABIC words there will always be at least one accent. Credit. Dis pose. Con tinue. De spair. Desperate.

Sometimes the stress will change according to the meaning or nature of the word. READ THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OUT LOUD:He in clinesto pro jectbad vibesA project to study the inclines.He pro ceedsto re bel.The rebel steals the proceeds.

Some words may have two stresses but one (marked here with an ´) will always be a little heavier: ábdi catecon sider átion.

Sometimes it is a matter of nationality or preference. READ OUT THESE WORDS: Chicken- soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigar ette. Maga zine.

Those are the more usual accents in British English. NOW TRY THE SAME WORDS WITH THESE DIFFERENT STRESSES… Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette. Magazine.

That is how they are said in America (and increasingly these days in the UK and Australia too). What about the following? Lámentable. Mándatory. Prímarily. Yésterday. In cómparable.

La méntable. Man dátory. Pri márily. Yester dáy. Incom párable.

Whether the tonic should land as those in the first line or the second is a vexed issue and subject to much cóntro versy or con tróversy. The pronunciations vary according to circumstances or circum stáncesor indeed circum- stahncestoo English, class-bound and ticklish to go into here.

You may think, ‘Well, now, hang on, surely this is how everyone (the Chinese and Thais aside) talks, pushing one part of the word but not another?’ Not so.

The French, for instance, tend towards equal stress in a word. They pronounce Canada, Can-a-daas opposed to our Canada. We say Bernard, the French say Ber-nard. You may have noticed that when Americans pronounce French they tend to go overboard and hurl the emphasis on to the final syllable, thinking it sounds more authentic, Ber- nardand so on. They are so used to speaking English with its characteristic downward inflection that to American ears French seems to go up at the end. With trademark arrogance, we British keep the English inflection. Hence the American pronunciation cli chÉ, the English cliché and the authentic French cli-ché. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them journal and ma chine. The French give them their characteristic equal stress: jour-naland ma-chine. Even words with many syllables are equally stressed in French: we say repe tition, they say répétition( ray-pay-tee-see-on).