Geekin' out on poetry (and Romanticism)—my study thread

Ode to the West Wind by Shelley

O wild / West Wind, / thou breath / of Aut / umn's be ing, ( / of aut umn's / be ing?)
Thou, from / whose un / seen pres / ence the / leaves dead (the / leaves dead?) (whose un / seen pres ence / the leaves dead?)
Are driv / en, like ghosts / from an / en chan / ter flee ing,

Again it seems to be mostly iambic pentameter, but there's a complex rhyme scheme here, and I'm not quite sure how to parse some of the lines at their ends.

Iamb (dun dun)
Trochee (dun dun) aka the anti-Iamb
Cretic (dun dun dun)
Anapaest (dun dun dun)
Amphibrach (dun dun dun)

About the Amphibrach (new kid on the block, that I haven't really looked into yet):

An amphibrach (/ˈæmfɪbræk/)[1] is a metrical foot used in Latin and Greek prosody. It consists of a long syllable between two short syllables.[2] The word comes from the Greekἀμφίβραχυς, amphíbrakhys, "short on both sides".

In English accentual-syllabic poetry, an amphibrach is a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables. It is rarely used as the overall meter of a poem, usually appearing only in a small amount of humorous poetry, children's poetry, and experimental poems. The individual amphibrachic foot often appears as a variant within, for instance, anapaesticmeter.

It is the main foot used in the construction of the limerick, as in "There once was / a girlfrom / Nantucket." It was also used by the Victorians for narrative poetry, e.g. Samuel Woodworth's poem "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1817) beginning "How dear to / my heart are / the scenes of / my childhood."[3] W. H. Auden's poem "O where are you going?" (1931) is a more recent and slightly less metrically-regular example. The amphibrach is also often used in ballads and light verse, such as the hypermetrical lines of Sir John Betjeman's poem "Meditation on the A30" (1966).

Amphibrachs are a staple meter of Russian poetry. A common variation in an amphibrachic line, in both Russian and English, is to end the line with an iamb, as Thomas Hardy does in "The Ruined Maid" (1901): "Oh did n't / you know I'd / been ru in'd / said she".[4]

Some books by Dr. Seuss contain many lines written in amphibrachs, such as these from If I Ran the Circus (1956):

All ready / to put up / the tents for / my circus.
I think I / will call it / the Circus / McGurkus.
And NOW comes / an act of / Enormous / Enormance!
No former / performer's / performed this / performance!
Source​

It seems like an Amphibrach can do the same job as a Cretic—create a smooth transition between Iambs and Dactyls. It also occurs to me the poem Red rover red rover is built from Amphibrachs.

I think it'll be a while before I can really figure out what's going on with those line ends. And maybe I don't need to specifically figure everything out.

Meandering

Plus of course, it goes without saying, they also use long meandering Victorian-style sentences that can run on for several verses or several dozen.

And though I said above it doesn't rhyme,* Milton inserts several near-rhymes, not always at the ends of lines. This makes it all feel extremely sophisticated and subtle.

* Just noticed this part's written in iambic (so was that, up until the last syllable). It's weird how fast you can grow to recognize things like this.

Let the metric analyses begin

I've decided to analyze the meter in a few poems to help me understand how they get such good smooth enjambment (flow-through) from line to line.

Paradise Lost by Milton:

Forthwith / upright / he rears / from off / the pool
His migh / ty stat / ure; on / each hand / the flames
Driven / backward / slope their / pointing /spires, and, rolled
In bill / ows, leave / i' th' midst / a hor / rid vale.

Most of it looks like Iambic Pentameter (blank verse actually, since it doesn't ryhme), except for the first part of line 3, and also the end of it. I'm not even looking up what that one is, it's one of those trick feet.

What's the name for the backwards Iamb? Two syllables, emphasis on the first one? Trochee.
Driven / backward / slope their / pointing—all trochees. That's it—everything else in this stanza is iambic penta. Except for whatever that one is at the end of line 3—three syllables, first and third stressed. Ok, screw it, I looked it up on the Wiki page. It's called a cretic or an amphimacer. Here's what I found about it:

A cretic (/ˈkriːtɪk/; also Cretic, amphimacer /æmˈfɪməsər/ and sometimes paeon diagyios)[1] is a metrical foot containing three syllables: long, short, long ( ¯ ˘ ¯ ). In Greek poetry, the cretic was usually a form of paeonic or aeolic verse. However, any line mixing iambs and trochees could employ a cretic foot as a transition.* In other words, a poetic line might have two iambs and two trochees, with a cretic foot in between.

Words which include a cretic (e.g. Latin cīvitās and its various inflections) cannot be used in works composed in dactylic hexameter or dactylic pentameter.

In Latin, cretics were used for composition both in comedy and tragedy. They are fairly frequent in Plautus but rarer in Terence. (See Metres of Roman comedy.)

For Romance language poetry, the cretic has been a common form in folk poetry, whether in proverbs or tags. Additionally, some English poets have responded to the naturally iambic nature of English and the need for a trochaic initial substitution to employ a cretic foot. That is, it is commonplace for English poetry to employ a trochee in the first position of an otherwise iambic line, and some poets have consciously worked with cretic lines and fully cretic measures. English Renaissance songs employed cretic dimeter fairly frequently (e.g. "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" attributed to William Shakespeare). Because the cretic, in stress-based prosody, is natural for a comparison or antithesis, it is well suited to advertising slogans and adages.

Source
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* Emphasis mine, because this is exactly what's happening here. The cretic (pronounced "Critic" apparently?) is used specifically I believe so the poem can switch smoothly back into iambic. Without the clever use of the cretic, the stresses would have no longer lined up where they belong; the next line would have been bass-ackwards iambic penta—aka trochee. Which I believe rhymes with low-key. Or Loki.

Whoah! This is awesome!!

Copypasta from above: "I've learned now that the opposite of an Anapest is called a Dactyl—three syllables to a foot, accent on the first. Not a very helpful name though. Couldn't it be an anti-pest, or something? Antipasto maybe? A little consistency in naming would be nice."

Well glory be!! I've now learned that another name for an anapest is an antidactylus!

That's almost an "Ask and ye shall recieve" moment, except that I know the more common name by far is Anapest (at least I think it is). If I call it Antidactylus most people wouldn't know what it means.

Hah! How bizare, that I'd ever say these things. A few days ago I hardly knew any of these words. And most people on this dirtball will never know any of them.

Ridiculosum indeed...

The plan to mend this cursed end-stop that's got me all blocked up

Quoted from above:

"End-stopped lines are those that conclude with a definite pause, at least with a comma, in poems where the effect of the meter depends on maintaining the integrity of the individual line."

The part I bolded is the main source of my trouble. I've been using a very sing-songy type of meter, very similar to a limerick, with cute little internal rhymes and a very strong, obvious meter to it, and just like a limerick, it definitely is meant to stop hard at the end of each line. Its strongly rhythmical quality depends on it.

I need to dwell for a while on those samples (in the Enjambment entry) by Milton, Shelley, and Williams, as well as immerse myself deeply in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Then I need to pen a lot of lines.

Enjambment

Here's a little verse demonstrating my frustration at being super-stuck in what's known as End-Stop(-page?)(-ping?). To quote the entry about it from the weird little site I mentioned just above: "End-stopped lines are those that conclude with a definite pause, at least with a comma, in poems where the effect of the meter depends on maintaining the integrity of the individual line. The expectation of end-stopped lines was most pronounced in the eighteenth century."

I em-blue-ified the part about my little problem above.

I actually tried several times, or wanted to, but I found since I had to concentrate on meter as well as saying something that makes sense, and being just-insulting-enough without being too insulting, it was too much to also combat my end-stopping tendencies. I felt like I was already juggling chainsaws on a high wire. I plan to devote some time to it very soon. Perhaps even tonight.

But first, here's the entry on Enjambment (examples in link):

"Enjambment (also called "run-on lines," and, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "rove over") is the practice of carrying the rhythm of one poetic line forward into the next line without any pause at the end of the line. The word itself suggests "straddling" or "hopping over." For some poets and in some poems--such as Milton in Paradise Lost or Shelley in "Ode to the West Wind"--enjambment may occur in the majority of the lines, at least in certain passages. In other cases it may be a rare occurrence. In modern free verse, calculated enjambments constantly remind the reader that regular meter is being resolutely evaded. The opposite of the enjambed line is the end-stopped line. Enjambment serves many purposes; in a speech in a Shakespeare play, a character may speak at first in stately end-stopped lines and then lose his temper and lapse into enjambed ones. In a poem by William Carlos Williams, enjambment can convey the inexorable power of nature in the progress of a season."​

Foot (prosody)

The Wikipedia page on Foot (prosody) has some nice graphs showing the most commonly-used feet, with somewhere a link to a very comprehensive list showing all of them(?), even those that are mostly just curiosities. I guess prosody is the collective term I was looking for above, when I asked what you call all these different terms like Anapest, Iamb and Dactyl etc.

Very helpful. Soon I'll know this stuff, though in a year I probably won't remember some of the names. A few I'm sure I will. But the most interesting part for me so far has been a little entry at the very bottom of the page—the last link listed under External Links—

• Prosody Tutorial by H.T. Kirby-Smith

It leads to an incredibly ridiculous-looking series of eye-searing pages in various fluorescent shades of vile yellow and poinsonous purple, with flashing, spinning widgets and all manner of Myspace or Geocities looking stuff. So far though there's some solid information (and after the first couple of pages I have't seen any more of the eye-hurting stuff)(yet). If you click on through to see the other pages, there's apparently a course teaching these terms and techniques. I'm currently exploring that strange site.