Alan,
We are always, I think, talking about the asteroid. Prosody and metrical
analysis, one could say, would be a particularly poignant "shoring against"
in that regard. But I don't mean that in any critical sense-- your post is
wonderfully interesting.
A number of years ago I submitted to the journal Victorian Literature an
essay on Tennyson's relatively obscure poem "The Hesperides". The readers
were interested and asked me to revise, but I never got around to it. The
piece argued, via prosodic analysis, that the "metrical incoherence" of the
poem (all the literature dismisses the poem as an unaccountable metrical
failure by one of the greatest English-language prosodists) was illusory,
and that what is actually at work is a mirroring of quantitative meters in
accentual syllabics. When looking from such an angle, what appears upon
scansion is a clear patterning of the amphimacer and choriambus as base
feet.
This wouldn't exactly be an example of "freie Rhythmen" (which I'd never
heard of before), but it seems that Tennyson's experiment in the case of The
Hesperides is certainly based on accentual foci that are isochronous in
nature.
esoterically yours,
Kent
>Does any one know of a good prosodical study of German freie Rhythmen?
>Better yet, anything that generalizes about this sort of quasi-meter across
>languages? Though no poet in English has used them with the sophistication
>of e.g. Holderlin, I'm sure there's often something similar going on in the
>"free" verse of Lawrence, Jeffers, and sporadically in many others. My
>impression, though, is that only the Germans (who else?) have done anything
>towards systematizing it.
>
>Loosely, I would define this "meter" as one with a markedly isochronous
>"beat," falling into runs of larger groupings (twos, or more rarely,
>threes).Put this broadly, it would include things as diverse as ballad
>meter and OE alliterative verse, though I'm thinking here of "free" forms,
>without structural rhyme or alliteration, and often with a constantly
>shifting "measure" (larger grouping of beats). For example:
>
>A snake came | to my water-trough
>On a hot, hot day,| and I in pajamas for the heat,
>To drink there.
>
>where you have three two-beat units, followed by units of three and one
>(these could also be viewed as two further two-beat units, with
>"enjambement" between them). In the next stanza, however
>
>In the deep, strange-scented shade | of the great dark
> carob-tree
>I came down the steps with my pitcher
>And must wait, | must stand and wait, | for there he was
> at the trough before me.
>
>you start with three very clear 3-beat units, followed by one ambiguous
>unit (1 or 2) and three 2-beat units.
>
>Now, someone might say that this kind of analysis could be applied to any
>text, verse or prose. But I don't think so. A random text would generally
>have many more "ambiguous" units, and such things as the perfect accentual
>and grammatical rhyme between "in the deep strange-scented shade" and "of
>the great dark carob-tree" seem clearly designed to clarify the rhythm, and
>make the units sound more isochronous.
>
>At any rate, this sort of thing is probably only possible in languages,
>like English and German, that have a considerable degree of
>"stress-timing." Even Russian, despite its strong stress, is probably too
>"syllable-timed" to allow it.
>
>Is this of interest to anyone? Or are you all too busy waiting for the
>comet?
>
>
>Alan Shaw
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