> Is this of interest to anyone? Or are you all too busy waiting for the
comet?
>
Interested very. But are you hinting the desirablity of a Germanic
systematizing of English? I'm intrigued by the relation of free forms to
notional form, to what extent, or length of a dog's chain, can English free
verse go from ghostly supports and stand unaided? The two and three beat
groupings are inherent in the speech, and can be seen as much in Jacobean
blank verse, fr'instance, and Eliotic free verse someways developed them
out, playing against a notional but not-used 'norm', whereas Lawrentian free
verse et al rely on parallelism for scaffolding support, but how far can
English be pushed up and against the iambic drift, that breaks apart on the
waves, into trochaic-led 'falling' rhythms, the patterns that drop down in
song?
db
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 5:11 PM
Subject: freie Rhythmen
> 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
|