Marcus, you wrote:
>>Meter comes in many forms. Is there really no meter in Spanish?
Someone said there's no meter in Hebrew.<<
This depends, does it not, on what you mean by meter? In music,
traditionally anyway, and unless a piece has no time signature, the meter is
set at the beginning of a piece, and it is either 4/4, 2/4, 3/8 or whatever.
The composer may play with the boundaries of that meter in any number of
ways by varying rhythm and phrasing, but the meter remains the same. And so,
if by meter in poetry we mean the same kind of formal framework--i.e.,
iambic pentameter, five iambic feet to a line--then, while I cannot speak
for Spanish, I think it is safe to say that there is no meter in Biblical
Hebrew poetry--I will not speak Hebrew poetry of other eras because I am not
sure; but I am pretty sure I remember this about the poetry of the Hebrew
Bible--just as there is no meter in Walt Whitman. This does not mean there
is no rhythm and it does not mean that Whitman was not consciously using
rhythm and playing with the ghost of meter in some of his poems, but if his
poems were musical scores, my own sense is that they would have to be
written without a time signature at the beginning.
Richard
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