English Poetry Versification - Part I

Versification is the poets’ backpack they trek with through the mountains, valleys, streams, plains and moor in a cognitive environment. These poetry chefs search for the right ingredients to clean and season the poetry they cook for us to consume. Ever mindful that their poetry must have the right taste and texture for folks still growing baby teeth, those with all their natural adult teeth and those who must wear dentures. Ever mindful of this, poets select the best spices and condiments to add flavor to their poetry dishes. In advance, they set the weight and measurement then blend them well into the stuffing that goes into the poetry. When completed the poetry is placed on the serving tray with the presentation pleasing to the eyes in a manner that complements the poetry being served.

How is that appetizer above I’ve whipped up for you? Now here is a sample from poetry dish in the form of an acrostic rhyming ababcdeedebcb in non-standard iambic pentameter.

Versification

Very well, measure verses as you should
each word, or sound that has fallen from lips;
run as you like under the old stave wood;
stressed and unstressed feet, this way the voice dips
in musing, rhyme as you please on the verse;
for feet brake sharply, for a strong road mark;
in time, those pentameter lines will rhyme
catalectic scanning is not a crime;
acatalectic gives foot a stretch mark;
take time to sway with cadence every time;
inside rhymes and caesura solve conflicts;
omitted vowels make lines roll with terse;
now, those omissions are metrical tricks.

The purpose of it was to lead you on to the main thread, that persons who prepare poetry for consumption are called poets. What poets bring to the table to feed our senses are their thoughts they weave through the process of Versification.

In order to versify, poets use versifier tools which perform specific task but working together in unison to produce the end product known as poems. These six versifier tools are listed below and with comments on each of them.

1. Content
Words = facts, ideas, impressions

2. Form
Content Structure

3. Style

Poetic diction

4. Measurement
scansion
meter

5. Sound Effects

Alliteration

Assonance

Cacophony

Consonance

dissonance

Euphony

Onomatopoeia

Rhymes

Rhythm

Sibilance

6. Elements of poetry
literal meaning
imagery
figurative language
symbolism
rhythm and rhyme
tone

Content for poems is made up of facts, ideas and impressions which poets creatively weave together. The arrangement of content is dictated by the particular form and genre which poets use. In order to present this content to the audience or readers the poet provides a voice. In other words, the poet assigns someone who will speak the words written in the poem. The person who elucidates the content of the poem is called the voice. Voice can also mean the aura. The aura that is created from the element in the artistic production that induces a perception by the audience or reader of the moral qualities of the speaker or character, Aristotle called this the ethos. In narrative poetry, the persona is the “I” or the implied speaker as in the case of lyrical poems. Sometimes the poet would identify a created character as the speaker. However, in the absence of such a specific attribution, the term persona is applied. What good does this do? It allows for no automatic assumption that the creative work done is the expressed experiences or views of the poet. The identification of a character or characters by poets prevents any potential ambiguity. It also enables poets to give expression to things they would prefer not to have attributed to themselves.

Form is the arrangement of the meter, rhythm, lines, verses, stanzas in poems. When predetermined meter, rhymes and stanzas become the structural blocks for poems we have what is known as fixed form (sometimes referred to as closed form, classical form, traditional form). The poetry styles that fit into this mold are the epic, ode, sonnet, ballad, limerick, pantoum, sestina, triolet, villanelle, rondeau, ghazal, elegy, tanka, cinquain, haiku, senryu, octtava rima, terza rima, paradelle. When the structural blocks in traditional poetry are ignored as often done by modernist and postmodernist poets, we refer to such a structure as a non-compliant form also known as unstructured poetry or open form poetry. Non-compliant poetry styles are free verse, reportage, pose poems, language poetry, performance poetry, computer-generated poetry, egoless poetry, beat poetry, blank form, open form.

Style has a way of tagging traditionalist, modernist and post-modernist poets . Style is synonymous with poetic diction which is all about the choice of words, phrases, sentence structure and figurative language in literary work; the manner or mode of verbal expression, particularly with regard to clarity and accuracy. We know that poetry is one of the genres of literature. So the aforementioned holds true. Poets weave their style into content for the expressed desire to captivate the audience or readers. Hence, style has to do with the manner, in which individual poets say, do, express or perform their poetic works. In the western world, Aristotle remains the originating plank for thinking about the use of language in poetry and prose; so according to the English translation by Ingram Bywater (1920) of Aristotle’s Poetics, Aristotle asserted that the perfect style for writing poetry was one that is clear and without meanness. He defined meanness of style as the deliberate avoidance of unusual words, but warned against over-reliance on strange words as seen in this extract from Poetics.

“The perfection of Diction is for it to be at once clear and not mean. The clearest indeed is that made up of the ordinary words for things, but it is mean… A certain admixture, accordingly, of unfamiliar terms is necessary. These, the strange word, the metaphor, the ornamental equivalent, etc., will save the language from seeming mean and prosaic, while the ordinary words in it will secure the requisite clearness. What helps most, however, to render the Diction at once clear and non-prosaic is the use of the lengthened, curtailed, and altered forms of words.”

I greatly admire the style William Wordsworth used in his lyrical poems. In his poetic style, he replaced the lofty and eloquent style used by poets of his era. His style reflects his use of clear and simple language of the people as he bonded intensely with nature.

(to be continued in Part II of this blog)

Forms of Poetry: Blank Form

William Shakespeare wrote most of his poems in Blank Verse also known as Blank Form. This structure allows poems to be unrhymed with the rhythmic power of the meter. In order to write top quality blank form, one must pay close attention to syllables and word count. The meter most commonly used with blank form is the iambic pentameter with end stops. Opinion would have it that the Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard was the first to use blank form having been inspired by classical Latin verse and others of similar orientation that did not use rhyme. Of the romantic poets, the true believers of this poetic form rested on the shoulders of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats; also, Alfred Lord Tennyson whose long narrative poems are crafted with the blank form structure.

When free verse was hitting the top of the charts, as it were; Hart Crane and William Wallace Stevens, poets of immense respectability, held on to blank form. My opinion is that some poets of the old school found it hard to part familiar ways; but sought to solve the dilemma by lounging with meter, hugging the arms and legs of iambic pentameter and at the same time romping with free verse; some sort of a hoodwink comes to mind. Samuel Johnson voiced his concern that John Milton wrote bad blank form. On that I have no opinion, but I do accept what the records have said that Milton’s blank form became very popular so much so that it was referred to as the Miltonic blank Verse. It became the standard for those attempting to write English epics for centuries following Milton’s publication of Paradise Lost and poems he wrote later in his life.

Blank form is often misunderstood as free verse. A good way to remember the difference is to think of the word “blank” as meaning no rhymes at the end of verses and “free” meaning the freedom from fixed patterns of traditional versification. There is an anomaly with respect to the use of the iambic pentameter verses in blank form structure. When the scansion process is applied to poems written in blank verse, we tend to see that the strict standard iambic pentameter advocated is jaded as a result of it being peppered at times by the trochee, anapest, spondee and dactyl. The landing of these invaders in iambic pentameter verses gives off a delightful soothing effect; they break up the monotonous rhythm that dogs standard iambic pentameter verses. This is not a problem per se if we remember rightly that the definition for blank form has allowed for any other type of unrhymed metered verse but must be five feet exactly. This is where the “inversion technique” is used. This technique allows iambic pentameter verses to retain their dominance in spite of being invaded by other foot types. The “inversion technique” imposes strict compliance in that there must be no compromising on the five feet and the second foot must always be an iamb. The first foot of the verse measuring five iambic feet is the one most likely to change; most inversions tend to fall on the trochee.

Wherever the inversion technique occurs in iambic pentameter verses it changes the standard iambic pentameter verses into non-standard iambic pentameter verses; but it is okay to drop the prefix and simply call such verses iambic pentameter verses because majority holds the sway in any civilized environment or platform. The iamb, anapest, trochee, dactyl and spondee are the most common poetic foot used in English verse. Their profiles look like this

Iamb: one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable
Anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
Trochee: one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable
Dactyl: one stressed syllable followed two unstressed syllables
Spondee: two stressed syllables

When the scansion process is applied to poetry the stressed syllable is shown with a symbol that looks like this / and the unstressed syllable is shown with this symbol v, so the symbolic representation of the English poetic foot is listed as follows:

Iamb /v
Anapest vv/
Trochee /v
Dactyl /vv
Spondee //

Anglo Saxon (Old English) poems are written in accentual meter often referred to as the strong-stress meter; alliterative-stress meter or accentual verse. Anglo Saxon accentual verse is based on alliteration and stress. It was usually done with four-stressed lines with a caesura (a pause in the middle). The stressed lines always alliterate with the first stress, the second stress or both. Alliteration held lines of the poem together rather than the rhyme. All vowels were considered to alliterate with each other, but compound consonants would alliterate with themselves. The Anglo Saxons were more likely to use enjambment and not the end stop on their lines.

Most Modern English poems are written in accentual-syllabic meter. Accentual-syllabic meter counts both the stressed and unstressed syllables. It uses specific patterns, such as iambic pentameter or the classical hendecasyllable: a metrical line of eleven syllables. Every syllable counts to create the proper rhythm and flow of the meter. It is conceived as one of the tighter methods of measuring meter. Most of the verse forms that the English created based on French or Italian forms are Accentual-syllabic. Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary of poets are credited for the fusion of the accentual of English and the syllabic of French into modern English accentual-syllabic forms.