PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS
Giving pupils the reading skills to succeed!
Paddy Salmon MA PGCE
Head of English SIS (Sèvres)
1993-2012
paddysalmon.wix.com/english-courses
METRICAL PATTERNINGS
Iambic pentameter has been used as a very typical verse line for hundreds of years. Chaucer used it for telling stories in verse, Shakespeare based his great verse dramas on it, Milton used it for epic verse such as Paradise Lost: it forms the basis of most sonnets through the ages and it was also used by Wordsworth for romantic poetry based on nature, such as his poem "The Prelude", his great study of self-development.
As a form, iambic pentameter signals a sense of working in a well-recognised poetic tradition. It also signals language and verse of a consciously higher register than, for example, the ballad form, which we shall consider later. In breaking away from the 18th century poetic tradition of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, Wordsworth and Coleridge deliberately chose to call their collection “Lyrical Ballads” as they wished to find a poetry closer to everyday speech, according to Wordsworth in the Preface. Iambic pentameter had been felt before then to be the proper medium for serious poetry – as opposed to ballads, that had always existed for the non-educated. Similarly, William Blake's choice of the ballad form to set his "Songs of Innocence" and later "Songs of Experience" marks a deliberate signalling of intention where the nursery rhyme tradition is subverted in the "Songs of Experience".
When iambic pentameter doesn’t rhyme, it is called ‘blank verse’. A poem such as "Two Look At Two" by Robert Frost uses blank verse and is self-consciously following in the footsteps of the tradition of nature and autobiographical poetry, which Wordsworth pioneered with his poem 'The Prelude'. When iambic pentameter rhymes in couplets, it is usually called ‘heroic couplets’ and is particularly associated with narrative or epic poetry of the 17th and 18th century (although the great epic poem 'Paradise Lost' doesn't rhyme).
Very regular iambic pentameter would always become slightly tedious (although Christopher Marlowe in his ‘Tamburlaine’ plays, for example, used it to full bombastic effect with his “mighty line” ), so writers have always exploited variations to give emphasis to words and to create dramatic effects. Thus Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question..” for example, actually highlights the word “that”, since the expected emphasis on the normally unaccentuated word “is” would not sound right. The line is also skewed by having an extra syllable. The total effect here, then, is of somebody thinking out loud, using the rhythms of everyday speech, rather than the heightened rhythms of controlled versification, which would be too regular and artificial.
The 'windhover' is an archaic name for a kestrel, a small falcon. The language used is full of references to chivalry, alluding to a world where falconry was a natural pastime. One major irony is that Christ (the essence of mildness, humility, victimisation) is equated with this predatory bird, who is addressed in royal, chivalric terms (minion, dauphin, kingdom).
The Windhover
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To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- |
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dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding |
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Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding |
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High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing |
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In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, |
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As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding |
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Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding |
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Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! |
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Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here |
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Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion |
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Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! |
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No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion |
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Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, |
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Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
It has been noticed before but it is worth noticing again at this point how much accumulated emphasis is gathered upon the word “Buckle“, not least because the traditional and expected iamb is reversed at the beginning of the line. Buckle has two meanings and both are present here: to buckle meaning to fasten, as in buckling a belt or harness and to buckle, meaning "collapse". Here, because Hopkins suggests he is the "prey" of the falcon (ironically linked to 'Christ our Lord') and thus both in mortal danger AND in religious ecstasy at the same time, we are taken into areas of ambiguity and irony, aporia, even, - areas which I try to look at more closely in another section.
This is a wonderful poem to study with pupils and a close reading reveals lots of other ironies and effects created by his complex use of words, but right here, all I wanted to notice was the way the iambic pentameter is still referenced in this poem, though pulled and strained in all sorts of different ways. I wouldn't personally bother with Hopkins' theories of "sprung rhythm", which I think is a bit technical for secondary pupils. What can be brought out in readings aloud is the way the poem forces certain words to be emphasised by the rhythm (as well as by alliteration and other effects). Most particularly this happens with the word "Buckle", followed by the almost triumphantly capitalised "AND".
BALLADS
By contrast with the iambic pentameter, iambic tetrameter, or trimeter, used in the ballad form of four-line quatrains (most often), is another very commonly used form of metrical patterning. Ballads signal a tradition of earthy simplicity, as they have been used throughout the ages to tell stories (the ballads of Robin Hood, for example); to compose songs, including hymns and nursery rhymes; and to create rapid, popular responses to political events and dramas.
Most often ballads are in four-lined iambic tetrameters, though there are very many variations possible. They usually rhyme and they signal a popular mode of writing, theoretically easy to read as well as easy on the eye and the ear. The Beggar's Opera by John Gay springs to mind, staging as it did the racy ballads that caught the attention of its period. That the ballad form can be used in highly complex ways can be seen when one considers the ballad styles of William Blake or Emily Dickinson. WH Auden in the Thirties consciously used the ballad to appeal to a wider audience than modernism was then reaching. The Ballad of Miss Gee (1937) is a typical example, a simple-seeming story of a very ordinary woman, who gets cancer and dies. There is, however, a blend of cynicism, compassion and dark humour, which makes our response to the poem a confusing one. Try it out on classes and see what they think!
In more recent times Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, amongst others, have cast a lot of their poetry, also, in the ballad form. Heaney's early " bog " poems, thus, not only exploit the ballad form in traditional ways, but they also look on the page as if they delve vertically into the "bog", "digging" their way into prehistory, memory and the very earth itself of Ireland.
Here, now, is a very simple ballad structure being used in Oscar Wilde’s "Symphony in Yellow"
Symphony in Yellow
An omnibus across the bridge
Big barges full of yellow hay
The yellow leaves begin to fade
The title of the poem asks us to make connections with music. A symphony is a very grand affair, with a full orchestra, big effects and is in three parts. Here we have three parts, but the form of the poem is hardly sufficiently grandiose to match our expectations of the word "symphony". What is going on here and how can a close reading uncover more?
To start with, the metre is mainly regular, with poetic inversions emphasising only three words, "Crawls", "Shows" and "Lies".
We notice the simplicity of the language and we notice also the repetitions of the colour "yellow". This colour had, in the 1890s, strong associations with the "decadent" so-called "aesthetic" movement and as a colour was associated with pre-Victorian regency décors and French (in other words sexy!) literature. Aubrey Beardsley, one of Wilde's circle of friends, contributed to the somewhat scandalous "The Yellow Book", an art and literary magazine which ran for a year 1894-95. Going hard against what they saw as the materialism and industrialization of the age, the aesthetic movement called for "art for art's sake". Some of this contextualization is important fully to understand the poem and it can provide a useful entry into further examination of "fin de siècle" art and literature (Beardsley's illustrations alongside Gustave Doré's, Ernest Dowson's "Non Sum Qualis" – for which there is an excellent Guardian commentary at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/mar/14/non-sum-qualis-cynarae-dowson and which can be used to link up with Verlaine and Rimbaud and the symbolist movement elsewhere).
The originators of "The Yellow Book" claimed, I believe, that it had its origination during one of London's worst "yellow" fogs. As a colour, it might signal autumn, perhaps, and the end of summer (or the end of the century – "fin de siècle" literally). The hay has been cut. There is a sense of finality, if not of sickness, in the possibilities of the colour itself.
The poem works very much like a painting. Colours are obviously important, with yellow, the dominant colour. We end with the Thames being described as unambiguously beautiful, like a "rod of rippled jade". The alliteration on the 'r's and the use of "jade" creates an exotic picture of beauty. The poet does not explore his own feelings explicitly; instead, what we are offered is a view of a cityscape, which, swathed in fog, might have been presented negatively. Instead, the surprise is to find the scene compared to nature. The omnibus is like a "butterfly" (positive), the barges are full of "yellow hay" (positive), the fog is like a "yellow scarf" (positive, surely). Only the human presence, "a passer-by", shows like a "midge" (negative but natural).
Even autumn, traditionally a season of melancholy and gentle regret, is here presented positively with the word "flutter". The poet is surely positioned along the bank, if the river lies at his feet. The scene is relayed in all its detail ("elms" rather than "trees") from a distance and with the coolly dispassionate lens of a film camera, which is panning along the riverside scene.
It's a picture which seems to be saying, "Out of heavily industrialised cityscapes an artist with the right sensitivity – the aesthete – can create beauty (music even) while appreciating the scene in all its own beauty." The paintings one might immediately think of are Monet's impressionist paintings of London in the fog, the start of the impressionist movement, or else Whistler's "nocturnes" and other paintings of London.
Can one detect in this poem Wilde's lack of sympathy with his human fellows? That sense of distance changes later in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" where the earlier lack of identification has been radically changed.
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- /
= AN IAMB
- / - / - / - / - /
= AN IAMBIC PENTAMETER
For a much fuller consideration of the following poem and its context I would urge you to read Adrian Barlow's contextualising of it in his book "World and Time". All I wish to do here is to draw attention to some of the rhythmical features of it as a sonnet.
In Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3rd 1802”, the poet reverses the foot at the beginning of each of the first two lines to accentuate the first word of the line:
Earth has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by…
and it is not until the third line that we get a regular line, which by its musicality and fluidity, suggests the glory it wishes to project:
A sight so touching in its majesty
As you might imagine, a later line, such as
The river glideth at his own sweet will
is absolutely regular, as the smooth uninterrupted movement of the river is what is being stressed here.
The poem finishes with,
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart is lying still.
There is a double stress effect on "Dear God!" with a strong caesura after, to express the poet's emotion at this point. No marks for guessing why the last line, however, finishes with a very regular line. The regular, beating heart of the City is brought out here with the regularity of the metre.
Nobody, perhaps, strains the iambic pentameter quite as much as Gerard Manley Hopkins, and in" The Windhover", for example, it may be hard to recognise at first the traditional form of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter, which are, nevertheless, at work within this poem. The first line, for example, is a regular iambic pentameter, though from there, the poem moves more to freer rhythms based on Hopkins' idea of "sprung rhythm".
extract from 'Reading Gaol' by Oscar Wilde
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the horrid hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalt ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.
To sum up, perhaps: forms and metrication in poetry are vital in allowing us to respond to poems. They are essential, first, for the sounds and music they create and, secondly, for the sense of working either within or against a tradition. The choice of form and metrication is a valuable pointer to the intentions of the poem. Very broadly speaking, ballads signal a lower, more popular register, whereas iambic pentameter (sonnets, blank verse, etc) signals a higher register. All I have done here is to suggest how one could begin to give pupils a feeling of familiarity and confidence with the patternings of poetry. Blank verse, the sonnet form and ballads provide a good start to discovering other verse forms and other ways of handling metre. This whole area should also not be left till the middle or end of secondary school. First year pupils will love the music of absurd poetry such as "Jabberwocky" or "You are Old, Father William" by Lewis Caroll or the limericks and nonsense of Edward Lear.
Both Kipling and Eliot loved playing with metre and you can compare Eliot's "Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat" with Kipling's "L'Envoi", which inspired it and its metrics.
There's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand gray to the sun,
Singing: -- "Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer's done."
You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song -- how long! how long?
Pull out on the trail again!
See ATTENTION GRABBERS for an amusing way to exploit T.S. Eliot's Old Possum poems…
For junior French pupils, "The King's Breakfast" by A.A. Milne is also a lovely tongue-twister to enjoy round a class as practice in finding the right rhythm of stressed/unstressed syllables.
Also try out John Masefield's 'Sea Fever' - "I MUST go down to the sea again…" - which mixes iambic and anapaestic rhythms to match the rhythmic but sometimes disorderly irregularities of wild ocean waves.
If you want to take it a notch higher and your class is ready to try choral effects, look at Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo"; YouTube has excellent recordings to play, but the fun is in doing it oneself with a group.
"From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortunes as you please ."
from Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe
Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly
by Edward Lear
This is in trochaic tetrameter with a foot missing at the end of the third and seventh lines, if we wish to be precise...!
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O! My aged Uncle Arly!
II Long ago, in youth, he squander'd
III Like the ancient Medes and Persians,
IV Later, in his morning rambles
V Never -- never more, -- Oh! never,
VI So for three-and-forty winters,
VII On a little heap of Barley
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IAMBIC PENTAMETER
One of the hardest things for learners of English to get hold of is the way the language depends so heavily on stressed and unstressed syllables.
This is particularly the case for those whose first language is French, where, theoretically, words receive equal stress. English poetry has always played on the rhythms and nuances, which can be exploited as well as subverted in verse forms and patternings.
At a very simple level, one teaching tactic is to take names in class and show how Antoine or Sébastien become ANThony and SeBASTian in English.
Cléopatre and Pénélope become CLEoPATra and PenELope.
CLEoPATra / - / -
PenELope - / - -
One can then start analysing words and phrases by marking them with:
- for an unstressed syllable and
/ for a stressed syllable
/ - - /
What is the time?
- / - - /
I haven’t a clue!
Now, as we all know, English verse is based on patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, whose arrangements we call metre.
One of the most common arrangements is the iambic pentameter. This is a line based on five "feet" (or units) made up of iambs.
An iamb is a "foot" made from an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (di – DUM or - /)
A trochee (trochaic metre) is DUM – di ( / - ) See the last poem on this page
A spondee (spondaic) is DUM – DUM ( / / )
Anapaest (anapaestic) is di – di- DUM di – di – DUM (- - / - - /)
Dactyl (dactylic) is DUM – di – di DUM – di – di (/ - - / - - )
Spot the iamb:
Happy
Clever
Afraid
Fearful
Correct.
It is "Afraid".
Think of more exercises like this to do with younger pupils.
Now, let’s see if we can make up an iambic pentameter using the correct word pattern…
Afraid of ghosts, he wandered down the hall
Afraid of nothing, she pulled out a gun
Which of the 10 syllable lines above is a regular arrangement of 5 iambs or an iambic pentameter (- / - / - / - / - /)?
The answer is that the first is a regular iambic pentameter but not the second.
Now, try to complete the following lines as regular iambic pentameters
The little bird……….. (possible answer – is sitting on the branch)
I tried to find the keys…… (possible answer – I lost in school)
The clouds are dark and… (possible answer – it will rain tonight)