informal talk about forms: the nuts and bolts of rhythm part 1

by Tom Adam

There are two traditional areas in the exploration of poetic forms: rhythm and rhyme. For the most part, stanza or line length is based on choices concerning both of these areas.

I’m saving issues about rhyme for another time; this article will be focusing on rhythm and the varieties of it in poetry.

At a basic level, rhythm is a reflection of the language it is based on. English is a heavily accentual language, and uses rhythm based on patterns of stress, while a language such as Japanese is without stress, and is focused more on how many syllables there are.

Accentual poetry
Accentual poetry is very close to the roots of English poetry. A good example of early English accentual verse is the epic poem Beowulf. When reading or listening to Beowulf in Old English, you can almost feel the drumbeats pulling the lines along. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf remains faithful to the word-stresses of the original.

Accentual poetry is based on the number of beats, or stresses, in the line, however many that ends up being. In many of the poetry workshops I’ve taken, a lot of people seem to have problems understanding the stresses in a line. In the following lines from Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” I have set the stressed words in bold:

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.

THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.

I could not turn from their revel in derision.

THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,

CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

(A.1.8-13)

Try pounding a table when you say the bold words. It’s pretty easy to feel the stresses on those words. The beats form a metronomic pattern with the syllables that come between each stressed sound. Vachel Lindsay uses four beats per line in this section (not all of “The Congo” holds to that, though it is heavily accentual throughout) which is very common in accentual verses. It probably also influenced Ballad meter, which was based on song.

Syllabic verse
On the other end, syllabic verse is based on the number of syllables in a line, and nothing else. This comes to English primarily through the influence of French (where the twelve syllable Alexandrine line is very common).

The Japanese Haiku, with its seventeen syllable structure, is another example of syllabic verse. Japanese Haiku consist of shorter sounds than most English Haiku; the brevity would be better thought of as thirteen syllables or so.

Historically, English verse uses an accentual-syllabic rhythm. While this could be having four stresses in an eight-syllable line with no regard to the pattern, most accentual-syllabic verse uses meter. You’ll have to wait till next month to hear my talk about the bread and butter of English Formal Verse: metrical systems.