The following excerpt on PROSODY comes from our longtime contributor,
Jeffrey Burghauser‘s new book entitled THE HEAVY LIFTING: A BOY’S GUIDE TO WRITING POETRY. It was provided graciously by his publisher:

“PROSODY. Noun. \ ʹprä-sә-dē \ [a] The study of versification, especially the study of metrical structure. [b] A particular system, theory, or style of versification. [c] The rhythmical and intonational aspect of language.”

—Merriam-Webster Dictionary

When it’s a good teacher who introduces us to an idea or a book, that teacher’s legacy walks alongside the memory of that subject matter, gently recommending it, asking you to accord it renewed attention. But when a bad teacher gets ahold of an idea or book, their legacy is no less tenacious. A bad teacher doesn’t render you merely indifferent to a subject; he makes you despise it.

The topic of prosody is hardly a saturnalia, to say the least. Since some form of literary education remains compulsory, and since most teachers are bad, we have the perfect storm. Assuming you’ve ever heard of prosody in the first place, it’s unlikely a topic which you are impatient to explore further.

One of the reasons for this is that you regard prosody as a barrier to self-expression. You once wanted to say something, when some dowdy English teacher, some hives-inducing harridan, waddled into your line of sight, expatiating upon The Rules. I get it.

That said, you might have had the experience of overhearing a rookie violinist, age nine or ten, attempting to “express himself.” It’s a sound that can raise the dead—and then make the dead regret having been raised. What I’m attempting in this book is not dissimilar to a course of violin lessons; I’m trying to help you develop a few fundamentals so that they become integrated in the mental version of “muscle memory.” That’s when the fun begins.

And besides, self-expression is overrated. What is this “self ” that demands “expression”? If you’re anything like me—

But, come to think of it, you’re everything like me! That’s the whole point. With the exception of protagonists from Werner Herzog movies, we all have the exact same “factory settings.” We all find ourselves alive and vulnerable, scuttling about in search of respect, companionship, security, and meaning, attempting to evade pain, bearing implacable hungers, all the while beneath the inescapable shadow of our own mortality. In many ways, there’s nothing more tedious than a self.

The fine thing about real poetry is that it’s an enemy of the self ’s expression. You’re thwarted in your thin drizzle of confession (“Woe is me!”), because the next word needs a stressed syllable in just the right place. Now, you must lay aside your pathetic self, and actually make something.

Poetry is the enemy of the self ’s expression—enemy, not conquistador. Poetry requires a well-balanced confrontation between Feeling and Technique. Without Technique, you have flaccid kvetching; without Feeling, you have bloodless experimentalism. Poetry requires the contribution of a self. But that self needs strenuous policing. And prosody is among the means by which you accomplish that.

There’s a certain music that’s inherent to language. It’s not added, like caraway seeds to a loaf of rye bread; rather, it belongs to the dough itself. The poet’s job is to arrange language so that its inherent music can be mobilized to some effect. The poet is like a master woodworker, studying the grain patterns of each individual piece of wood so that these patterns can contribute to an overall scheme.

“Until” isn’t pronounced “UN-til” (stressed, unstressed), but “un-TIL” (unstressed, stressed). To pronounce it incorrectly violates the word’s music.

In one sense, the poet masters language, imposing himself upon it; in another sense, however, he’s engaging with language, and establishing a consensual relationship with it. Language has certain priorities, tendencies, and quirks that must be yielded to. The poet takes language to a quiet ethnic restaurant, drinks wine with it, and asks it questions in a rich, NPR-ready baritone until it’s comfortable exposing its nature to him.

Sometimes language can feel like an adversary. But do remember the sad wisdom that John Milton puts in Satan’s mouth in Paradise Lost: “Who overcomes / By force hath overcome but half his foe.”

A poem is made of stanzas, a stanza is made of lines, and a line is made of…words? Close: a line is made of “feet.” A foot is a rhythmic unit, usually of two syllables: one stressed, the other unstressed. I’ll mark a stressed syllable “/” and an unstressed syllable “u.”

A foot that’s stressed-unstressed is called a “trochee:”

	“PHA-llic”	/ u
	“MON-ster”	/ u 
	“WHIM-pers”	/ u

A foot that’s unstressed-stressed is called an “iamb,” which is the most common foot in English verse:

	“a-LAS”		u /
	“e-RECT”	u /
	“a-LONE”	u /

“Iambic pentameter” refers to a pattern of five iambs per line (“penta” = five; “meter” = rhythm). Here’s the opening line of Shakespeare’s over-quoted Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

If we mark the prosody, it looks like this:

	u/	u/	u/	u/	u/
	Shall I compare thee to a sum—	mer’s day
	1.	2.	3.	4.	5.

Notice that the borders between feet aren’t necessarily coincident with those between words; “summer” straddles the fourth and fifth iamb.

Here’s another little quirk of prosody: a syllable, stressed under some circumstances, may become unstressed in others. For example, here are the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme

Let’s focus on the second:

	u/	u/	u/	u/	u/
	Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme
	1.	2.	3.	4.	5.	

Although “shall” appears as a stressed syllable, it’s a function of rhythmical context. In the following example from Sonnet 3, “shall” appears as an unstressed syllable:

So thou through windows of thy age shall see We can notate it thusly:

	u/	u/	u/	u/	u/
	So thou through win-dows of thy age shall see
	1.	2.	3.	4.	5.	

The eagle-eyed and bat-eared among you will have noticed some apparent anomalies in the sample from Sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme[.]

If the rhymical scheme is to be obeyed scrupulously, then “powerful” doesn’t fit at all; Shakespeare pronounces the trisyllabic—

	/	u	u
	po	wer	ful

—as a bisyllabic:

	/	u
	pow'r	ful

And furthermore, Shakespeare wants us to pronounce “monuments”—

	/	u	/
	mon	u	ments

—rather than how it’s actually pronounced:

	/	u	u
	mon	u	ments

How to account for this?

Here’s Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder:”

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoestring, in whose tie I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when Art Is too precise in every part.

Although we resist chaos, it’s possible for something to be too orderly. Spectacles like North Korea’s mass gymnastics strike us as so horrifying because we see in their perfect choreography something inhuman. Herrick’s ardor for his lady wouldn’t be enhanced were she an utter slob; it’s those subtle deviations from symmetry that he finds so fetching.

This explains the metrical irregularities in our excerpt from Sonnet 55. The occasional deviations, contortions, and rhythmic protuberances humanize the text. After all, perfect prosody is a defining characteristic of what’s called “doggerel:” vernacular, occasional, or novelty verse that was never meant to be taken very seriously.

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Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash