[New-Poetry] Re: a dead ear for scansion

[Skip Fox]

You're right, we CAN read a line any way we want, but would we? With most
lines 95% of us (used to poetry, not dramatic) would read the same stresses
and unstresses. With maybe 20% of the lines there are legitimate variants.

 

By the way, in the example you gave, "to" could even be emphasized. (Someone
is writing down what she is told by the first person who has her at
gunpoint-ransom note or other craziness-and the first person object to what
she wrote: "I said he gave you cash TO pay our bills, not FOR paying them.")
But that's an odd sentence.

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 3:20 PM
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: a dead ear for scansion

 

In a message dated 7/23/2008 2:42:09 PM Central Daylight Time,
skip at louisiana.edu writes: 





Stressing is different with different readers, though basically the same. If
we were reading 



"An aged man is but a paltry thing "

  

with "aged" being 2 syllables, a dramatic interpretation might stress "is"
in a performance, but a normal reading would not. I'm with you. The "is" is
softer than "man" or "but" even after a long caesura? (If "aged" is a single
syllable, then u / / u / u / u /.)




Well, with only two marks, it's like I said: "more or less."  When you go
to, say, a 1-2-3 or a 1-2-3-4 system of scansion you could presumably show
these variants.  But any line of iambic pentameter could be scanned in
multiple ways if we tried to consider what was being emphasized by the
words.

I said he gave you cash to pay our bills.

You could force a stress (using italics maybe) on four different words here
(probably not on "to") and 'I," "he," "you," and "our" wouldn't ordinarily
receive stresses but could with some kind of "rhetorical emphasis."  Each
time the line would get a slightly different meaning. 

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