![]() ![]() So, why don’t we do that together? Just looking at this first line: “When I see birches bend to left and right.” “When I see birches bend to left and right.” “When I see birches bend to left and right.” And sometimes it’s not good to repeat it too often then you start to become unhinged. Well, for me, when I try to make sense of the meter of given lines, I think it’s useful to try to settle, to start, those syllables that seem most clearly stressed, to, you know, identify where there isn’t question and use that then as a structure from which to interpret the rest of the lines. I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. When I see birches bend to left and rightĪcross the lines of straighter darker trees, This is blank verse it’s the language of Shakespeare it’s the language of Milton. Free verse is non-metrical poetry, another thing altogether. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. This is an example of blank verse, and that is always to be – blank verse always, perhaps confusingly, to be distinguished from free verse. Let’s illustrate these general points by just reading together and trying to hear the beginning of Robert Frost’s poem “Birches,” on page 211 in The Norton. So, if you’re unsure about the metrical definition of a line, because it’s hard to discriminate between levels of stress, as will almost certainly be the case, remember that more often than not, the context takes over and the regular beat of a meter rules and perhaps promotes an accent in a phrase that might not otherwise seem to have one to you. Poetry is not interested in expert debate at all, and it converts the big spectrum of possible degrees of accent into those two simple categories: stressed and unstressed syllables. ![]() Accent is something somewhat difficult to define and categorize. What constitutes an accent when you – what is an accent in a given English word? In fact, linguists often argue about this subject, and it’s a complicated one. And if you repeat them five times, you have pentameter.Īccent: what is an accent? For some of you, this will seem self-evident for others, it’ll seem like a great puzzle. If you do it four times, you’ve got tetrameter, a more common meter in English. If you repeat a boat three times – a boat, a boat, a boat – you have trimeter, iambic trimester – three iambs in a row. A boat, about, a dress, a coat: these are all simple iambic phrases that you hear in our language all the time. The iamb is a simple pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Ordinarily, in accentual syllabic verse, which is what we’re reading more often than not in English poetry, the accents are arranged in relation to unaccented syllables, creating a kind of limited array of standard units. It’s a scheme that in English counts accents or stresses per line and then arranges them in a pattern. Well, meter: what is meter? Meter is – it’s a scheme for organizing verse, for organizing lines of verse. ![]() The primary metrical pattern in Frost is the primary metrical pattern in English poetry, which is to say blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Professor Langdon Hammer: We talked on Monday about Frost’s idea of “the sound of sense” and vernacular speech forms, his wish to put these in tension or, as he put it, “strained relation” with metrical pattern. Modern Poetry ENGL 310 - Lecture 3 - Robert Frost (cont.) ![]()
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