On Feb 25, 2010, at 2:15 PM, Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
Is
there a fancy Greek name for Browning’s 25/75% prosodic melange? *[see
ednote at bottom]
I doubt it. The
examples were chosen to show that this is a common exception or line
variation in anapestic verse.
There are several
such exception in iambic verse, the most common being the inversion of
the first foot into a trochee.
Often the first foot
of an iambic, especially pentametric, line can be rendered either way,
as iamb or trochee,
and it's the
reader's choice as how to pronounce it.
Traditional verse
begins with a prototypic line or pattern which is adhered to closely
but not slavishly.
Indeed once one has
a pattern one wants to break it in order to avoid monotony,
but not to the point
that confuses and destroys the sense of form.
The first foot
iambic variant introduces variety as well as allowing greater semantic
freedom, i.e. word choices,
without disturbing
too greatly the overall anapestic rhythm, which I suspect variation in
a later foot is apt to do.
One can even obtain
a perhaps overly precise meaning to the term doggerel:
namely verse that
too strictly adheres to the prototypic line pattern,
always has a pause
at the end of each line (i.e. no enjambments),
and no mid-line
breaks or caesurae.
If the verse is
short or the point is to amuse then this kind of doggerel is fine.
But, especially with
longer verse, the prototypic ur-line serves
as a scaffold or
armature for spinning out broader rhythmic structures, the
cognoscenti's art.
To me VN excels at
this kind of rhythmic structuring.
And this perhaps
constitutes the rough magic underpinning Pale Fire.
We live, I think, at
a time when traditional poetics is not well understood
and recognized; but
yet is still felt when verse is read physically
and interpreted with
care, practice, and imagination.
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EDNote: Russian uses the term "amphibrach" for lines with this
rhythm:
-`- -`- -`- -`(-) If I'm not misremembering, it is mentioned in
Fyodor's Chernyshevsky book (in The Gift) as the "democratic
meter" preferred by Nekrasov.