Wednesdays@One's latest project: writing accentual-syllabic poems. Specifically, we'll be working on poems written with dactyls. The dactyl is the three-beat metrical foot that "falls forward," its first syllable stressed, or accented, followed by two unstressed syllables. Here are some examples of dactylic units:
Think of all the poems you can make out of these words! Or how about phrases such as:
But making a line from dactyls isn't quite like laying bricks one after another. A LINE of poetry will determine the relations between and among the syllables deployed, the order in which they are deployed, the stressed and unstressed syllables deployed around the intended kind of metrical foot, and the particular dialect of (American) English you happen to be writing in or reading from. More, TWO LINES of poetry will impact your pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables even further.
Dialect or regional speech pattern might determine where you put the stress in words like umbrella, insurance, and controversy. Nearby syllables, word order or rhetorical emphasis might turn "month of May" from a dactylic foot into two iambic feet if the phrase is preceded by "the," probably one of the most UNstressed syllables in the English language!
Dactylic meter can be of two measures (dimeter), three, four and so on. Much ancient Greek poetry was written in Dactylic hexameter, six measures of a falling three-beat foot, like repeating the word "yesterday" six times. Which is why poets writing in English have steered clear of the ancient Greek measures, opting for the briefer forms, especially the dimeter:
As you can hear (or feel, in this famous case), the meter rushes forward, and foolishly, like the Light Brigade (whose charge directly into Russian cannon fire was executed, so to speak, because of a battlefield miscommunication). It gallops. Tennyson was fond of the dactyl. Even when he fashioned his poems out of the noble and most British iambic pentameter, he could not resist hiding dactyls inside the line:
How inviting it is to read "river lie," "and of rye," "clothe the wold," and "meet the sky" into the opening lines of "The Lady of Shalott" like three-beat dactyls. And here is how he described a basket of fish in "Enoch Arden," his long narrative of the life of an English fishing village:
This last example I get from my trusty Norton Anthology of English Literature, where the editor goes out of his way to repair any notions I might have of The Ridiculousness of Alfred Lord Tennyson. And successfully so, I should add. For the point about Tennyson and his achievements is that he is probably the most musical (i.e., measured) of any poet writing in English, ever.
Which leads me back to this project: making music the old-fashioned way.
There once was a time when "writing lyrical" meant adhering to the five metered or "accentual-syllabic" feet that the English language can reasonably support:
But the strictly accentual-syllabic forms--iambic tetrameter and pentameter foremost among them--come off as antique to a 21st Century American ear. Still, occasionally practicing them in a poem doesn't hurt us at all. In fact, familiarizing ourselves with the older formalities of poetry lends facility when it comes to building lines of poems that start, move, pause, rise, fall, strike, flow and come to a full and satisfying (and this means meaningful) stop.
This is why dactyls for our new project. Most of us are used to writing in iambic meters, usually tri- and tetrameter, sometimes pentameter, when we try to write more traditionally. Let's add another tool to our rhythm tool box. The dactyl will prove a little more problematic, but well worth the effort.
Speaking of problematic, the dactyl encourages, or maybe forces a number of problems on you from the get-go. Here are some challenges you'll encounter:
- The dactyl is a three-syllable unit. Building it into a line of poetry won't feel as automatic or as "right" as when you write with iambs, partly because you don't use as many three-syllable words in a line as you do words of one or two syllables. Contemporary, colloquial American English, or conversational English, isn't all that complicated when it comes to the words we keep in our personal vocabularies. So you'll at some point in your draft be forced to work in as many as three words to make one dactylic measure. That'll be interesting.
- The dactylic accent is front-loaded, producing a driving or "falling forward" effect in the line. When so much of the poetry we write strives toward rhetoric--that is, a well-constructed argument with a logical resolution; that is again, "content"--our voices want to rise to the occasion, literally. The falling pitch of dactyls goes in the opposite direction.
- Lines based on the dactyl are harder to extend beyond two or three measures. The English language tends to run out of gas (that is, its available propulsive intensity) after a measure or two. Try extending a line through four dactyls and you'll experience what I mean. But I'm cutting you some slack here; see below.
- Your choice of subject matter might be more limited when the rhythm behaves more like a drumming or a falling down/forward. Hard to imagine an elegy, a lullaby, a reverie, a prayer or a metaphysical inquiry done well in dactyls! A charging Light Brigade, on the other hand . . .
You'll find the dactyl problem even trickier in light of our other stipulation in this project: to limit each line to eight syllables. There is room for at least two stray syllables in every line. What are you going to do with these? Where will you place them? How will they impact the unfolding of the strong and weak accents of the dactyl?
And for this reason, I am amending the project. You must limit each line to eight syllables . . . but you can build with fewer if you wish. I do not recommend, however, just writing lines of only three syllables (that is, one dactyl). That's a recipe for stiltedness.
Your objective is to write well-honed LINES.
. . . . . . .
So, you're going to run into two needs right away: 1) to count syllables; 2) to distribute the strong and weak accents so that each line has at least one dactyl. You're going to try less than effective strategies, like mispronouncing words in order to fit them into a dactylic stress pattern. And you're going to end lines with weak words (the, a, an, on, etc.) just to get the eight count in or to come up with a proper dactyl. Fine. Go ahead and do that in a first draft. But don't stop there. Keep revising until each line stands well on its own as a line with a beginning, middle and end (even if that end word flows into the first word of the next line).
As an example, here is how I began my poem (still not finished, by the way, as of this post):
Not a bad beginning. I thought of some neat words with the right number of syllables and strong/weak accents in the right spots (underlined). But you can also see that I've written myself into an awkward little line break at the end of the third line, not to mention the weakling endings of "to" and "in" of the first two lines. That's because I'm trying to adhere to the eight-syllable rule.
How have I improved upon this first draft? Can't tell you that quite yet, because I'm still working on it. I may not get to something better, and if I do, I might wind up changing the poem altogether, subject matter and all. That's okay, too, because what I'm really hoping to do with this poem is to bend my notion of the line, the syllable, and the accented voice a little beyond my usual limit--and to write a decent poem as well, technically speaking.
I'm having fun, too! I'll show you what I've come up with this coming Wednesday. I hope you have some fun with this project like I am having. Don't worry if your poem doesn't turn out perfect or exactly as you planned it. Do worry about how you solve the problem of accentual-syllabic writing. :-)
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