A Study of Versification

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER METEB Here, at the outset, we find precisely what differentiates Terse from prose. These two possess much in common. Their ideals are often similar; their subjects may he identical; their cadences sometimes coincide. Yet there is an essential difference, which has seldom been rightly stated, and which is a difference of mechanical method. The units of prose are diverse, irregular in length, rarely conformed to a common pattern. In verse, on the other hand, succession is continuous. Something recurs with regularity. This is the distinctive note of verse, making its structure differ from that of prose; no other absolute line of demarcation can be drawn. Typical recurrence, uniform repetition, is the prime postulate of meter. ? T. S. Omond: A Study of Meter. We have seen that the habits of the English language are such as to make it practically impossible to write English verse except in one of the four rhythms which we call iambic, trochaic, anapestic and dactylic. And the practice of the poets reveals that any poem in our language must be in one or another of these rhythms. The poet, having accustomed our ear to the rhythm he has chosen, must keep to the pattern of his choice. He must give us the succession of beats in the order he has promised them to us. He may make varied substitutions and frequent suppressions inside his lines, but he must preserve always the expected framework of the chosen form. That is to say, he must decide once for all, whether he will compose in an iambic rhythm or a trochaic, an anapestic or a dactylic. Of these four rhythms, the iambic has ever been the favorite. Indeed, there seem to have been periods when it was the only rhythm known. In King James' rulesfor writing verse, published in 1585, only the iainbus is considered, as ...