Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

17.5 Extra (and missing) syllables in the line
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

We have seen that, at one end of the line, there can be one or two missing syllables, a phenomenon called ’catalexis’ (where a metrical foot falls short). We now look at three ways in which lines of exactly the same metre can vary by having additional syllables in the line. The first of these is the opposite of catalexis; while the line can have one or two syllables fewer at one end, at the other end it can have one or two syllables extra, which do not count for metrical purposes. Because they do not count they are called ’extrametrical’ and are not included in feet. In iambic verse, where extrametricality is fairly common, one extra syllable can optionally appear at the end of the line:

With fingers light the lingering breezes quiver

Over the glowing of the still, deep river,

Whose water sings among the reeds, and smiles

’Mid glittering forests and luxuriant isles.

       (John Ruskin, untitled, 1836)

The first line would be grouped into five pairs (iambic feet) and a final unfooted or ’extrametrical’ syllable. The extrametricality of the final syllable is cued by the fact that it is in a ’feminine rhyme’ (where the last stressed syllable in the line is not the last syllable in the line):

This line also illustrates a second way in which a syllable can be ’extra’. The word ’lingering’ has three syllables but here it counts as two; this means that one syllable is ignored when grouping them into metrical feet. It is possible to mark out these ’ignored’ syllables (while remembering that they do not affect the actual foot size) by writing a different kind of symbol beneath them (we use a delta, a little triangle, to mark uncounted syllables):

The seventeenth-century poet John Donne made very extensive use of the principle of not counting some syllables (particularly vowels before vowels),

to the extent that some readers found it very difficult to work out the relation between the performed rhythm of the poem and the actual metre:

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt

To nature, and to hers and my good is dead,

And her soul early into heaven ravished,

Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set.

Here the admiring her my mind did whet

To seek thee God; so streams do show the head;

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst has fed,

A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

But why should I beg more love, when as thou

Dost woo my soul for hers, offering all thine:

And dost not only fear lest I allow

My love to saints and angels, things divine,

But in my tender jealousy, dost doubt

Lest the world, flesh, yea devil put thee out.

     (John Donne, ’Sonnet 17’, c.1607)

Consider, for example, the second line, which should be scanned like this:

One syllable is not counted (’to’ before ’hers’) and Donne compounds the difficulty by having a rhythm that is some way from the periodic pattern of the iambic pentameter metre of the line, such that syllables that would not be thought of as carrying stress such as ’and’ are in head positions. (Try scanning the rest of the poem - you will find that it is entirely in iambic pentameter.) Both of these ways of having ’extra’ syllables are fairly common in ordinary English verse, particularly iambic verse.

However, there is another way of having ’extra’ syllables that constitutes an entirely new metre - one we have not seen before. This metre has been given many names: ’ballad metre’, ’Christabel metre’, ’dol’nik’ or ’iambic- anapaestic metre’. We call it ’loose iambic’ metre because we think the feet are actually iambs, with one extra syllable permitted between a pair of iambs. It is found in much folk poetry (particularly ballads and nursery rhymes), in art poetry that imitates folk poetry, such as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and in much twentieth-century metrical verse. Here is a nursery rhyme that illustrates the metre:

A frog he would a-wooing go,

Heigh ho! says Rowley,

loose iambic tetrameter

loose iambic trimeter

Whether his mother would let him or no.

With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach,

Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

loose iambic tetrameter

loose iambic tetrameter

loose iambic trimeter (?)

     (’The love-sick frog, 1809)

If we look at the line ’With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach’ we can see why the metre is sometimes called ’iambic-anapaestic’. What seems to happen in this metre is that we get a mixture of iambic and anapaestic feet. This is not just a matter of monosyllables permitting variation: the polysyllables also participate in this, and their stressed syllables can be one or two syllables apart in the same line:

In the loose iambic metre, the rhythm and the metre are much more closely related than in the metres we have seen before; ’counterpointing’ of a varying rhythm against a strict metre does not happen here. Instead, the rhythm largely determines where the heads of feet fall: as a general principle, wherever there is a strongly stressed syllable in the line, this is treated as the head of a foot (and hence has a right bracket put after it). The strongly stressed syllables can be at most three syllables apart; they can also be two syllables apart, and often there is a combination of the two as in the line quoted above. But it is also possible for two strongly stressed syllables to be next to each other, in which case they build shorter-than-usual feet, here feet containing just one syllable:

Notice that there is also an extrametrical syllable at the end of the line. Because rhythm determines metre to some extent here, different performances can give the line different metrical forms; here are two alternatives for the last line (we prefer the first, but acknowledge the possibility of the other one):

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins developed a version of this metre that permits even longer stretches between heads (of three or more syllables), and called it ’sprung rhythm’.