Metrical philistinism makes writers spout gibberish

Owen Pallett recently analysed Katy Perry’s song “Teenage Dream” using music theory: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/03/katy_perry_s_teenage_dream_explaining_the_hit_using_music_theory.html

He explains at the outset: “In the days since Ted Gioia published his essay in the Daily Beast, alleging that music criticism has devolved into lifestyle reporting, with little or no attention paid to how the music itself works, I've been challenged by friends on Facebook to write a ‘not boring’ piece that explains a successful pop song using music theory.”

This philistinism about music theory—i.e. indifference to how music actually works—is closely related to the philistinism among English teachers about metre, which is the music of speech. C.S. Lewis warned that we are coming to acquiese in a “hair-raising barbarism” on the subject, to the point that professors of English and students finishing degrees at Oxford could not recognize and accurately pronounce a line of verse.*

Consider Exhibit A: Strunk & White. That is, William Strunk’s The Elements of Style as revised by E.B. White in 1959. This is a very traditional guide for writing, still referred to today for its brevity and clarity. In chapter V, E.B. White sets the tone: “In this final chapter, we approach style in its broader meaning: style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind?” He then takes as an instance of this mystery the famous line from Thomas Paine, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Why is it so effective? Why has it shown such durability? He tries rearranging the words or paraphrasing, and rightly throws out these alternative sentences as rubbish, but gives no positive explanation of why the true line works. Then the metrical philistine comes out: “We could, of course, talk about “rhythm” and “cadence,” but the talk would be vague and unconvincing.”**

There is the whole English metrical tradition dealt with in pretty summary fashion. Here is a famous author (Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan), a member of America’s cultured elite, educated in the English department at Cornell University, and a complete barbarian about metre. Apparently, metre is without relevance to ‘what is distinguished and distinguishing.’

In the spirit of Owen Pallett’s recent essay, I offer an explanation of this line using metrical theory, which is anything but ‘vague’ or ‘unconvincing’. It’s probably too optimistic to hope that it will be ‘not boring’; but it will, at least, be brief.

First of all one does not need to be an Anglo-Saxonist to recognize this as an octosyllabic line, itself a common (though not the most common) form of English verse, with a iambic rhythm and inversion at the start.

/	x	x	/	x	/	x	/
These	are	the	times	that	try	men’s	souls.
DUM	da-	da-	DUM	da-	DUM	da-	DUM

A respectable piece of English: the iambic rhythm, so like the human hearbeat (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) has been the standard pattern of English verse for five centuries. The inversion makes the line begin and end with a stressed syllable, emphasizing that it is itself a complete paragraph.

But there is more to it than this. Tom Paine’s famous line is, in form, a verse of Beowulf.

Beowulf is written in the oldest known form of English verse: the alliterative metre. It was the main form of English poetry for a thousand years (c. 500–1500), and with good reason. Its metrical units are based on the natural forms of English speech; and, where rhyme comes naturally to Romance languages, alliteration comes naturally to English. The effect of the alliterative metre is richness and fullness of sound.

Each line of alliterative verse consists of two half-lines, each with two ‘Lifts’, that is, stresses which fall on long syllables, and a reasonable number of ‘dips’ or unstressed syllables.† One Lift from the first half-line alliterates with the first Lift of the second half-line.

/	x	x	/	x	/	x	/
These	are	the	times	that	try	men’s	souls.
DUM	da-	da-	DUM	da-	DUM	da-	DUM
long	long	short	long	long	long	long	long
Lift	dip		Lift	dip	Lift	dip	Lift

In the first half-line, ‘these are the times,’ the stresses fall on the first and last long syllables; in the second half line, ‘that try men’s souls,’ every syllable is long, with the stresses falling on ‘try’ and ‘souls.’ That the whole second half-line consists of long monosyllables lends it greater weight. The full line thus takes the form of an E-type alliterative half-line (Lift dip Lift) and a B type (dip Lift dip Lift). The alliteration falls on the T (note that the words beginning with TH do not alliterate with T; this is obvious if one attends to sound rather than spelling): these are the Times / that Try men’s souls. There you have a line that would not be out of place in Beowulf.

The point of all this is not that the line just happens to conform to a set of rules for an antique metre. These ‘rules’ for different poetic forms are not arbitrary formulas invented by professors; they are the patterns of sound and rhythm which have shown themselves to speak naturally to the English ear. Words put in this form sound good; they stick in the brain; they beg to be repeated; they are easy to remember. They became established poetic forms for this reason.

The traditional forms of English poetry are the testimony of what great writers for centuries have found to be ‘distinguished and distinguishing.’ Perhaps the antinomian spirit of our age maddened the English teachers of past generations into chucking them out as ‘restrictive.’ But what they did was chuck out any practical guide for young writers about how to make their writing sound good. They have no replacement; instead they adopt a tone of awe, call it the goddess Style, and wrap it in obscurities, as White does: “These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story ... there is no satisfactory explanation of style ... the young writer will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion...” The ‘enlightened’ moderns, in literature as in so much else, turn out not to be the ones throwing open the curtains to bring in the light of knowledge, but the darkest obscurantists and mystery-mongers.  

Metre, of course, does not exhaust what makes writing good: it deals only with sound, not with sense. It may appear mostly relevant to verse. But it is easily applied to prose; and when one wants to elevate the tone or make a point stick—make it memorable, make it quotable—one has a practical guide in the English metrical tradition. Blank verse, rhyme, the alliterative line: these are to writing what the arch and the pillar are to architecture. Not that one must literally build up a line to order (‘ten syllables every second one stressed...’). Because these rhythms are natural in English, they tend naturally to occur in speech and writing, as I expect Paine’s line did. Where one wants to drive a line home, one often has only to tweak it: substitute a word here, or invert there, and it will land sweetly on the ear.

There you have it. Barbarism in metre has meant that where we once had a practical guide to what sounds good, we now can only offer our sacrifices to the mysterious and fickle goddess Style.

* See Lewis’s “Metre,” in Selected Literary Essays http://books.google.ca/books?id=sa48AAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

** It is only fair to say that E.B. White’s contribution to The Elements of Style is very inferior to Strunk’s. I suppose the publisher wanted a big name attached to their reissuing of an antiquated, out-of-print style guide; and so without White none of us might have heard of Strunk. But White’s ‘revision’ appears to me wholly unnecessary and, although I have not consulted the original version, I guess that he accomplished more a partial subversion than a revision of Strunk.

† I refer the interested reader to C.S. Lewis’s “The alliterative metre,” in Selected Literary Essays.