Reading the Romanesque

In answer to a request, here are some suggestions for reading on Romanesque Art, conventionally dated to c.1000 to c.1200 with all sorts of blurring and overlapping at either end of course. Here are some one-stop-shop books which cover all the arts of the period. Specific books on architecture etc. can be left for other posts.

Anne Shaver-Crandell, Cambridge Introduction to Art: The Middle Ages is an excellent starting-point. Clear and helpful chapter on Romanesque.

Andreas Petzold, Romanesque Art is attractive, authoritative, readable. The emphasis here is on how the art worked within the society, so there are chapters on patronage, women, the Church, other cultures (Classical, Jewish, Islamic). Not much extended object-specific analysis, but an excellent primer on looking for the significance of works you do encounter.



George Zarnecki, Romanesque, has chapters on the different media: Architecture, Sculpture, Metalwork, Ivories, Stained Glass, Wall Painting, Book Illumination. The author takes us through the key features of each of these, and wears his enormous learning lightly. As with many older art books, this one challenges the reader by having illustrations on a different page from the text, so there is a good deal of flicking around which interrupts the reading. Well, we just have to get over it. The points Zarnecki makes in capsules about individual images (capital sculptures, for example) are outstanding.

Henri Focillon, The Art of the West 1: The Romanesque is a classic of art history. First published in 1938, it shows the author's appetite for dealing with whole cultures, whole centuries, looking for deep principles which help us to understand the individual object. Focillon writes wonderfully, in a style quite different to most approved art history. Of Romanesque imagery - bestiaries, strange distorted sculptures - he says: 'It seems, not the created world, but the dream of God on the eve of the Creation, a terrible first-draft of his plan'. Thoughts like that put a smile on your face and transform the act of seeing. Plenty to be learned here - as far as I can tell, it's not overly dated - and inspirational too.

Zarnecki and other scholars produced English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, the catalogue which accompanied a major exhibition of Romanesque art from England, at the Hayward way back in 1984. All the arts are covered, and detailed descriptions of the exhibits make it a good source for getting to know particular works. Lots of information, perhaps best for occasional detailed reading.

A quick mention for two books which cover a wider period than those above:  John Beckwith, Early Medieval Art and C R Dodwell, The Pictorial Art of the West, 800-1200. Best read in that order. That's a long enough list for now.

Pinter and Pragmatics

The dialogues of Harold Pinter are often cited by linguists working in the field of pragmatics. This is an area where linguistics and literary criticism (of drama) are close neighbours; so some entry-level pragmatics can certainly help us in a commentary on a Pinter passage. Here is the briefest of outlines of this rich field of enquiry, followed by a list of things to look out for in the plays.
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. To take a simple example, I might say:

It's cold in here.

The meaning of the words is clear enough (assuming I'm speaking literally rather than figuratively); but that is not the same thing as the meaning of the utterance. Analysis starts with the question 'What is the meaning of the utterance? To begin to answer this we need to consider the context.

Depending on the context, 'It's cold in here' could mean:

Please shut the door, or
You're not a very good builder, or
You're not looking after my elderly mother properly, or
You've left the window open again.

We could easily extend this list. The utterance in each case is functioning as a communicative act: I am ordering, pleading, threatening, complaining etc. So we can ask what the speaker is doing with / through the words employed (and in fact we analyse each other's statements int his way all the time).

The utterance 'It's cold in here' is addressed to someone (teh addressee), and thus the act is intended to have an effect on them - to frighten, reassure, persuade, mollify, confuse etc. We could take the meaning of the utterance as act + effect, which is dependent on context (though meaning may be further affected by non-verbal elements: tone of speech, gesture, facial expression etc.)

Conversations generally involve a set of conventions understood by the speakers. One obvious one is turn-taking - a dinner party conversation dominated by one or two loudmouths is spoiled by their disregard for this norm -  but there may be many others whihc are implicit (wait for your seniors to address you, always agree with the boss etc.). The linguist Paul Grice identified 'maxims' or rules of the game which can be observed in conversational exchanges. Two of these are the Maxim of Relevance (say what is relevant) and the Maxim of Quantity (say what you are in a position to say). When we depart from these rules, we are flouting the maxims, just as we are flouting the convention of turn-taking if we speak out of turn.

With this in mind, here are some things we can look out for when commenting on a Pinter passage. Very few refer to linguistic jargon (and Pinter was not writing for students of linguistics!). No quoted examples given (copyright) but it shouldn't be difficult to find any.

1. Concealed meaning. What is being said beneath the surface of the spoken words? There may be several possibilities.
2. What is the speaker doing through the words? (defending, intimidating, resisting etc.)
3. What is the effect of the speech (both the presumed intended effect and the actual one we see)?
4. Ambiguity, when the act and effect are unclear. It can be very disconcerting when we do not know why someone is saying what they are saying.
5. Conventions being followed (the ritual of reading the newspaper at the start of The Dumb Waiter).
6. Conventions being flouted (Gus speaking out of turn, asking questions he's not supposed to).
7. Turn-taking not happening (eg when A speaks, then there's a pause - implying B's turn - and A speaks again)
8. Discontinuity and disconnection between speakers (a sign might be consecutive questions)
9. Dead ends, where a thread of conversation leads to nothing.
10. Evasion, sudden shifts of subject (flouting maxim of relevance)
11. Unexpectedly long speeches (flouting maxim of quantity)
12. Conversations which are not conversations because the characters are not communicating, but isolated in individual worlds.
13. Dialogue may seem awkward because there are no observable codes or conventions, so the characters circle each other warily.
14. Anywhere where information might be being witheld, or there is a possibility that it is being invented (for example, descriptions of past events may be constructions)
15. Repetition: for insistence, reassurance etc.
16. Any words or phrases that create in our minds a notion of violence, invasion, death.
17. And, of course, what is happening in the pauses and silences?

Some links:

Q&A with Michael Billington has some useful comments on Pinter's use of language.

Linguistic approaches:
Chowdury Mohammed Ali, 'Grice's Maxims and a study of some dialogues in Pinter's The Caretaker'
Khorshid Mostofi, An Analysis of Characters' Inner Threats in The Caretaker and Grice's Concept of Implicature
University of Lancaster Linguistics Department, Conversational Implicature and The Dumb Waiter

T S Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations

With a writer as densely allusive and suggestive as T S Eliot, we can sink happily into the details  of each particular poem, without ever feeling we have quite touched the seabed.  This is an intensely rewarding activity, of course, but it also calls out for a complementary panoramic view of the work, in which we view poems next to each other and get a sense of the poet's general preoccupations. I offer here some thoughts on the first section of the Selected Poems (Faber), Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). This is a remarkable first collection, in which the poet speaks with a fully achieved voice, in a formally innovative style, and assays the great themes that we will see worked on again across the oeuvre.

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Observations? It gives the poet a distant air: he is not the Romantic poet expressing his emotional life, but a detached, clinical observer of his times. This is Eliot's impersonal poet, reserved and elusive, using the masks of personae rather than speaking in his own voice: there are many such masks in the Selected Poems: Prufrock, Gerontion, the voices of 'The Waste Land', Simeon ... Eliot is writing dramatic monologues in the tradition of Browning, but with a modern twist. His speakers are ghostly, phantasmal, barely characters at all perhaps beyond the poem they are in. After the psychotic swagger of Browning's Duke in 'My Last Duchess' we get the traumatised voice of Prufrock, vehicle for the doubts and hesitations of modern man, consumed by early twentieth-century angst. For a curious thing about some of the great modernists - Eliot, Pound, Lawrence - is that they hated the modern world. They were really anti-modernists, seeking in the past the order and vitality and sense which they felt had been drained out of the Western world. The contemporary scene they regarded with horror: it was, literally, a waste land, a spiritual desert life is savaged, mechanised, brutalised, rendered meaningless by the loss of a shared cultural tradition. One of the preoccupations we meet in the first volume is this sense of disenchantment: other ages might have known the grace and loveliness of the mermaids, but they are silent now. The later religious poems can be read as a search for a way out of this disenchantment, back to grace, beauty and meaning.

The air of coldness of the title of Prufrock and Other Observations clashes with the warmth of the dedication, to Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal, who died in the First World War. It is characteristic that Eliot should express his warmth of feeling for Verdenal through a quotation from Dante, a poet Eliot revered and turned to throughout his life. It is the first of the many, many allusions and quotations we will meet in the book. And it stirs questions. Why express yourself through the words of another poet, from another time, in another language? For some, it is simple elitism: an epigraph in Latin or Italian is like a sign saying 'Don't bother with this unless you're part of the club of the hyper-educated', a way of ring-fencing culture off from the common man. Another suggestion has been that it is a deliberate strategy of invoking (literally, calling in) the great tradition in the contemporary: through allusion and quotation, Eliot's poems seek to be inclusive, to involve the formative texts of Western civilisation. Quotation is a kind of genuflection to the great lights of culture. Or, perhaps, it is a form of reticence. A rather shy way of uttering affection, we may feel. Eliot cannot salute his dead friend directly, in his own words, but does through in a sideways fashion, through the words of Dante. Cleverness deflects the grief. Deep feeling is in this way managed and ordered through the apparatus of erudition. Or a mixture of these motives. Or none of the above.

Even before the first poem, we are in Dante's underworld, where he is guided by Virgil among the souls in Inferno and Purgatory: 'trattando l'ombre come cosa scalda', treating the shadows [the dead] like the solid thing. Shadows and reality, the dead and the living - this is one of the great Eliot themes. He is fascinated by the meeting between the living and the dead: on a literary plane, this is the meeting of past and present writers, the relationship between modernity and tradition. In Eliot's scheme of things, Dante is a modern poet, a voice expressing the present. And Prufrock, Gerontion, the inhabitants of 'The Waste Land', the Hollow Men - they are all in some shadowland, the twilight kingdom, between life and death. The living can seem more dead than the dead, an idea still being worked through in the Ariel poems, where we find the Magi between the old (dead) dispensation and the new world, or Marina's father between life and death in the ephemeral smoke (an echo of the fog of Prufrock). And overshadowing the work is the the tragedy of the First World War. Against that Inferno, everything can collapse into unreality. In Eliot, we barely leave Dante's underworld, where the living poet descends, with the help of Virgil, to meet the spirits of the dead, and where the spirits, through poetry, give voice to their vexations.

The first persona we meet is Prufrock, speaker of the first poem. He is himself an 'observation'. A strong influence here is the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-87), who cultivated an air of sceptical, cynical detachment from vulgar modern life. Prufrock - whose tidy respectable name deflates the romantic expectations of 'Love Song'  - is in the Inferno of modernity, and the 'you and I' suggests Dante and Virgil, touring this latest manifestation of spiritual death. (Another key influence is Baudelaire, whose speakers take refuge in the imagination from the sordid urban world: 'La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait', the deafening street howled around me, he wrote). Prufrock is captive in the lonely, fog-bound city, and his particular circle of hell is the world of society, the drawing rooms, cultured conversations and teatime rituals which form the timetable of his existence. It is a poem of existential crisis: Prufrock is existing but not living. He cannot live. He looks out at the world around him and vertically down into himself. His world has 'formulated' him, and he is acutely aware of its judgements and expectations. Confined by this self-consciousness, he cannot find in himself any will to act, to take on an independent life: even to speak about it would be a presumption, a disturbance of the settled world. Though he walks and talks, Prufrock is, spiritually speaking, dead - a soul in agony, in hell. His condition is that of paralysis, a morbid lassitude born of the sense of the pointlessness of life, which leads to an inability to do anything apart from retreat into guilt-ridden introspection. This ennui is a major theme in Baudelaire; and we find another treatment in James Joyce's Dubliners, whose characters are unable to move or act beyond the narrow circumscribed world defined for them by place, tradition, religion. In this condition, life itself - meaningful, fulfilled life - is deferred, indefinitely postponed. Yet another reference here is Matthew Arnold's 'The Buried Life', which describes the sense of our real lives and selves being hidden from us:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life.

The buried life, the life not fully lived is another great Eliot theme, or really the same theme as the meeting of living and dead, for it is about the life which never happens, which turns into a mental death. Prufrock cannot act; Gerontion ends up in a waste land at the end of an empty life; The Hollow Men take this spiritual inactivity to an extreme; and even Simeon, having been granted the revelation, resigns himself to an otherwise uneventful life.

After Prufrock's love song, which describes not being able to love, and not having a song, we meet the similarly tortured speaker of 'Portrait of a Lady'. The title alludes to a Henry James novel, and the poem is a Jamesian 'moment', consciousness investigated to breaking point. The lady believes her companion is an understanding friend (lines 19-23), but he knows he isn't: he stands back from the scene he is in, treats it as material for art, reflects on his incapacity for true friendship (the musical images form an analogue of this guilt pulsing through him), and takes refuge in social rituals - admiring the monuments and so forth. It is another version of Arnold's buried life, the unspoken world where conversation falters, the subterranean anxieties which lie beneath social ritual. (This acute awareness of hidden, vertiginous depths beneath the surface of events is a great modernist trope: it is the basic premise of Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway - both, incidentally, published in 1922, the same year as 'The Waste Land'.) Feeling unequal to the emotional demands made of him, the speaker of 'Portrait' takes refuge in the persona of the refined flaneur, the ironic observer of urban life. Music throughout is the unconscious force that jerks him into recognising his inadequacy. When she dies - she is nearing her journey's end, she says - how will he respond to that? Will she have the better of him by pointing out in her death his total inability to find the right feeling in himself? Intellect, culture, irony .. all here have led to a dead end, a failure of sympathy and communication. Eliot the tremendously educated (Harvard, Paris, Oxford) intellectual poet is contemplating the emotional atrophy which follows from over-cultivation of the intellect. As in Prufrock, the form expresses the emotional narrative of the piece, giving us an x-ray of the synaptic currents as the speaker feels his nerves grow, then calms himself, then starts again ... And we are getting an uneasy sense now of Eliot's representation of women - terrifying presences in Prufrock, and a source of neurotic anxiety here.

In 'Preludes', we return to the modern city, as explored by Baudelaire (Eliot seems here to be remembering his home town of St Louis, Missouri - in exile in London, the memory grows keener). We can see the waste land forming - the streets are shabby, life is made up of pointless 'masquerades', the poet watches and cultivates his observational powers. The Preludes look back to Baudelaire and more recently to Imagism, the school of poetry formed by Pound and others in opposition to the (as they saw it) vacuous rhetoric of Georgian poetry. Imagism is devoted to clear, sharp delineations in a language which is born of common speech but exact. From the image the reader 'gets' the emotional state behind it. Compare the images in these poems to Pound's famous 'In a Station of the Metro':

This apparation of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

From these deft observations and metaphors an emotional world is built up in the reader's mind. Alongside the clarity and economy of the writing, we also note the detached poet stance uttering some rather unpleasant observations about the sordid contents of some unnamed, ordinary person's mind. Thanks! And how does he know, anyway? The ironic detachment here becomes an aggressive snobbery, as in the dead crowd on London Bridge in The Waste Land. We could read this as the speaker projecting his own disenchantment and self-loathing onto what he sees: Preludes and Rhapsody, after all, explore the process of perception, dramatise the way inner state colours observations of the external world. But nonetheless, elitist detachment from ordinary life is for many one of the less agreeable aspects of the Eliot poetic.

Then we come to 'Rhpasody on a Windy Night', a poem freighted with intimidating learning, if we consult Southam and other guides. One influence is the French writer Henri Bergson, and his theories of memory (like Eliot, Bergson was interested in the coexistence of past and present); perhaps we see a trace of F H Bradley, the Oxford philosopher on whom Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation (the war prevented Eliot from attending his viva voce exam, and hence he never became Dr Eliot). Bradley's subject was the philosophy of mind: is there any reality beyond the reality of my consciousness? Are there minds other than mine? How could I know if there were? and so forth. (Perhaps the most clearly Bradleyan lines occur in 'The Waste Land': 'each in his prison / thinking of the key'). But 'Rhapsody' is not a philosophical poem. It does not argue a thesis, and source-hunting is likely to lead us away from its emotional depths onto the dry (very dry) land of abstract reflection, where some readers may prefer to be. For 'Rhapsody', like the other poems in the collection, is quite terrifying. It is about suffering, and depicts a mind in an extreme state. Again we find a speaker trapped in a circle of hell, which takes the form of an urban nocturne. Memory is troubling, leading us into madness (11-12). We meet another menacing female (16-22). A prostitute, at that time? Perhaps. Or a projection of the mind? Another paralysed spirit, certainly, unable to communicate.  Failure to communicate is perhaps the keynote. Even the children are oblivious, and the nearest the speaker gets to any kind of interaction with anything is playing tug-of-war with a crab. we never quite know if the images int his poem are nightmare phantoms, or things in the real streets around which, restlessly, he walks. Alongside these themes we notice another Eliot motif, which is eyes: the woman's eye is twisted, and the child's eye is a blank. We remember the piercing eyes in Prufrock. Turn from here to 'The Hollow Men' and you'll see eyes all over the place, eyes unable to see, unable to meet. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, as the saying has it, then we find ourselves here in a soulless place, the place where the soul dies. 'Rhapsody' follows the meandering route of the speaker as he walks through this desolate inferno - waste land - city - unconscious - memory liminal space where thoughts that should be dead and buried come to life. He finally reaches his sparse-sounding lodging, with the single toothbrush hanging pathetically on the wall. The lamp tells him to get ready for the business of living (which is what Prufrock spends his life doing). Life? what life? The irony is savage, hence the last line, locked in place by rhyme (rhyme endings in Eliot are rarely comforting chimes, more often beats of mounting nervous tension).

To sum up the themes announced in Prufrock: failure of communication, the buried life, the life not lived, the mingling of living and dead, past and present, women as a source of fear and self-doubt, elitism (perhaps), despair, suffering. A depressing list, so what stops the experience of reading from being purely depressing? First, the simple fact that is being said: the unspeakable is being articulated, the depths hauled to the surface (cf the image of memory throwing things up on a beach in Rhapsody). There is the creative energy which we find in the exact use of language and the formal techniques: quotation and allusion, the handling of 'free' verse so that the lines form an exact map of the mental journey they describe, the employment of personae, the sharp characterisation, imagery that has not been done to death, and still makes a surprising impact today. And we sense that this is the real thing, not someone writing what they think poetry ought to sound like, but using poetry as an instrument to transcribe experience, whatever dark places that may lead us into. The creative process of art, then, is a way of dealing with pain. The next set of poems, 'Ara vos Prec' (Poems, 1920) will ask, among other things, whether art and intellect are sufficient for dealing with the tribulations of modern (modernist) life.

For more overview material (online) see:

One-page summary from Books and Writers
Ronald Bush, T S Eliot's Life and Career
General Account on The Poetry Foundation

Also:
Earlier post on this blog on Prufrock
Keith Sagar, 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'
Analysis of Rhapsody
Another account of Rhapsody on Wondering Minstrels blog

Short Guide to Poetic Metre

The following is an outline of the discipline of prosody, the study of poetic metre. It is probably the area of literary commentary where it is easiest to get bogged down in jargon, and usually a little talk of dactyls, anapaests and secondary stresses will go a long way. But equally there is no doubt that over much of the history of poetry, the concern with metre or 'numbers' has been very high indeed in the minds of readers and writers: one only has to flick through a Renaissance treatise such as Puttenham's Art of Poesie to see this concern with sound, and to get a sense that previous generations were attuned to nuances of rhythm to a degree we perhaps cannot now recapture. In any case, the basics of the matter are offered below for the bold and curious, and suggestions for other sources are added to placate the dissatisfied.

Syllables
Words in English divide into units of sound which we call syllables: win-dow, coll-ect, ten-der (2 syllables each); fasc-in-ate, cum-ber-some, dis-as-ter (3); ex-clam-a-tion, con-de-scen-ding (4) etc.

A syllable will contain at least one vowel. It may have one or more consonants accompanying it: 'coll' is a syllable consisting of consonant + vowel + consonant. ('Vowel' and 'consonant' aply here to sounds, rather than letters or characters: 'll' is two letters but one consonant sound.)

Stress
When we speak, we naturally emphasise or stress some syllables more than others: win-dow, coll-ect, ten-der, fasc-in-ate, cum-ber-some, dis-as-ter, ex-clam-a-tion, con-de-scen-ding. The stress position is not arbitrary, but subject to habits of speech sound.

Scansion
Poets compose texts in such a way that stresses are normally highly organised within verse lines and longer units. In regular metre, the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables will fall into patterns. These patterns create a particular kind of rhythm, which can be varied and interrupted for metrical effect. The study of these patterns and effects is called, to use an old-fashioned term, prosody. Because the key feature of prosody in English is identifying which syllables carry a stress or accent, the system is called accentual-syllabic.

When we describe the metre of a line of verse, we first scan it to identify the stressed syllables. Here is the beginning of Canto 4 of Pope's The Rape of the Lock:

But anxious cares the pensive nymph oppressed,
And secret passions laboured in her breast.

When scanned, the lines look like this (capital letters indicating stress), with the syllables separated:

But ANX-ious CARES the PEN-sive NYMPH opp-RESSED  (10)
And SE-cret PASS-ions LA-boured IN her BREAST. (10)

I have used a smaller size for IN (line 2), because its stress sounds lighter than the other capitalised syllables: it carries a secondary stress (though stress has been divided into more than two grades). It is in fact a common effect that where there are five stressed syllables in a line, one will be notably weaker and take a secondary quality.
So far, we have marked line one of the extract  as having ten syllables, made up of five unstressed and five stressed, and line two as following the same pattern (with a qualification noted on 'in'). If we use the conventional symbols of / for stress and x for unstressed, we can represent this as the following sequence:

x/ x/ x/ x/ x/

This sequence is clearly ordered and not random, and its repetition in two successive lines suggests strongly it is not arbitrary. It is a pattern consisting of the x/ unit, repeated five times. With vertical lines between each unit, we see how it maps onto the line of verse:

But ANX |-ious CARES | the PEN-| sive NYMPH | opp-RESSED

A poetic line which behaves according to a regular accentual metre like this is said to scan (and scansion is another term for metre).

Feet
The basic unit of stressed and unstressed, repeated to form a pattern, is known as a foot. Metrical feet are oblivious of meaning: they correspond to groups of syllables, and words can cut across them. In traditional scansion, feet are designated with Greek words. This is far from ideal, both because Greek is today an obscure language even to most educated people, and because the Greek language works very differently from English: Greek and Latin poetry are quantitative, that is to say their syllables are long and short, and to take words used to describe this state of affairs as the tools with which to describe a different sound world where syllables are stressed or unstressed is a kind of category error. Nonetheless, the error is so long ingrained and enshrined in textbooks that it seems inescapable. And, it must be said, while the terminology is not ideal, there is still much useful work that can be done with it.

Iambic Pentameter
Pursuing Greek terms, the unit of x/ (stress unstress) is an iamb. The line from Pope we have been concentrating on has five iambs, making it a pentameter (words ending in -meter count the number of feet in the line: pentameter means 'five feet' and that is all it means). The iambic pentameter is the most common line in post-medieval English poetry, long enough to encompass interesting thoughts while remaining memorable, and at the same time anchored in the natural rhythms of speech (The pentamter functions equally well at different speech registers. Examples of colloquial pentameter: I wonder if they'll call us when he comes, I've read this thing at least a thousand times! Just text me and I'll come and pick you up). The iambic pentameter is used in many rhyming verse forms; verse in non-rhyming iambic pentameter is called blank verse (examples are Paradise Lost and most of the dramatic verse of Shakespeare).

To recap, the three stages of describing the metre of a line are:

1. Identify stressed syllables
2. Identify the basic kind of foot into which the line can be broken down
3. Count the number of feet to give the type of line (note: count the feet, not the syllables).

Here are the most common feet in English with their Greek names:
                                                         
iamb   x/  (forGIVE)
trochee  /x  (WINdow)
spondee //  (I've got BAD NEWS)
pyrrhic  xx  (MUCH of the TIME)
anapaest  xx/  (InterrUPT)
dactyl /xx  (CHARacter)

The line lengths are designated as follows:

1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter 
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
7 feet: septameter / fourteener

Verse lines can thus be described in terms of their feet, and the number of feet in a line:

I wonder if she's there (I WONder IF she's THERE) = iambic trimeter
How the time is running past us! (HOW the TIME is RUNNing PAST us) = trochaic tetrameter

Tetrameters and pentameters are far the most common in English verse. Mono, di, hex and sept are  rare.

Pitch
The voice usually rises in pitch when it stresses a syllable. Hence, iambs and anapaests, which end in a stress, naturally create a rising rhythm. Trochees and dactyls, which move from stressed to unstressed, create a falling rhythm. These two effects can be counterpointed to create a wave-like sensation, and prevent the iambic line from becoming noxiously jaunty. The couplet from Pope is an example. The only way to get a word like 'window' (/x) into iambic verse is to make it cross from one foot into the next (An |xious). Pope uses several such trochaic words, and the effect is to slow the verse down, creating a feeling of falling against the natural rising rhythm of the iambs. Though this aural pattern is meaningless in itself, it usefully colours the content of the line, and here perhaps helps us to imagine the mental labour and anxiety of the 'nymph', to feel her vexed sighings (though this reading may simply be an example of 'reading in' the sense of the words into their rhythmic utterance; sound effects diviorced from lexical meaning seem to have no real effect at all):

But ANX |-ious CARES | the PEN-| sive NYMPH | opp-RESSED
And SE | cret PASS | ions LA | boured IN | her BREAST.

Syntax
The second line here noticeably goes into a trochaic rhythm, to come out of it in the last foot. (Returning to the weaker 'in', we might even scan this as a pyrrhic - two unstressed syllables).
In this example, the syntax corresponds to the metre: each line contains a single grammatical sentence, linked by the conjunction 'And' at the start of line 2. Often, though, poets will set tensions between the verse line and the syntax, with sentences flowing over several lines, starting and ending mid-line, and local rhythms forcing themselves against the dominant general pattern. Milton does this constantly, and it is a characteristic feature of writers in what we may call the baroque style. But in any period it is a general effect to look out for: the sentence rhythm - the general shape and natural emphases of the sentence - will be in some kind of relationship, friendly or tense, with the verse rhythm, demarcated by individual lines. In these lines from Donne, we can hear the energies of the sentence struggling against the prim compartments of metre and line as the cosmic vision is released into words:

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
all whom the flood did, and fire shall, o'erthrow ...

Against this emotive effusion, the classical, Augustan line counters with well-bred lines of shapely poise and balance. 'To Penshurst', by Donne's contemporary Ben Jonson, celebrates the civilised qualities of the Sidney family, as enshrined in Penshurst, their country estate. We note how the good ordering of the land is represented in the orderly syntax, rhyme and metre:

Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer
When thou wouldst feast or exercise thy friends.
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine and calves do feed;
The middle ground thy mares and conies breed.

Variation
Verse lines can vary without changing their scansion. In these lines by Sir Philip Sidney, we feel the tedious ascent of the moon in the heavy tread of the iambic feet:

With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!

Of course the sense of the lines causes us to slow down but we notice, too, the medial pauses between phrases, and the way the words seem to drag. To stress a vowel is also to lengthen it, and this lengthening is pointed here by thickets of consonants (steps), assonance (climb'st, silently), half rhyme (Moon, wan) and sibilance coming into and out of the vowel  (skies, silently) - all maximising the time value of the syllable and bringing across the sense of effortfulness. The lines are still broadly regular, though we might hear 'sad steps' as a spondee, or on the way to one. By contrast, sense, syntax and the distribution of sounds make these lines by Donne brisker, bringing across the speaker's impatience:

Now thou hast loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say.

Shakespeare offers such variations of phrasing and tempo line by line for the speaking voice, creating an awareness of flexibility against the iambic beat.

Other variations reach for the key to the iambic padlock and unlock it. A few examples will suggest the infinite effects that can be deployed:

To BE | or NOT | to BE, | THAT is | the QUES | tion.

The chief variation happens with the decisive 'That' at the start of the fourth foot. Here instead of an iamb we have a trochee, making it a trochaic substitution or inverse (back-to-front) foot. The line furthermore has 11 syllables (hendecasyllabic) rather than 10 (decasyllabic). The extra syllable at the end is a feminine ending (referring, by lamentable tradition, to its weakness) or an unstressed hyperbeat. Because it has too many syllables for an iambic pentameter, the line is hypermetrical. The effect of the inverse foot is emphasised by a caesura or hiatus indicated here (we know nothing of Shakespeare's actual punctuation) by a comma at the end of the third foot, creating a heavy pause which interrupts the rhythm. For what my intuition is worth, I doubt Shakespeare thought consciously of any of this, any more than a great jazz pianist in performance thinks verbally of chord sequences and key changes: once a craft has been thoroughly internalised, it can be pursued without such painstaking self-consciousness. It is indeed a curious effect of the kind of dissection we are attempting that it seems to attribute to artists toils of ratiocination of which they may have known nothing. But it does not follow that the observations we make of the resulting art are wrong.

Here is another example of a variation:

TYger, | TYger, | BURning | BRIGHT
IN the | FORests | OF the | NIGHT

This famous poem by Blake employs a catalectic trochaic tertameter: catalectic = one missing or 'silent' syllable, here the unstressed syllable needed at the end to complete the trochaic pattern (Tyger, Tyger, burning brightly - this is the trochaic tetrameter used in Longfellow's Hiawatha to curiously enervating effect). At the line-break, there is no punctuation. Thus the line is not end-stopped and the break constitutes a run-on, or enjambment. The effect is not necessarily to speed the verse up. Here, we have two stresses next to each other, either side of the line-break: 'burning bright / In the forests'. In fact, the enjambment creates a pause, allowing us to hold the image of the burning tiger in our minds before extending the vision into the forest.

The next example is from Shakespeare. Typically, it is open to many different readings, one reason that the plays allow for repeated productions. The line is from King Lear's famous 'Oh, reason not the need' speech:

If ON | ly to | go WARM | were GOR |ge-ous,
WHY, NA | ture NEEDS | NOT what | THOU GOR | geous WEAR'ST.

To 'save' the metre here, 'Gorgeous' has to be given its full three syllables in the first line, while it is compacted into two in the second. Similarly, words like imagination can be 5 or 6 syllables according to metrical need. In the reading I have suggested above, the second foot of line 1, 'ly to' is a pyrrhic substitution, while two feet in the second line are spondaic substitutions. The foot 'NOT what' is a now familiar trochaic inversion. The net effect is to feel the iambic current being short-circuited, bringing out a stuttering, interrupted rhythm we may associate with Lear's emotional turbulence. This kind of metrical torsion, however we may analyse it in specific instances, is characteristic of Shakespeare in his later period. Our aim as readers is not to 'solve' the line to an imagined answer, but to discover more or less plausible possibilities within the parameters of normal pronunciation (we cannot, for example, wrench an accent from its normal syllable, except when singing, where such effects are regarded as acceptable). We can pause to note, too, the importance of elements off the page: the timbre of the actor's voice, intonation, facial expression, gesture, all of which contribute vitally to our perception of the moment of these lines.

This brief outline will, I hope, provide a useful starting point for accurate metrical analysis. Prosody is not exclusively for the examination regular verse: so-called free verse will still have a carefully considered rhythmic organisation, even if it does not fit any established regular metrical form.

Considerations
When analysing metre, we can bring questions such as these to bear:
What is the basic rhythm? Where is it varied, and why? Do variations point the meaning, eg by highlighting a contrast (YOU did, not ME) or imitating the sense in some way? We should not feel compelled to harness metrical and other sound effects to an interpretation of meaning: they can be aesthetic and sensual rather than semantic in significance, creating a pattern which is decorous, balanced, symmetrical, harmonious - or spiky, jerky and nervy. Dryden would give us examples of the first, Hopkins of the second (with exceptions either way), and in both cases the acoustic properties of the verse constitute a subverbal realm which we register even if we cannot interpret it in lexical terms (we feel it, but cannot put it into words, since it is beyond words). Metre is inextricably linked to syntax, punctuation and other devices, and is to be considered as part of a total cast of effects rather than as a single actor alone on the stage. Metre will be part of the voice of the poem solemn, stately, lively, boisterous, a voice frequently moved by some internal tension, exploratory, self-dramatising. The study of metre is at the very least a reminder that poetry is written primarily for the ear, rooted in spells, chants and incantations. The technicalities of the jargon in the end return us to the pre-verbal and mysterious origins of poetry, which remain as trace elements in even its most modern printed form.

Further Reading
Online
Amittai F Aviram, Meter in English Verse
Cambridge English Faculty, Virtual Glossary of Literary Terms
Series of articles by Tina Blue

Books
James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled
John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason - a simultaneously entertaining and instructive book which explains forms by demonstrating them.