Writing an Essay

When you're set an essay, the natural and human reaction is to want to get it over with. But for high-stakes writing - for exams and such - this have-a-go approach is a bit risky. So it's hugely worthwhile to put some time aside to find a guide to the method of essay writing that clicks with you. Many websites offer help with this, and not a few offer to write them for you for a fee. After a brief trawl, the online resources below seemed to me particularly useful.

Here's a hub to various resources on all kinds of writings. I haven't looked at them all. The Creative Writing Resources looks very good. Open here.

For academic essays in particular, I recommend the Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Go to 'Common Writing Assignments' for detailed advice on argumentative essays etc. Breaks it down into stages.

Plenty of universities are posting their student guides online. Here's good one from Anglia Ruskin University.

Another good one is this, by David Gauntlett of the Institute of Communication Studies at Leeds. I like his examples of concision over waffle: Essay-Writing: The Essential Guide

Here's a very practical document by Tom Davis written for English undergraduates (but useful for other subjects), with some useful links of its own. Written in 2001 so the remarks on technology are a little archaic, but the advice on putting material into paragraphs is timeless. How to Write an Essay.

See also previous blog post, Guides to Good Writing.

Rhetoric: Some Tropes

Accompanying another post on rhetorical schemes, here is one on tropes. Where schemes deal with sentences - clauses in parallel, etc. - tropes concern the artful deviation of words from their ordinary sense. In practice, the distinction between schemes and tropes can become artificial, as there is a natural symbiosis between word and syntax. Some figures (ie zeugma) have been classified variously as scheme and trope. There are also problems in talking about the 'ordinary' use of language. There are good arguments (see Owen Barfield's wonderful book Poetic Diction) that language in its normal state is metaphorically rich, and we have to make a special effort to reduce a word ro statement to carry single precise meanings: think of the work lawyers have to do to create documents that admit of only one interpretation - it suggests they might be working against the grain of the material of language.

Metaphor and Simile

Metaphor
Twisting a word from its usual sense to create another idea. Used to form striking comparisons between two unlike things to show something they still have in common. A metaphor can occur in various parts of speech, and it does not have to take the form a=b. There's a beautiful discussion of metaphor in the film Il Postino.
This book is a monument.
The sun blessed the bright sky. The sun shouted in the laughing sky.
That news just burns me up.
I stood in the lonely field [so-called transferred epithet, where the adjective describing me - lonely - is transferred to the field. Also an instance of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, the fallacy being to suppose that inanimate things like fields have feeling (pathos) like loneliness.]

Simile
Also a comparison between two unlike things, made explicit by a word such as 'as' or 'like'
My love is like a red, red rose.
The silence settled like snow.
He entered the room as subtly as a steam train.

Part and whole

Synecdoche
Part stands for whole; genus or adjunct suggest main idea.
A village of three hundred souls. ['soul' is a part, standing for the whole person]
Keep your vehicle roadworthy [Vehicle stands - probably - for car, a specific kind of vehicle
: genus for species]
Give us this day our daily bread [Bread for food: species for genus]
Many hands make light work.
You did this for the oldest of motives - silver [the material 'silver' stands for what is made from it]

Metonymy
Virtually the same as synecdoche. An attribute or suggestive word is used to imply what is really meant.
Let's go and buy a bottle or two for dinner.
The top brass are meeting now.
He lives by his pen.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Puns
Other ages took puns more seriously than we do. Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance dramas has a level of wordplay that can seem puzzling to a modern audience. One way of looking at a line like Hamlet's punning 'A little more than kin and less than kind' is that it contains metaphor at its most compressed - several meanings in just one word (kind implies a comparison with 'kinned' (family-related) and 'kind' meaning species).

Antanaclasis
Word repeated in two different senses.
I want to scotch the idea that all the Scotch like Scotch.
Let's hang around while they hang Danny.
We make the traveller's lot a lot easier.

Paronomasia
Use words that sound the same but have different meanings. this is the groan groan type of pun.
I wish my parents would leave me a loan.
If you try the high stile you might look silly.
Let's have the fool for pudding.

Syllepsis
One word (usually a verb) governs two or mroe other words, though it is understood differently in each case. See zeugma, from which it is practically indistinguishable.
I take my hat and my leave.
Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.
... Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.
His speech raised a laugh or two but also some hackles.

Figures of Substitution

Anthimeria
Substitute one part of speech for another. Several examples in late Shakespeare.
The thunder would not peace at my bidding. (noun for verb)
Lord Angelo dukes it well.
Knee thy way into his mercy.
I am going in search of the great perhaps (adverb for noun)
He wants to do the impossible (adjective for noun)
The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she.

Periphrasis
Substitute a descriptive word or phrase for a name (eg a nickname); substitute a proper name for a quality associated with it.
Meet the mad jackal, captain of our village cricket team.
I am taught biology by the great fungus.
I like drawing, but I'm no Leonardo.
You'd need a Hercules to shift this lot.

Personification
Give abstract concepts or inanimate objects human qualities.
The ground is thirsty.
Smoke caressed the garden fence.
Fortune is cruel and arbitrary.

Apostrophe
Address to an absent person or personified abstraction: Death be not proud, Oh cruel fortune! etc.

Hyperbole
Substitute an over-the-top phrase for the real idea, to achieve emphasis.
There were millions of people at the party.
When he's angry, he makes the walls shake.
He's the King of the village hall ping-pong table.

Litotes
Opposite of hyperbole. Deliberate understatement, emphasising the point by opposite means. It's most common form is witht he negative.
That's no mean task.
I'm slightly puzzled as to why you burned the house down.
It would be rather helpful if you could throw me a rope to stop me from drowning.
I admit it's somewhat unusual to see a tree growing in someone's living room.
einstein was not unintelligent.

Rhetorical question (erotema)
Asking a question in order to make a point rather than to elicit an answer.
How many times do I have to tell you?
Isn't it odd that the murders only started after the new vicar was installed?

Irony
Using a word to signify the opposite of what it usually means. In its strong form it becomes sarcasm.
So you completely ignored the question - that was clever.
It's a privilege to be able to teach Wykehamists.
I can't wait to get the next gas bill.

Onomatopoeia
The sound of a word seems to underline its sense. Often combined with alliteration and assonance.
First march the heavy Mules, securely slow,
O'er hills, o'er Dales, o'er crags, o'er rocks they go
Jumping high o'er the shrubs of the rough ground,
Rattle the clatt'ring Cars, and the shockt Axles bound. (Pope, Iliad, 23:138-41)

Oxymoron
Joining together two words with different senses, to create a kind of self-contradiction.
Dry ice, conspicuously absent, deafening silence, cruel kindness, laborious leisure, the living dead
O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches.

Recommended Reading
Arthur Quinn and Barney R Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase
Richard A Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

Online
Two handy lists:
Robert A Harris, A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
University of Kentucky, Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

More comprehensive treatment:
Gideon Young, Silva Rhetoricae

Rhetoric: Examples of Schemes

Rhetoric: the art of persuasive speech. Or perhaps we might say, the art of expressive speech, in which language is shaped, 'figured', into configurations that compel our attention. Of the hundreds of figures of speech listed in reference works, only a few (metaphor, simile, alliteration) are in regular use in literary study. Here is a list of a few others: getting acquainted with them can certainly sharpen our sense of form in writing, and that perception of form can in turn - on a good day - help us to get a precise idea of the nature of the thought being expressed, and how its formal contours give it a rhythm and emotional current.

Rhetorical figures can be divided into schemes and tropes. Put simply, schemes deal with the shape of a sentence, tropes with the use of individual words. Schemes themselves can be subdivided, as follows:

Schemes of Balance

Parallelism   Words, phrases or clauses with a similar structure:

Government of the people, by the people, for the people 
I watched television and my wife read a book [Two clauses around and: the structure of each clause is Pronoun + transitive verb + object]

Players who abuse the opposition or maim the referee will not be selected in future. [Sentence includes two parallel phrases: abuse the opposition, maim the referee, both transitive verb + object]

Parallelism can convey the effect of being composed, in mind and speech, poised, in charge of one's material. Notice the various parallel phrases and clauses in the opening of Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents:

It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of faction.

One way of making clear the parts of text working in parallel is to place them in a column, to see how the elements of speech map onto each other:

If a man happens not to succeed
If he touches                                 [If + subject + verb / verbal phrase

weak and visionary
weight and consequence  [Two terms bound as a couplet, a pair of adjectives and a pair of nouns. Notice that in both pairs, a short Anglo-Saxon word is followed by a longer Latinate one]

exasperated at the discovery
thankful for the occasion  [adj + preposition + noun]

And the last sentence (or period, as Burke might have considered it) consists of two balanced sentences (If clause, main clause), themselves pivoted on a semi-colon and containing parallel constructions (the tool of power / an instrument of faction)

Isocolon
When the parallelism is exact:
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
To our right is the hard road to virtue, on our left lies the pretty path to perdition.

Antithesis
Contrasting ideas, whose relation is pointed by their position in parallel structures:
The fool thinks he is clever; the wise man knows he is ignorant.
That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Schemes of Unusual Word Order (Hyperbaton)

Anastrophe
Inversion of usual word order:
Slowly flows the stream
Those I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love.

Parenthesis
Start a sentence, then interrupt its natural flow with something else, even a complete sentence:
This crime - and I use this word deliberately - must be punished.
When he is angry - something which I am sorry to say occurs quite often - he loses all sense of proportion.

Apposition
Two things side by side, one explaining or modifying the other. (In Latin, of course, they can be some way from each other)
Ted, the village postman, has just been arrested. ['the village postman' is in apposition to 'Ted' - it saves using the relative clause ' who is the village postman']

Schemes of Omission

Ellipsis
Missing out a word or words which the reader has to 'fill in' from context.
I must to England [Obviously, 'I must go' is intended]
If you want a harder essay title, fine.
Idleness is the main vice of the young, wasted effort of the middle-aged, and despair of the old.

Asyndeton
Missing conjunctions between successive clauses.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
You were warned. You ignored this warning. You must be punished.
The teams went onto the field, the referee blew his whistle. The game had begun.

Polysyndeton
Opposite of asyndeton: lots of conjunctions.
And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.
It was cold and dark and silent and suddenly we felt very scared.
I entered the room although it was dark and atood very still but heard nothing.

Schemes of Repetition

Alliteration
Repeated initial or medial consonants. A useful sound effect:
Bruised and bloody, but not beaten.
A lovely, long, lazy summer afternoon.

Assonance
Repeated vowel sounds in stressed words, surrounded by different consonants.
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king. [It's the 'i' sound in blind that gets repeated here]
Sing with a voice of joy.
The hard, dark path.

Anaphora
Starting successive clauses with the same word or words.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

Epistrophe
Ending successive clauses with the same word or words.
I don't like cricket. I don't play cricket. I don't want to hear another word about cricket.

Epanalepsis
Same word at beginning and end.
Blood will have blood.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay.

Anadiplosis
End a clause with a word, and begin the next clause with the same word.
Cars have parts, parts need repairs, and repairs are expensive.

Climax
Words, phrases or clauses arranged in order of increasing importance.
I serve my employer, my family, my country and my God.

Antimetabole
An ABBA structure where words are repeated in inverse order.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Chiasmus
ABBA structure where grammatical structures or parts of speech are repeated inversely.
We proceeded at night, and by day we slept.
It's easy to make friends; to lose them is difficult.

Another post will give a list of tropes and reading recommendations.

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

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.










                               

Milton's Punctuation

If there were a competition for the driest blogpost title, this would be a contender. Yet there is a particular interest in the punctuation of literary texts, an interest aroused in me by graduate studies (many years ago) in paleography and the editing of medieval texts - Oxford's solid philological tradition - and by a subsequent reading of Malcolm Parkes's Pause and Effect and John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook, which pays detailed attention to this rather esoteric aspect of poetic craft (Lennard studied with Parkes at some stage, I think).

Punctuation matters. Careful writers - perhaps you and I on a good day - choose punctuation marks with the same care as they choose words. Broadly speaking these marks work in three ways - visually, aurally and logically. For example, the colon (1) helps us to see the segments of a sentence or period on the page, (2) creates an emphatic pause which we hear, and (3) suggests some logical connection between what precedes and follows it, thus guiding our understanding of the sense of a passage.

Too often, printers and editors alter authorial punctuation. But when we can be sure we are seeing the original (or at any rate, something roughly contemporary with the original, and thus conforming to many of the same conventions), it will repay our critical attention. Below I discuss the part punctuation plays in some lines from Milton. Familiar terms are used in the following ways, with bold and italics distinguishing where the same word is used to indicate the graphic mark or a sequence of text.

A colon (plural cola) indicates the mark :
A colon (plural cola) indicates everything written between cola, ie the segment of text which terminates in this mark (or a full stop).

A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the mark ;
A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the texts terminating in the mark ; or, again, with a terminal stop.

Similarly, a comma is the mark, and a comma (pl commata) refers to the words enclosed by commas.

A sentence is a grammatical statement with, normatively, a subject and verb which makes independent sense. It does not necessarily end with a full stop (though it normally terminates in one o the marks including a stop (?!;:.).

A period is a complete line of thought, which may contain several grammatical sentences, and which ends in a full stop (still called a 'period' in American English, recalling the earlier rhetorical tradition which Milton and others worked within).

An early modern writer like Milton typically composes not primarily in sentences, but in periods. To get a feel for this, we have to extend our view beyond the sentence, which is generally taught as the largest grammatical unit today. A rough equivalent to a Miltonic period would be the paragraph, a  gathering of sentences to make a cohesive larger statement. Another analogy is to see the punctuation marks as the joints of a limb, articulating the various members and holding them together to form a greater whole.

Simply to get our eye in, we can have a look at the 'joints' of a representative portion of text, Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 312-24. Text and notes are from the Dartmouth hypertext edition:

Now had they brought the work by wondrous Art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock
Over the vext Abyss, following the track
Of Satan, to the self same place where hee [ 315 ]
First lighted from his Wing, and landed safe
From out of Chaos to the out side bare
Of this round World: with Pinns of Adamant
And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable; and now in little space [ 320 ]
The confines met of Empyrean Heav'n
And of this World, and on the left hand Hell
With long reach interpos'd; three sev'ral wayes
In sight, to each of these three places led.

Stripped down eccentrically to punctuation marks only, this passage becomes ,,,,:  ,;,;. The period is composed of two cola, around the pivotal colon (line 318). The first colon has four commas (none of them, we note, at the end of a line, the medial placement creating a series of cross-rhythms) and thus five grammatical commata. The second colon comprises three semi-cola. The first two semi-cola have two commata each. Without commas, the main structure is clearly : ; ; . The limb of the period is in two halves, and the second half has two smaller joints (the semi-cola) holding it together. The whole period resembles the classical period of four cola. A further analogy is the renaissance altarpiece,  which is composed of various leaves (typically a diptych or triptych, but often with further sections), making a single work composed of distinct images - as foreign to prevailing conceptions of the artwork as Milton's periods are to those of the modern notion of sentence / statement.

Now we have identified the joints (or leaves), we are in a better position to follow the current of thought. Let us consider a longer period, also from Paradise Lost (the opening of Book IX).


First Colon

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest
With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam'd:

This is the first colon, ending midway through line 5, where the colon acts as a brake against the metrical momentum. It provides a link to the preceding book, referring to the scene we have just left: the poet tells us he will move on from the happy scene of man talking amicably with angels. There are five commata, the first two embracing the subject, and each of the last three giving an image of a particular action: used to sit ... partake ... permitting. These are non-finite verbal forms (two infinitives and a participle), suggesting the timeless, unhurried nature of such discourse.  The colon is placed to create a pause for reflection, significantly pointing the key word unblam'd, which summarises man's lost innocence.

Second Colon

I now must change [ 5 ]
Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience:

The second colon explains why there can be 'No more' of this pleasant theme. It is made up of two semi-cola. The first of these announces the change of subject; the second unpacks the full sense of the key word Tragic and takes us to the momentous word disobedience (the negative prefix echoing unblam'd at the conclusion of the previous colon). The four commata list, with cumulative force, the crimes of man (distrust, breach disloyal, revolt, disobedience): these stark nouns offer a tonal contrast to the actions described in the first colon. We notice, too, the semantic aptness of breach / Disloyal being visually prised apart by a line break, a graphic representation of the rift between God and man.

Third Colon

On the part of Heav'n
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, [ 10 ]
That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sinne and her shadow Death, and Miserie
Deaths Harbinger:

The second colon explained the first, and anatomised the elements of man's revolt. It moved us on from a timeless then to an equally verbless Now. The relation between colon 2 and colon 3 is that of cause and effect, as we learn of heaven's response to man's fall and the subsequent introduction of sin and death into the terrestrial sphere.

Fourth Colon

Sad task, yet argument
Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth
Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu'd [ 15 ]
Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd,
Or Neptun's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's Son;
If answerable style I can obtaine [ 20 ]
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
Her nightly visitation unimplor'd,
And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse:

Now that the subject matter of the Fall has been outlined, the fourth colon reflects on it as suitable matter for epic verse. What is a heroic subject? The link between Milton's work and ancient epic is the theme of vengeance and retribution by the mighty (and indeed almighty). This colon digresses into an ostentatiously erudite riff on this subject, the commata unfolding descriptive ornamentations as the poet's mind explores the theme. The first semi-colon declares that the Fall is not less but more heroic than Achilles' combat with Hector in Homer's Iliad. The next semi-colon offers further classical examples of the theme of divine 'ire' and 'rage' in retribution. The entire colon subdivides into a tricolon, a group of three, with the third semi-colon being the longest, attaining a climactic force as it describes the nightly visitations to the poet by the Muse. The subject of the whole colon is thus the superiority of Milton's poem to ancient epic: his work, we learn, has a loftier theme, and is directly divinely inspired without human interference. But we note here that even as Milton laments man's pride in challenging a higher authority, he himself asserts his own will against the literary authority of classical poetry. At the same time, the reference to the actions of classical narratives seems a diversionary tactic, taking our view away from the total lack of memorable dramatic action in the story of fall and punishment in the Christian narrative he has outlined. The classically composed period is, we might feel, holding together a passage of thought vexed by paradox, tonal contrast, a sense of the mismatch between matter and manner in the Christian epic itself. We are given a chance to rest as the colon falls at the end of a largely iambic line.

Fifth Colon

Since first this Subject for Heroic Song [ 25 ]
Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument
Heroic deem'd, chief maistrie to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights [ 30 ]
In Battels feign'd; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds; [ 35 ]
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgious Knights
At Joust and Torneament; then marshal'd Feast
Serv'd up in Hall with Sewers, and Seneshals;
The skill of Artifice or Office mean,
Not that which justly gives Heroic name [ 40 ]
To Person or to Poem.

The fifth and final colon completes the claim for the Fall as an heroic theme by contrasting it with other epic narrative verse. Where the fourth colon dealt with ancient epic, the fifth describes more recent works. They are obsessed with boring battles, nostalgic ideas of chivalry ('tinsel Trappings'), and don't explore more interesting kinds of courage such as that of the martyrs. This great colon has no fewer than six semi-cola as Milton warms to his theme of the inferiority of everyone else's poetry to his own, in good puritanical fashion clearly showing an appetite for the kind of literary pleasures he deprecates.  The important concept word 'Heroic' appears near the end to tie the fourth and fifth cola together.

It is perhaps worth repeating the observation that Milton usually places the heavy punctuation marks not at the ends of lines but in the middle. The shape and syntax of the period creates its own rhythm on top of, and against, the vestigial iambic metre. This plays a large part in giving Milton's verse a tense and 'heavy' feel as so much seems to be calling out for emphasis.

Finally, the long period here is a demonstration of the 'Heroic' nature of poet and poem, as it shows one vast line of thought encompassing rural repasts, divine anger, Homeric epic, divine inspiration, and chivalric verse. Here is a mind thinking, planning, remembering, considering and claiming with a triumphant mental energy.

Further Reading
Brief History of Punctuation in Britannica
Stephen Reimer's course notes from University of Alberta

John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook
M B Parkes, Pause and Effect: Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Scolar Press, 1992)
Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves has a handy summary of the earlier system.

English Lang & Lit Study sites

Three public domain revision sites for English Lang and Lit:

English biz. A little too much 'get the grades' stuff here for my lofty taste, but actually the guide to writing about poems I looked at was very sensible.

Andrew Moore's site has some good material. Some excellent introductions to poetry here.

The third site is Cross-ref-it. Study guides, context etc.