Don't Sweat the Syllables
Recently an issue arose in another forum as to whether a line of iambic pentameter should never vary from a 10-syllable count. For those who may be already perplexed by the ticklish process of scansion as well as writers trying to compose metric verse themselves, I looked up some info in the hopes of clearing up the confusion.
Here's what author Chris Baldick has to say on the subject in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, p. 217, (boldface mine.)
"Syllabic verse: verse in which the lines are measured according to the number of syllables they contain, regardless of the number of stresses.The syllabic principle operates in the poetry of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) and of Chinese and Japanese; but in English purely syllabic verse occurs only in rare experiments, such as those of Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, and Thom Gunn. The counting of syllables is not the dominant principle. . .[But]Alexander Pope and other poets of the 18th century were quite strict in counting the ten syllables of their pentameters. . .but other English poets like Shakespeare and Keats allowed themselves more variation in the syllable-count. . .so that it is more accurate to call their pentametersfive-stress lines."
The poets who do not waver from the "decasyllabic line" follow the poetic principle of "accentual-syllabic" prosody. For those writing purely "accentual" verse , "the number of syllables per line does not matter." In that type of iambic pentameter, the emphasis is on five feet per line, with one stressed syllable in each foot rather than a hard-and-fast devotion to ten syllables per line.
Just for the heck of it, I leafed haphazardly through The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry in order to see if I could find some examples of pentameter lines which step beyond the 10-syllable limit.
The opening line of "The Winter Twilight Glowing Black and Gold" by Delmore Schwartz is exactly the same as the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Like the original, Schwartz's poem follows a pattern of predominantly five-stress lines, all with ten syllables, except for the concluding two lines, the penultimate with 11 syllables, the last one, 12.
Now boxed in the learning and music of art:
But once more, as before, accepted and refused.
"The Wraith," the third part of a longer poem called Four for Sir John Davies by Theodore Roethke, begins:
Incomprehensible gaiety and dread
Attended what we did. Behind, before
Lay all the lonely pastures of the dead.
The first line, with its multi-syllabic first word, has 11 syllables, but the two succeeding lines follow a 10-syllable, five-stress iambic pattern.
Finally, Robert Frost famously expressed his-- "playing tennis without a net" --disdain for free verse, obviously practicing what he preached, since his metric poems seem to scan smoothly and effortlessly. Nevertheless, readers can find a slight divergence from the narrow woods in a poem such as "The Oven Bird." If the word "everyone" is elided to "ev'ryone," then opening line is 10 syllables in length, but if "everyone" is pronounced the way it is written, with three syllables, the line is 11 syllables long:
There is a singer everyone has heard,
contains two eleven-syllable lines as the result of Keats-style, "feminine endings":
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers (line 4)
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers (line 7)
It seems to me that a poet can deviate from a strict syllable word-count while still retaining his chosen metric pattern with the required stressed syllable within each foot. A beloved poem by the aforementioned Marianne Moore likened baseball and poetry, so we might try draw an analogy between metrics and Major League Pitching.
With a young, developing pitcher, especially ones whose specialty is the hard-tossed fastball, some managers make these guys strictly adhere to a pre-ordained pitch count. The metric equivalent of a pitch count would be a line with the prescribed number of syllables.
On the other hand, for a seasoned "ace," a pitch count isn't nearly as important. In fact, on those occasions when a pitcher lasts for a complete, 9-inning game, the number of pitches he has thrown may have exceeded 100. What's important with those stars is not the speed of the fastball, but varying the kinds of pitches he throws, as well as the location of where a particular pitch lands. The main focus is getting the "out" however it takes within the rules of the game. The poetic equivalent is having the freedom once in a while to diversify the 10 syllables while keeping the five stresses.
So I would say that modern poets more likely to follow the metric philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats rather than Alexander Pope. If an extra syllable sneaks into a line of pentameter, the poem hasn't lost, so to speak, the game.
