Back to the gym; scansion

[redbird]

Having not been to the gym in about a fortnight, I discovered after I got there that I didn't have my combination lock with me. I didn't want to buy yet another, so I schlepped my pack with me, which is both less fun and something the gym doesn't really like. It would have been a minimal workout anyway, though, because I was squeezing it in after work:


Crunches, 4 sets of 20
Back arches, 3 sets of 17 (@ lunchtime)

Cardio, 5-minute warmup

Seated leg press, 370 pounds, 12.
Leg extension, 80 pounds, 12 (in fits and starts).
Leg curl, 110 pounds, 12.
Lat pulldown, 105 pounds, 12.
Overhead press, 50 pounds, 11
Vertical chest press, 60? pounds, 9.
Biceps, 45 pounds, 11
Triceps, 50 pounds, 12

And then changed back into my street clothes, with neither serious stretches nor a shower, and came home.

Meanwhile, reading the subway-provided excerpt from Yeats again, I realized that it isn't actually in iambic pentameter, no matter how I try to force it. Or rather, some lines are, but not all: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold" is iambs, but I cannot make "The ceremony of innocence is drowned" fit into ten syllables, and "Turning and turning in the widening gyre" is only iambic pentameter if I pronounce "widening" with the "e" silent, as "wide-ning" instead of "wide-en-ing" (which may be how Yeats would have said it). It doesn't rhyme either, but that's less startling.

Have I been confused all these years, or is this just the difference between New York dialect of today and Irish of a century ago?

Also seen on the subway: "War is Peace: Bush/Orwell 2004".

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much you know about the rules of scansion, so I beg your pardon if I'm telling you something you already know.

Iambic pentameter doesn't necessarily have ten syllables to every line (Shakespeare plays fast and loose with it on a regular basis; consider, "To be or not to be, that is the question," which has eleven). It's the five stresses per line that matter (and even then, some lines may have four or six--to be a good poet, you have to know the rules; to be a great poet, you have to know how to break them).

Now, I suck at English scansion, so I can't tell you whether "The Second Coming" is blank verse or not, or what you call it if it isn't. All I can tell you is that the ten syllables per line is a rule of thumb; English poetry is almost never as rigorous as Japanese.

[kiya]

Is it supposed to be iambs? I'd read it as dactyls or anapests (depending on which way the single syllable feet should read), with a few blurs of syllable keeping it from being perfectly regular.

(I can't read the first line without it coming out in dactyls. TURN-ing-and-TURN-ing. . .)

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Oh, so I'm not the only person who sees dactyls where other see iambs ... *whew*

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

I cannot make "The ceremony of innocence is drowned" fit into ten syllables

I can do it by slurring the last two syllables of 'ceremony' together, so it becomes CER-e-m'ny...

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

Or leaving out the second "e": "cer-mony".

Yeats was Irish. What would it have sounded like in his accent, I wonder, and would that be the difference?

[lysana.livejournal.com]

I got to hear a recording of him reading "Lake Isle of Innisfree" once. It didn't make much difference to that poem, but I rather suspect it would in this case.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Well you have been sticking with it (the weight training) and those leg presses are most, er, impressive. I, on the other hand, have been slacking off, and the result is that after a month of being far too occasional, I am deconditioned enough to have to back off on my weights. So let that be a lesson to you! she concluded pompously.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I'd say, 'wid-ning' quite happily?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Imagine Rysmiel saying it, because that's essentially the same accent, and then it all scans -- to five stresses if not ten syllables. (If you can sing it to "Stairway to Heaven", it's iambic pentameter.)

I say "wide-ning". I mean, I don't say it very often in normal conversation, because it doesn't often come up, but if I were to say that word that's how I'd pronounce it.

[ailbhe]

It scans in my accent, or at least, all the lines you've written here do. I very rarely pronounce widening as three syllables; generally only if I'm on a bad phoneline or talking down to someone or talking to someone with little English.