I Can't Scan

A friend of mine, a wonderful poet who loved what words could do and who appreciated the possibilities of formal devices, despaired of ever being able to write a poem that scanned properly. It wasn’t her fault, she said. She was from the South, and all her syllables were two or three syllables long, like the two adorable little hillbilly girls in the old commercial: “It’s Shake and Bake! An' we hay-ulped!”  I could have asked her how then to explain Sidney Lanier or Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom, or, for that matter, Hank Williams. Or I could have answered more simply, as I did,

“Learn to scan.”

Learn to scan because it’s a tool. Like any other tool, it doesn’t have to be something you use all the time, but you should have it in your belt.

And because meter is the basis of rhythm, and rhythm is the basis of poetry. The one characteristic all the great free verse poets have – Whitman and Ginsberg with their long lines, Neruda (of Odas Elementales) with his very short lines, Williams or Collins with their plainspoken lines, Ashbery with his baffling lines—they all sing. They all swing. They all got rhythm.

Some wag got way more mileage than he deserved out of the observation that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Well, in the first place, you can’t, because Dickinson with her odd punctuation works at deliberate odds to the metrical regularity of her words, and in the second place, okay, but so what? Dickinson wrote in common meter, or ballad meter—iambic tetrameter lines followed by iambic trimeter. Four stresses, then three stresses. You could sing all her poems to “House of the Rising Sun” or “Amazing Grace,” if you wanted to.

And if you’re having trouble hearing scansion, singing it is a good way to test it. Try writing a poem in common meter—it’s easier to find songs that fit it than iambic pentameter—sing it to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” or “House of the Rising Sun,” and see if it works.

Of course, songs are different from poems. poems - their line strategy is different.

Actually scans in common meter, but you wouldn’t want to sing it that way. You’d sing it

And you could conceivably sing

But I wouldn’t recommend it.

 But some songs do scan, and they can teach us even more about the subtle uses of scansion. I recently scanned Chuck Berry's  "Memphis." How good is  Berry? Look at/listen to the control he has here.

 It's in common (ballad) meter, trochaic feet (DA-da), with some lines beginning with an extra unstressed syllable (line 7 has two). The trochees are never substituted for.

 Every important two-syllable word begins with a stressed syllable (distance,  number, uncle, etc.), except at the end of a trimeter line ("my Marie").

  Every 4-syllable word is two trochees  ("information," "Mississippi.")

  Every 3-syllable word ("Tennessee") ends a trimester line.

  Berry wants to mute the ballad stanza - make the verses sound more like two 7-stress lines, so every tetrameter line ends in an  enjambment. This is true throughout the song, with a couple of well-timed exceptions ("Her home is on the south side").

  The last stanza, strikingly,  ratchets up the emotional intensity by violating almost all these rules, because the exception to the two-syllable trochee rule is the girl's name, Marie, and every time Marie is mentioned there's an increasing emotional wrench, and an increasing formal wrench.

 The first line begins with an imperfect (stressed) foot. The name, Marie, appears in the center of the line for the first time, so it can't be contained within a trochaic foot, or put into an imperfect foot at the end of the line, as in stanza two.

  Line 5 begins with "Marie," and Marie dominates the line, turning the whole line iambic.

  Also, for the first time, we have two consecutive end-stopped tetrameter lines.

  Then the last two lines of the song revert to complete regularity, after the form, and your emotions, have been turned inside out. Like so many of Berry’s songs, this is a masterpiece on so many levels.