These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'scansion.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2020 And replacing Shakespearean scansion with looser Seuss-ish rhyme schemes would add to the comedy and make the long bouts of exposition at the beginning and end of the play less tedious. Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books, 17 Nov. This is when there are four sets of two beats per line. Most commonly you will find trochees associated with trochaic tetrameter. Websters New World Similar definitions The graphic representation, indicated by marked accents, feet, etc., of the rhythm of a line or lines of verse. The word trochee comes from the Greek meaning to run. American Heritage The act of scanning, or analyzing, poetry in terms of its rhythmic components. Peter Marks, Washington Post, 29 July 2022 And this is not to touch upon the scansion forms were, for Valéry, crucial and complex. noun Analysis of verse into metrical patterns. 2022 Clarity for lyricists has to refer not just to scansion and word choice, but also how their songs are communicated. This sonnet form has been used by a wide variety of poets since its conception but like all sonnets, it has fallen out of favor since the Modernist movement of the early to mid-1900s. Note, though, that this poem about agreeable balance makes a kind of music out of the sentences, often balanced agreeably around a semi-colon, instead of the syllables that scansion measures.Įdwin Morgan's 'Song of the Loch Ness Monster' presents a great challenge to most attempts at scansion.Recent Examples on the Web Toshio Hosokawa’s monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players, probes deeply into the terror and loss of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem through a jagged, atonal setting that stretches the scansion out of its familiar rhythm. The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is one of the two major sonnet forms, the other being Shakespearean/Elizabethan. Some poems, such as D J Enright's 'Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant', avoid even accentual regularity. To see Beer's first stanza displayed thusĭemonstrates its regularity and variations, and helps a reader or listener understand why those "last sparks" are so central to this stanza - the moment of irregularity within what is otherwise regular makes them stand out for the ear.īy contrast, scanning Alan Brownjohn's 'Incident on a Holiday' reveals that, although he largely eschews a regular foot, he does maintain a five-stress line in the first stanza, and in most of the poem, thus giving the poem something of the irregular rhythms of prose, while the accentual metre simultaneously keeps a form of regularity.
What this process achieves is a diagrammatic representation of the metrical effects of a poem. The third line, however, introduces a variation, holding back its first stress for an extra syllable - "at the last sparks", which can be scanned | uu | // |, after which the iambs pick up again until the end of the stanza.
With x being used as a 'missing' syllable - like a rest in music - this line can be scanned as | x/ | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ |, still maintaining the iambic pentameter.
The next has clear stresses on "one", "clock", "looked" and "round", which is only four at first glance, but there is also a lighter stress on the "for" at the start of the line, particularly as the following "the" is less stressed. The first line has stresses falling thus: "aRRIving EARly AT the CEM e TERY", or u/u/u/u/u/, which sets up a clear pattern, | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ |, an iambic pentameter. Patricia Beer's poem 'The Conjuror' might be taken as an example. 'Mark' can be taken to mean both 'notice' and 'annotate', the latter often done with a u for an unstressed syllable and a slash, /, for a stressed one.
Scansion is the process of marking the stresses in a poem, and working out the metre from the distribution of stresses.
0 kommentar(er)
