1/2/2024 0 Comments Scansion exampleThe first sentence of his 30+ line speech lasts five and a half lines, ending with “To do obsequious sorrow” and beginning the second sentence with “But to persever” (I.ii.92). The next speech of metric interest for me is when in Act One, Scene Two, Claudius turns his attention to Hamlet and his mourning. This start-stop rhythm helps to set the tone of unease that kick-starts the play. By my rough count, there are eight such pauses in the first scene alone. Does Barnardo expect a response from Horatio? Does Horatio expect more reportage from Barnardo? Regardless, it’s another stilted moment, in a scene full of them. When Horatio asks if the Ghost has appeared, Barnardo answers, “I have seen nothing” (I.i.22). Is Barnardo waiting for Francisco to explain himself and lacking that explanation goes on himself? Does Francisco get distracted (or afraid)? Less than two dozen lines after that, we get another shortened verse line. Barnardo’s response begins its own verse line, so the clue is for there to be a pause between the two speeches. The second of the two lines ends abruptly, after just three of the five expected iambic feet. ![]() ‘Tis bitter cold, // And I am sick at heart” (I.i.8-9). For example, within the first dozen lines of the play, Francisco, one of the sentries, says, “For this relief much thanks. And so we go with Hamlet.Īs I read the play, what I noticed immediately was a large number of short verse lines, ones that would necessitate long pauses. 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.With every play, just as I like to take a look at the stage directions hidden in the dialogue, I think it’s also a good idea to take a look at how verse can give an actor some performance clues. 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.
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