Trochaic Substitution
In a line of verse that normally employs iambic meter, trochaic substitution describes the replacement of an iamb by a trochee.
The following line from John Keats' To Autumn is straightforward iambic pentameter:
- To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
Using '°' for a weak syllable, '/' for a strong syllable, and '|' for divisions between feet it can be represented as:
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| To | swell | | | the | gourd, | | | and | plump | | | the | ha- | | | zel | shells |
The opening of a sonnet by John Donne demonstrates troachaic substitution of the first foot ("Batter"):
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| Bat- | ter | | | my | heart | | | three- | per- | | | soned | God, | | | for | you | | |
Donne uses an inversion (DUM da instead of da DUM) in the first foot of the first line to stress the key verb, "batter", and then sets up a clear iambic pattern with the rest of the line
Shakespeare's hamlet includes a well-known example:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'
Here, that is emphasized rather than is, which would be a wrenched, or unnatural accent. The first syllable of Whether is also stressed, making it a trochaic beginning.
Read more about this topic: Inversion (prosody)
Famous quotes containing the words trochaic and/or substitution:
“A tattered copy of Johnson’s large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to “make up” verses.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)