Syllabic Verse - Syllabic Verse in English

Syllabic Verse in English

Syllabic verse in English is quite distinct from that in most other languages, historically, structurally, and perceptually.

Historically, English syllabics have not evolved over time from native practice, but rather are the inventions of literate poets, primarily in the 20th century. Structurally, syllable counts are not bound by tradition, even very long lines are not divided into hemistichs, and the verse exhibits none of the markers usually found in other syllabic meters (with the occasional exception of end-rhyme), relying for their measure solely on total count of syllables in the line. Perceptually "it is very doubtful that verse lines regulated by nothing more than identity of numbers of syllables would be perceived by auditors as verse . . . Further, absent the whole notion of meter as pattern, one may question whether syllabic verse is 'metrical' at all." In English, the difficulty of perceiving even brief isosyllabic lines as rhythmically equivalent is aggravated by the inordinate power of stressed syllables.

In English, unstressed syllables are much weaker and shorter than stressed syllables, and their vowels are often phonetically reduced (pronounced as the rather indistinct schwa — "uh" — rather than fully sounded). Moreover auditors tend to perceive word stresses to fall at equal intervals in time, making English a perceptually "stress-timed" language; it seems that the same amount of time occurs between stresses. So the conventional patterns of accentual and accentual-syllabic English verse are perceived as regularly rhythmic, whereas to the listener, syllabic verse generally is not distinguishable from free verse.

Thus syllabic technique does not — in English — convey a metrical rhythm; rather it is a compositional device: primarily of importance to the author, perhaps noticed by the alert reader, and imperceptible to the hearer.

A number of English-language poets in the Modernist tradition experimented with syllabic verse. These include Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, and Louis Zukofsky. Some more traditional poets have also used syllabics, including Elizabeth Daryush and Robert Bridges whose Testament of Beauty is the longest syllabic poem in English.