OTTO JESPERSEN Notes on Metre - UMR 7023

and the shorter
<strong>Notes</strong> on Metre 127
o pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity!
I - v V 11""1 V v I f"\ - I v v v I f"\, V v I f"\
Apollo's summer look
I v v v ; v v v I f"\ - I (p. 158-59).
We get rid of all such pieces of artificiality by simply admitting that
short syllables like ver-, spir-, Pit-, -pol-, sum- are just as susceptible of verse
ictus as long ones.
Unfortunately experimental phonetics gives us very little help in these
matters. Sonnenschein and others have used the kymograph for metric .purposes,
and "the kymograph cannot lie" (Sonnenschein, p. 33): but neither
can it tell us anything of what really matters, namely stress, however good it
is for length of sounds. The experimentalist Panconcelli-Calzia even goes so
far as to deny the reality of syllables, and Scripture finds in his instruments
nothing corresponding to the five beats of a blank verse line. So I am afraid
poets and metrists must go on depending on their ears only.
English prosodists are apt to forget that the number of syllables is often
subject to reduction in cases like general, murderous, separately, desperate; compare
the treatment of garden + er, of person + -al and of noble + Iy as
disyllabic gardener, personal, nobly, and the change of syllabic i before another
vowel to non-syllabic [j] as in Bohemia, cordial, immediate, opinion, etc., in
which Shakespeare and others have sometimes a full vowel, sometimes syllable
reduction, the former chiefly at the end of a line, where it is perfectly
natural to slow down the speed of pronunciation. Compare the two lines (Ro
II. 2. 4 and 7) in which envious is first two and then three syllables:
Arise faire Sun and kill the envious Moone ...
Be not her maid since she is envious.
Similarly many a, many and, worthy a, merry as, etc., occur in Shakespeare
and later poets as two syllables in conformity with a natural everyday
pronunciation (my Modern English Grammar, I, 278).
I must finally remark that the whole of my paper concerns one type of
(modern) metre only, and that there are other types, based wholly or partially
on other principles, thus classical Greek and Latin verse. On medieval and to
some extent modern versification of a different type much light is shed in
various papers by William Ellery Leonard (himself a poet as well as a metrist):
"Beowulf and the Nibelungen Couplet"; "The Scansion of Middle
English Alliterative Verse" (both in University o/Wisconsin Studies in Language