Problematizing the Pentameter

pattern, ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum, a grid of expectations explicitly formulated within the culture since at least 157514 and sufficiently confirmed within a poem to fix the pattern totalized gestalt, a grid enabling both How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! and O monstrous act! Villany, villany, villany! to constitute pentameter even though, E. M. W. Tillyard says in citing them, the lines are as different they can be except in that the pattern behind them is the same.15 On the other side there are the prominences and unprominences of the syllables produced in natural, that is, nonmetric usage. It is not the case that the official pattern is a metrical abstraction and its practice in counterpoint an actualization of this abstraction; rather, the counterpoint is the meter. This can be substantiated through two comparisons. (1) English pentameter can be compared with the model of classical hexameter.'6 The abstract pattern of Latin hexameter is defined by the Oxford Classical Dictionary follows: Its first four feet may be dactyls or spondees, its fifth is regularly a dactyl, its sixth a spondee or a trochee. Lines are measured in quantities of syllables with duration parameter of contrast in a binary opposition between long and short, long being equal to two short. Thus

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• The Limits of Literal Meaning

  Ellen Spolsky•New Literary History•1988

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