Listening to people reading 237METRICAL PATTERNING
Perhaps the best way to start is with the Eliot extract. It is not always easy
to get agreement about how a line of verse should be scanned, but an analysis
of these three lines that might win a fair measure of assent would be:
For the first of these, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables
maps exactly onto the allocation of prominent and non-prominent syllables
in the suggested reading;
// LET us GO then // YOU and I //This is not to say, however, that there is a simple correspondence between
the two. Syllables that count as ‘stressed’ in the metrical analysis are of two
different kinds in the intonation analysis: tonic and onset. It is a difference
which, in another tradition, would be expressed in terms of primary and
secondary stress. Let us provisionally assign the number 1 (meaning something
like ‘maximum weight’) to tonic syllables, the number 2 to onset syllables
(meaning ‘less weight’) and 0 (meaning no prominence) to the remainder.
We can then represent the first Eliot line as
| 20 | 10 | 20 | 1 |a procedure which enables us to see the distinction that conventional scansion
treats as a simple opposition between ‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed’ syllables
as a matter of relative weight within the foot. Applying it to the second line,
// WHEN the EV(e)ning // is SPREAD OUT // aGAINST the SKY //we get:
| 20 | 10 | 02 | 10 | 20 | 1 |with a reversed unstressed/stressed pattern in the third foot.
The third line introduces a new complication. If we apply the procedure
to:
// LIKE a PAtient // ETHerized // upon a TAble //we get:
| 20 | 10 | 10 | 00 | 00 | 10 |Here there are two feet, -ized upon a- in which all syllables are given weight
0, a result which does not accord with the trochaic character that we perceive
in both of them. It is evident that we need to recognize a subdivision among