I suffer from an affliction akin to being tone-deaf: metre-deafness. I am told by friends who blithely scan poems that hearing metre, particularly in a formal poem, richly enhances the experience. Therefore, every few years, I attempt to understand metre by laboriously sounding out formal poems such as Keats’ sonnets or the iambic pentameter lines from Shakespeare. With a pencil in hand, I put little stress and unstress marks, mostly at random in trying to create a pattern I cannot hear. In my defense, I tell said friends that my first language (Korean) is an unaccented language.

Along with such futile attempts, I also occasionally read up on metre to at least understand the concept theoretically, if not aurally. My latest reads are Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form and Babette Deutsch’s entry on metre in Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms.

Babette Deutsch, a well-known translator in her time, doesn’t just write about poetic devices; she articulates the larger ways in which such devices function for the poet. For “metre”, she starts: “The abstract pattern that obtains when rhythm is formally organized. It imposes on verse a regular recurrence of durations, stresses, or syllables that is intended to parcel a line into equal divisions of time.” Deutsch’s sentences connects formal elements of poetry to that of music: patterns, time, stresses. An appealing aspects of Deutsch’s definition of metre is a recognition that there is an interpretation going on and, as with any interpretation, this leaves a text open to variations.

Both Fussell and Deutsch agree rhythm is established in order to lay down a regularity that can be disrupted. Fussell demonstrates this convincingly in a formal analysis of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”:

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The first six lines are composed in iambic-anapestic but the seventh line uses a spondee. Fussell writes that the first six lines places us in a “world of some possibility, a world in which escape is thinkable and in which even salvation may be engineered”, a world in which we have “been conducted to a bed of a compensating crimson joy.” The seventh line, however, with its irregular rhythm, shatters that world and reveals the crimson bed to not be one of only sexual consummation but also one of destruction.

I am always amazed when I read translations of poems since even in poems that do not contain a regular rhythm (some language such as Greek use long and short vowels as metre), there are formal elements such as alliteration, rhyme, repetition, puns, metaphors, similes, and many others that are difficult to transport into another language while retaining the substantial portion of the meaning.