Some observations on English binary metres

Abstract

In an earlier article ( Language and Literature, 11(4)) the author argued that Hanson and Kiparsky's parametric theory failed to account for some statistically verifiable features of the English iambic pentameter, in particular, the far from random distribution of mid-line word boundaries in this metre. The present article argues that there are a series of other features of English binary metres that can only be identified and explained if parametric theory is supplemented by quantitative techniques borrowed from Russian linguistic metrics. It analyses samples of verse in various binary metres by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning, and identifies some peculiar properties of each poet's use of tension. It measures inversion and erosion in iambic pentameters, and in iambic, trochaic and mixed tetrameters, and concludes that: (1) more than 85 percent of strong positions in the English iambic pentameter contain a stressed syllable; (2) English iambic verse contains a constraint against two consecutive strong positions lacking stress; (3) the tetrameter is more regularly iambic than the pentameter; (4) the English trochaic tetrameter allows up to half of its lines to have a non-trochaic opening; and (4) Milton's `L'Allegro' and `Il Penseroso' contain a balanced mixture of the metrical features of iambic and trochaic verse.