Sunday, October 19, 2014

How can you explain the meter in Sir Philip Sidney's poem "My True Love Hath My Heart"?

Meter is defined in scansion
as the rhythm and the number of repeating patterns. A question about meter excludes
structure and rhyme scheme. The meter of Sydney's "My
True-Love Hath My Heart" is a classic iambic ( ^ / )
pentameter (five feet of iambs) with
elision and proparalepsis
adding variation. Line one shows the meter clearly: "My^ true' / -love^ hath' / my^
heart', / and^ I' / have^ his'." Sydney wrote this in a very rhythmic meter; one can
almost sing along while reading it if a tune comes to mind. Line two has the first
instance of elision. Elision is defined as the omission of
a vowel, a consonant, or a syllable in pronunciation of one or more words. The elision
in line two occurs in the word "given." Normally, it would
be pronounced "gi' -ven^". However when the vowel
e in the second syllable is elided the
pronunciation changes to "giv'n." It is now pronounced as a single syllable instead of
two and fits the meter as the stressed syllable of the final iamb. "By^ just' / ex^
-change' / one^ for' / the^ o' / -ther^ given'."Sydney chose not to illustrate the
elision as some authors do (giv'n), but it is elided
anyway.


Some might view an alternative scansion to the
meter as scanning line two with an incomplete sixth foot. While many poets choose to use
incomplete final feet, the convention, which is called
catalexis, only applies when an unstressed syllable is
dropped from trochaic or dactylic feet. It is also normally used in a patterned meter
(except perhaps in free verse) and not as a random line here or there. As a result of
these two poetic conventions, elision and catalexis, the alternative scansion turns out
not to be an alternative after all. Therefore the correct scansion is that "given" is
ellided to "giv'n" and forms the stressed syllable of the final pentameter
foot.


The second instance of
elision is in line four and is explained the same as line
two is: "driven" in the final pentameter foot is elided to "driv'n" to form the final
stressed syllable: "There ne' / -ver was' / a bar' / -gain bet' / -ter driven'," with
"driven" scanned as "driv'n." In line nine, Sidney uses a technique opposite to elision:
he emphasizes a syllable in an alternate pronunciation to the usual one by adding adding
a syllable to the end of a word in a technique called
proparalepsis. The word "received" may be pronounced as
either re^ceived' or re^ceiv^ed^, thus creating three syllables out of a usual two. As
an illustration, the same technique of proparalepsis is applied to
beloved, and we hear it around Valentine's Day. With proparalepsis,
Sidney stretches "receivèd' to three syllables, thus composing five full pentameter
feet:  "His^ heart' / his^ wound' / re^ -ceiv' / -èd' from' / my^
sight';".

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