NOTES ON RHETORIC
(partly mine and partly adapted from various sources, mostly the appendix to the Norton Anthology of Poetry)
RHYTHM AND METER
English versification is based on the distinction betwen stressed and unstressed or accented and unaccented syllables. Two varieties of stress may be distinguished. There is the natural accent: for instance, sýllable is accented on the first syllable, etc. Then there is the sort of stress that indicates rhetorical emphasis. If the sentence "You went to Greece?!" is given a pronounced accent on the last word, it implies "Greece of all places"? If the emphasis is on "you", it implies "you, of all people?"
In English, some words in a sentence tend not to be emphasized, such as prepositions. On the contrary, nouns are usually emphasized. However, the presence of stress depends also on the position of the word.
Following are a number of key terms and concepts related to stress and meter [Notes: the Italian translation is also provided; in square brackets the pronunciation (I have used ";" to indicate the "schwa," the other letters correspond to the Italian pronunciation), the symbol: "_" indicates an unstressed syllable, whereas "/" indicates a stressed syllable, i.e. a syllable carrying a strong accent (also called "ictus").]
Line or verse: verso
The following feet are found in traditional English poetry:
Iambic foot or iamb [āi-emb]: giambo; _ / ; examples: unėte, repeāt. Most English verse falls naturally into the iambic pattern.
Trochaic [troke;k] foot or trochee [trouki]: trocheo; / _ ; the opposite of the iamb; examples: ųnit, ėnstant.
Anapestic foot or anapest [ānapest]: anapesto; _ _ / ; examples: intercčde, disarrānged, or Camerōon.
Dactylic [daktėl;k] foot or dactyl [dākt;l]: dāttilo; / _ _ ; the opposite of the anapest; examples: Wāshington, Čquador
Spondaic foot or spondee [spandi]: spondeo; / / ; examples: heartbreak, headline, Kashmire
To discover the underlying metrical pattern in a poem, we must "scan" it, that is, we go through it line by line, indicating by conventional signs which are the accented and which the unaccented syllables within the feet. We also count the number of feet in each line.
Verse lengths are conventionally described in terms derived from the Greek:
Monometer: monometro; one foot (rare)
Dėmeter [d;meter]: dimetro; two feet (rare)
Trėmeter: trimetro; three feet
Tetrāmeter: four feet
Pentāmeter: five feet
Hexameter: six feet (six iambic feet make an Alexandrine)
Heptameter: seven feet (also rare)
An example of a very regular poem is the following by Samuel Johnson's:
_ / _ / _ / _ /
I put my hat upon my head
_ / _ / _ /
And walked unto the Strand
_ / _ / _ / _ /
And there I met another man
_ / _ / _ /
Whose hat was in his hand
The poem is iambic in rhythm, alternating tetrameter and trimeter in verse length. But the absolute regularity of meter combines with the banality of the subject to make it a parody of banal poetry, which was precisely Johnson's intention.
In actual poetry subtle effects are often achieved by establishing a rhythm, and then varying it, either for specific dramatic or expressive reasons, or simply to lend variety to the verse. For example, the typical verse used in sonnets is the iambic pentameter. But consider the following sonnet by Shakespeare (116):
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Read naturally, the patterns is as following
/ _ / _ _ / _ _ _ /
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
This is neither a pentameter nor in any way iambic. The second line is a little more iambic, but read naturally is not a pentameter:
_ / _ / _ _ / _ _ /
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Only the third and fourth line scan like five iambic feet.
Among the devices in common use for varying patters are for instance: the insertion of a trochaic foot in a otherwise iambic verse, especially at the start, as in the line from Byron's The Giaour: "Sullen it plunged and slowly sank," which following standard English pronunciation scans as following: /_ _ / _/ _/ . Other devices are the more or less free addition of extra unaccented syllables; and the use of caesura, a strong grammatical pause within a line. The second line of the sonnet above is a good example of caesura:
Admit impediments. Love is not love.
When the end of the line coincides with a semantic unit (a clause or a period), we have an "end-stopped line":
So lovely fair was hero, Venus' nun,
As Nature wept, thinking she was undone,
Because she took more from her than she left
And of such wondrous beauty her bereft.
(Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 45-8)
When the end of the line does not coincide with a grammatical unit, we have a "run-on line":
Full in the middle of this pleasantness
There stood a marble altar, with a tress
Of flowers budded newly; and the dew
Had taken fairy fantasies to strew
Daisies upon the sacred sward,...
(Keats, Endymion 1.89-93)
Following the example of such poets as Blake, Rimbaud, and Whitman, many poets of the 20th century wrote free verse--that is, verse which has neither a fixed metrical foot nor a fixed number of feet in its lines, but rather tends to adapt to the subject matter.
Sense and sound
The very words of which the poetic lines produce different effects. Polysyllables, being pronounced fast, often cause a line to move swiftly; monosyllables, especially when heavy and requiring distinct accents, may cause it to move heavily as in Milton's famous line (Paradise Lost 2.621):
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.
Alliteration is the use of several words or stressed syllables beginning with the same consonant, and reinforces the emphasis on a given verse:
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away,
(Shakespeare, sonnet 64)
The alliterative t's in the second line serve to reinforce the directness of the line, in parallel with the meaning, which stresses the unstoppable march of Time and the absoluteness of its dominion.
Assonance is the repetition of the same or similar vowel sound within a passage (usually in accented syllables).
For shade to shade will come too drowsily
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
(Keats, Ode on Melancholy)
Consonance is a similar device, consisting in the repetition of a pattern of consonants with changes in the intervening vowels-for example: linger, longer, languor; [repetition of l-g]; rider, reader, raider, ruder. [repetition of r-d]
RHYME AND STANZA
Rhyme is the repetition of accented sounds in words usually at the end of verse lines.
Masculine rhyme: rebound / sound; the rhyme sound is in the very last syllables of the two lines;
Feminine rhyme: hounding / bounding, the last two syllables rhyme
Polysyllable rhymes: sensibility /feasibility; rare, unless used for comic purposes as in Don Juan (intellectual / henpecked-you-all).
Rhymes occuring within a single line are called internal; for instance, in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea [first / burst].
Eye rhymes (rime poetiche) are rhymes that look alike but sound different; off rhymes (sometimes called partial, imperfect or slant rhymes) are rhymes based on similar but not identical sounds: years / yours; tigress / progress;
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. In the sixteenth century it was primarily used in plays; Paradise Lost was one of the first nondramatic poems in English to use it. Because of Milton's authority blank verse came to be used for a great variety of poems-besides remaining standard for epics.
In Elizabethan drama there is much deviation from the standard meter. At the end of a scene, we often get a couplet.
Stanza
Stanza (strofa) A recurring unit of a poem, consisting of a number of verses, usually grouped on the basis of rhyme scheme [skėim] and grammatical unity.
The simplest form of stanza is the couplet; it is two lines rhyming together. A single couplet considered in isolation is sometimes called a distich; when it expresses a complete thought, ending with a terminal mark of punctuation, it is called a closed couplet. End-stopped couplets where used since the mid-seventeenth century in so-called heroic tragedies, and consequently acquired the name of heroic couplet.
Three line stanzas are not common in English, though some poets have written in terza rima (aba bcb cdc etc.) following Dante.
Quatrains are stanzas of four lines, usually rhymed alternately abab, or abcb. When they alternate tetrameter and trimeter, as in Johnson's little poem quoted above, they are called ballad stanza. Ballads were a traditional popular genre that was taken up by poets after the 1750s. This stanza is used for example by Coleridge in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (1798):
_ / _ / _ / _ /
It is an ancient Mariner
_ _ / _ / _ /
And he stoppeth one of three.
_ _ / _ / _ / _ _ /
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye
_ / _ / _ _ /
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is in heroic quatrains; these rhyme alternately, and employ five-stress iambic verse throughout. In In Memoriam, Tennyson used a tetrameter quatrain rhymed abba, but these forms are not very common.
Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseide" is the premier example in English of rhyme royal, a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza consisting essentially of a quatrain dovetailed onto two couplets, according to the rhyme scheme ababbcc. Similar to the rhyme royal, is the ottava rima, an eight line stanza rhyming abababcc. It was first used in English by Wyatt, and notably by Byron in Don Juan.
The Spenserian stanza has nine lines rhyming ababbcbcc; the first eight lines are pentameter, the last line an Alexandrine. It is slow-moving, intricate and also demanding, because of the repetition of the same rhymes, but has nevertheless appealed widely to poets. Keats's Eve of St. Agnes and Shelley's Adonais are successful examples.
The sonnet was originally a stanza that then developed into an independent lyric form. It is usually defined as fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but the definition is not absolute.
The Petrarchan rhyme scheme is either abba abba abba cde cde, or abba abba cdc dcd, or finally, abba abba cde dce; in any case, the first eight lines are arranged in two groups of four lines each, these four lines being known as a quatrain, these two quatrains together being known as an octave. The final six lines, in which the variations in rhyming pattern occur, are known as the sestet. As the Petrarchan sonnet employs only five (or sometimes only four) different rhymes (abcde), this rhyming pattern requires immense linguistic resources in like-rhymes.
Structure: There are two parts to the sonnet, the octave [ōkteiv], in which the "problem" is stated and developed, and the sestet, in which the problem is "resolved", a resolution which generally involves a turn of thought. Sometimes this pure form is modified so that the octave acts as two separate quatrains in which the problem is repeated twice in two different images.
Whether or not it was because the English language is not as rich in rhymes as the Italian, a modified form of the sonnet rose in England known as the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, although it was Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey rather than Shakespeare who invented the English variation. Bringing the sonnet form from Italy to England, they developed a rhyme scheme which was perhaps more suitable to the English language. This rhyming pattern is as follows: abab cdcd efef gg. As opposed to the Petrarchan rhyme scheme which uses only five different rhymes, the English sonnet uses eight different rhymes, the final rhyme appearing in the last two lines which therefore become what is known as a couplet. This change in rhyme scheme completely alters the nature of the sonnet form, particularly in the division of octave and sestet. As opposed to the interlinked rhyming of the Petrarchan octave (abba abba) which makes it into essentially a single unit, the rhyming of the first eight lines of the Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd) produce what is more properly considered two separate quatrains. And the same is true of the remaining six lines. Whereas the Petrarchan octave actually contains within it three couplets, not counting the first and last lines (bb aa bb). The Petrarchan sestet, with its three repeated rhymes, avoids tll possibility of a couplet thus producing a more unified section. The last six lines of the Shakespearean sonnet, however, easily break into a third quatrain with concluding couplet. Now, although the Shakespearean sonnet sometimes functions like a Petrarchan sonnet, the first eight lines stating the problem and the last six resolving it, the function of the Petrarchan octave is all too often given to all three quatrains, which state the problem in three different ways, leaving only the couplet to resolve the problem, often taking the form of a neat aphorism.
A series of sonnets on a particular theme, can be called a sonnet sequence.
In blank verse and other irregularly rhymed verse, there are no clear stanzas. Sometimes the poetry can be divided in verse paragraphs, semantic units much like regular prose paragraphs.
The divisions between stanzas can be marked by a refrain [rifrčin], ritornello. Ballads customarily have refrains; for example, the refrain of Lord Randall is:
mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down.
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
Simile [s;'m;li]: similitudine; a comparison, as in "Richard is like a lion." When we omit the word of comparison (like, as) we have a metaphor-as in, "that pig has eaten all our food." Simile can be brief as in the example or longer, in which case we speak of extended simile. Metaphors and simile can and have been distinguished according to their effect: violent, comic, degrading, decorative, ennobling, etc.
Synecdoche [senčkd;ki]: sineddoche; a rhetorical figure that substitutes the part for the whole. Example: "can you lend me a hand."
Metonymy [metānomi]: metonimia; substitution of one term for another with which it is closely associated. Eg. "a statement was issued by the Quirinale this afternoon." Antithesis: a device that places opposing ideas in grammatical parallel, as in Pope's lines:
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a man must die a maid;
(Rape of the Lock, 5.25-30)
Irony [āirouni]: a verbal device that implies an attitude quite different from (and often opposite to) that which is literally express. It can be open or very subtle.
Hyperbole [haip;'rboli]: iperbole; a willful exaggeration, which can be serious ("I'm dying for love") or ironic.
Pun: a play on words (also "double-entendre" or, rarely used, "paronomasia")
Oxymoron [Āximoron]: a figure that associates contradictory words. E.g. Milton's description of hell as "darkness visible", "the living dead," "the tranquillity of his fury".
Paradox: a statement that seems absurd but turns out in the end to have meaning.
Conceit [konsėt]: a far-fetched and ingenious comparison. Many of Petrarch's conceit used in describing love, were taken up by his English imitators. Wyatt for example uses a Petrachan conceit when he compares the lover's state to that of a storm-tossed ship. The metaphysical conceit, used by metaphysical poets, was a more intellectualized, many-leveled comparison-for instance, Donne's comparison of separated lovers to the legs of a compass (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning).
Images, symbols, and allegories are all related figures. Critics differ in their exact definition and their definitions sometimes overlap.
The Norton Anthology provides the following definition: Images as verbal representations of something capable of being visualized. They do not only convey what the things look like, but direct us, by their pattern of associated and involved feelings, in our reactions to what is being represented. In this way, an image can become imbued with meaning to the point that the abstract meaning become its primary feature.
The critic Jeremy Hawthorne provides the following useful distinction between image and symbol:
"1. Images [ėmag;] are usually characterized by concrete qualities rather than abstract meanings; images normally have a more sensuous quality than symbols-they call the taste, smell, feel, sound or visual image of the referred-to object sharply to mind.
2. Symbols, in contrast, because they stand for something other than themselves bring to mind not their own concrete qualities so much as the idea or abstraction that is associated with them" ((109). In the case of Gatsby's green light or of Woolf's lighthouse we do not experience sharp sensory responses, whereas with Joyce's snow in "The Dead" or Forster's motor-car in Howard's End we are sort half-way between image and symbol, insofar as "the references have an imagistic function alongside their primary symbolic purpose" (109).
Allegory. [āllegori] I would define allegory as a more abstract and often traditional form of symbol, where the actual characteristics of the allegorical "object" are often unimportant and may be only vaguely related to the thing it allegorizes. What is allegorized is usually an abstract idea, principle or force. Because of its arbitrary nature, allegory usually relies heavily on convention and / or tradition. An example of allegory is the "veltro" in the Divine Comedy, which stands for the Emperor. In The Fairie Queen, Spenser simply tells us that the "Redcrosse Knight" "stands for" Holiness, and thus arbitrarily creates a simple allegory (though some of the characteristics of the knight, e.g. the fact that he has a red cross, make him also symbolic in some degree). But Allegory is also used by critics with a different meaning, as a definition of narratives where allegorical devices are used. In this sense Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress is an allegory.
Personification is the attribution of human qualities to an inanimate object or an abstract concept.
OTHER TERMINOLOGY
Amplification [āmpl;f;kčisc;n] n. Emphasizing of certain semantic nuclei through repetion and expansion (Italy, our land, our home, the sacred soil on which we were born).
Anaphora [anāfora] n. The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs; for example, "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills" (Winston S. Churchill).
Burlesque. [burlčsk] The burlesque degrades its subject by directly cutting it down, whereas the mock heroic [māk hirō;c] degrades it by exaggeration. In Butler's burlesque Hudibras, the hero is characterized by low and vulgar attributes. In Pope's mock-heroic Dunciad, banal matters are treated as heroic.
Chiasmus. Plural: chiasmi. [kaėasm;s or kiāsm;s]. Chiasmo. Inversion of word order in two parallel phrases: "Red mouth and eyes of green;"
Dramatic irony: a device in which a character in a play says something that has one meaning for him and for the onstage person he is addressing, but quite another for the audience.
Dramatic monologue is a poetic form associated with Robert Browning. It is a monologue because the poem corresponds to the speech of a single character. It is dramatic, because the monologue suggests the setting as well as the presence of a silent interlocutor. E.g. in "My Last Duchess" we are very much aware of were the Duke is standing (in front of the painting, etc.) and that he is speaking to a diplomat, who reacts in specific ways to his comments. In Browning's monologues, we often get dramatic irony as defined above, that is, the main character unintentionally reveals himself through his own words.
Epiphany: a revelation. The word is most famously associated with Joyce, who provided a definition of the word in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Personally, I've always have had the impression that the definition provided by Joyce (is Stephen is to be taken as his alter ego, which might very well not be the case) differs from Joyce's actual practice. In Portrait, Stephen defines the epiphany as the moment when you perceive the essence (the "quidditas" as Aquinas calls it) of something. In The Dead, the epiphanic moment is not the perception of the essence of the scene that Gabriel sees outside his window. It is not purely objective. Rather the scene, the symbolism of the scene, is a product of the interaction, of the fusion, one could say, of the objective characteristics of the scene and Gabriel's subjectivity, his memories, his sensibility. Woolf's "moments of being" are also similarly characterized by this fusion of perception and memory.
Eulogy and Elegy. [ėulogi, člegi]. Elogio, panegirico; oppure elogio funebre, A work of praise, in prose or poetry, for a person either very distinguished or recently dead. In its modern sense, an elegy (elegia) is a lamentation for the dead. English elegies tend to be discursive poems on meditative themes, not necessarily related to the death of a specific person. E.g. Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Counrty Church-Yard.
Genre [jānraa]: genere. An established literary form, such as stage comedy, the picaresque novel, the epic, the sonnet, the Gothic novel.
Gothic, Classic, Neoclassic. [nėoclāss;c] Gothic and Classic are traditionally used to distinguish styles in art and literature. In early 19th century, Madame de Stael established an influential distinction: Gothic implies vital, primitive, but irregular worked, with the qualities of the barbarian North. Classic implies lucid, rational, and idealized work, as in the sunlit southern civilizations of Greece and Rome. For Pope and his contemporaries, "Gothic" was generally a term of contempt; for Ruskin, at the end of the 19th c., of praise (Ruskin wrote in praise of Gothic architecture)."Gothic" novels, were shockers and thrillers written in late 18th an early 19th centuries, and usually came with "Gothic villains," innocent maidens, and medieval settings. Neoclassicism is used to describe the resumption of the ideals of classic Greece and Rome, in the Renaissance and later, ideals which are adapted to modern times.
Mock-Heroic: see Burlesque
Pathos, Bathos and the Sublime. [pčithos, bčithos, sublaim]. Pathos, caduta di stile, sublime. Following the Aristotelian definition, pathos is the feeling of sympathy-pity and sorrow particularly-aroused by a literary work. Bathos is an abrupt and involuntary transition from the elevated to the commonplace, which creates and (involuntary) ludicrous effect. In Longinus's treatise On the Sublime, the sublime coincides with loftiness and is seen as the most desirable literary quality. In the 18th c., Edmund Burke defined the sublime as a mixture of beauty and pain or danger, thereby distinguishing it from the merely beautiful.
Realism. [rėal;sm] Fiction that aims to fidelity to actual existence. Usually dealing with unexpectional people undergoing everyday experiences. Naturalism: realistic literature, associated with Emile Zola. It has particular emphasis on the influence of society and genetics in shaping people.
Romance, Novel. [nāv;l]. In Italian, "romance" corresponds both to the "poema cavalleresco" and to the "romanzo d'avventure," whereas the novel corresponds to the actual "romanzo."
Style. There are many different definitions of style. The most undisputed one, refers to the formal characteristics of the work/s of an individual author. Therefore "style" here, coincides with "individual style."
Zeugma. [Ziųgma] zeugma n. 1. A construction in which a single word, especially a verb or an adjective, is applied to two or more nouns when its sense is appropriate to only one of them or to both in different ways, as in He took my advice and my wallet.