The term “syllabic density” simply means the amount of time it takes to speak the syllables that make up a word. Take a couple of two-syllable words, for example: “living” and “creampuff.” The first takes less time to utter than the second, which means that “living” has a lower syllabic density than “creampuff.” This matters because syllables are the stuff of words and words are the stuff of poems. Poets exploit the syllabic density of words to make their poems stronger and more memorable.
Don’t Stress Out
Traditionally, discussion of English poetic rhythms has been limited to “meter,” a pattern of accents more regular than the rhythms of prose or spoken English. The first lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are a good example:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Only in a poem would we hear a person speak this way: da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM.
Meters are classified by the number and order of stressed and unstressed syllables in a group of two three syllables, each group being identified as a “foot.” (Frost, in the above example, uses iambic feet,each of which consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.) The science of meter is incredibly complex, and yet writers on the subject seldom mention syllabic density.
The point is that poets know better: they don’t focus exclusively on patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, but pay close attention to syllabic density as well.
How do we know? Consider these perfectly iambic pentameter (five-beat) lines, all lifted from two poems* by the same poet, Seamus Heaney:
I tried to write about the sycamores
*
We have our burnished bay tree at the gate
*
I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal
*
The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood
If you speak these lines aloud you’ll hear that they appear in order from low to high syllabic density. The iambic meter orders the words the way a musical beat holds keeps notes in order. The differences among them arise from Heaney’s adroit use of syllabic density, which gives each line its distinctive sound.
The Secret to Writing Poems Without Meter
Walt Whitman is often credited with overthrowing meter as the accepted standard for verse rhythms in English. And yet he conceived of his poems as “songs” and there’s no denying the power and musical sophistication of his best work. Consider his fine later poem from 1870, "A Noiseless Patient Spider":
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
These non-metrical lines are musical for a number of reasons, but the root of their music is the subtle shifting of syllabic density from line to line and even within the lines. In fact, non-metrical poems rely on these shifts more than metrical poems do. It’s the failure of poets to grasp this fact that has produced so much flaccid “free verse,” much of it indistinguishable from prose if you hear it read aloud without seeing it laid out in lines on a page.
The point of this essay is simple. You can choose whether or not to use meter in your poetry, but you simply cannot avoid the syllabic density built into each of your chosen words. So if you want to improve your poems, you should keep in mind the rather profound observation poet William Everson makes in his posthumous essay collection Prodigious Thrust:
The whole course of English verse might be seen as a long process of merely technical variation upon the basic prime matter of its speech. Older than the insouciance of the Renaissance, older than the Norman Conquest and the deceptive softness of its French forms, outside even the Roman Dominion and the logical abstractness of its Latin, persists the old alliterative Anglo-Saxon line, compacting within its syllabic density the powerful resources of the tongue.
For most poets, the ongoing discovery of those resources is among the chief joys of writing.
__________________
* “ Glanmore Sonnets ” and “ Singing School ”
Joseph Hutchison - Joseph Hutchison has worked for many years as a professional writer, both inside corporations and—since 1992—as the co-owner ...
Join the Conversation