What is prosody?

Prosody is the study of the music of language.

Prosody studies sounds moving through time.

Prosody is separate from semantics. It’s distinct from the meaning of the words that the sounds convey.

“A sonorous system produced by periodic vibrations,” Hemholtz defined music as.

Prosody is similar. It studies the music of language in the sense of rhythm — yet without any melody. In this sense, the word “music” is used figuratively since music by definition requires melody.

Prosody does not require melody. It’s the science of language without music yet with the rhythms that come when sounds move through time.

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The word prosody comes from the Greek prosōidía — meaning: a song sung to music.

Prosody is the rhythm of words which when organized and structured in a universally recognized way become grammar. But prosody isn’t grammar. Nor is it meaning. Prosody is the study of language’s rhythms as it passes through time.

Semantics is the science that analyzes the meaning of words.

Grammar is the science that analyzes the meaning of words integrated together.

Syntax, a subset of grammar, is the science that studies the order of words integrated together.

Prosody is the accented and unaccented patterns of language as sounds, apart from their sense.

Prosody is the study of word-sounds — syllables, phonemes, morphemes — and how they’re pronounced, accented, unaccented, and how all these things combine and then sound together in phrases, sentences, stanzas, and paragraphs. It’s word-sounds without melody, yet with rhythms created when the words-sounds are brought to together. It’s pronunciation and enunciation and the rhythms this creates.

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The word prosody is not lexically related to the word prose, as one might suspect, based upon the first four letters of the words — as I myself thought for some time when I was first learning the words. Etymologically, they’re only distantly related — not even kissing cousins.

Prose — from the Latin prosa, proversus: “turned to face forward” — means “straightforward.”

Prose is pronounced: PRO’S.

Prosody is pronounced: PRAHS-uh-dee.

The first accent in the word prosody, as my pathetic all-caps are intended to denote, falls on the first syllable — a fact I mention because the word prosody itself is an excellent illustration (mercifully brief) of what prosody studies: the word prosody is a dactyl — i.e. three syllables in which the accent falls upon the first syllable.

The word mercifully is also a dactyl.

A troche, on the other hand, is a two syllable word with the accent on the first syllable — as in: dactyl and troche.

And: eager.

And: beaver.

And: dickhead.

If, however, you meet someone named Richard Head who goes by Dick Head (from a long line of Heads), the accent in this particular pronunciation typically falls on the second syllable — a la: dick HEAD — in which case the phrase isn’t trochaic but iambic, which is the most common (though far from the only) way we stress phrases and words in English.

If you happen to be one of those unorthodox gorgeous few with a vocal style all your own, who upon meeting Mr. Head (whom you like) cry out:

“DICK! HEAD! I’m pleased to see you!”

Then you, sir or ma’am, with your articulate tongue and irresistible spondees, should have a statue erected to you.

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Lines of verse can contain a trochaic meter or an iambic meter or a spondaic meter or any number of other obscure-term meters — for instance, the following two lines from Thomas Hoods’s poem “The Bridge of Sighs”:

Take her up tenderly,
Fashioned so slenderly.

Both of those lines contain two dactyls per line, though as you no doubt noticed each line has only one word which in itself is a dactyl: tenderly and slenderly. The other words in each line — “Take her up” and “Fashioned so” — are dactyls (or, to be more precise, dactylic phrases) only because of how the three syllables taken together are accented — as determined by the rhythm the poet has established, which is usually established by the way the poet typically pronounces the dominant single word (or dominant single words) in the opening of the poem, during its composition. This is where the pace is set. You feel yourself pulled into the poet’s intended rhythm.

In prosodic terms, the type of dactylic verse used by Thomas Hood is called dactylic dimeter.

That’s the only technical aspect of prosody I’ll address in this post, and I address it purely by way of clarification — clarification and also, I will admit, in the service beauty. For those two lines are very beautiful and rarely if ever quoted, and in them we see a perfect illustration of what the science of prosody looks like in practice. Recall as well that the word prosody itself is also a dactyl.

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The word prosody has only two synonyms of which I’m aware: metrics and versification.

Prosody, metrics, and versification can be used interchangeably.

All three words refer to the structuring and restructuring of sound, which distinguish and define the type of poetry we now call verse.

Not all poetry and not all poetic language, however, is verse.

Any given person may at any given time write or speak a phrase or passage that’s poetic. But this doesn’t make it verse. Neither does it make it a poem.

Prosody — like “metrics” and “versification” — refers to the type of poetic language we now call verse.

A verse is also known as a poem.

Yet those two words are not quite synonymous — “verse” and “poem” are not perfectly interchangeable.

In the singular, “a verse” can refer to a single line of a poem or passage — i.e. when one says “That verse from Act 3, scene 2 of Macbeth.”

But a verse can also mean a whole poem or a long passage or a section of a chapter in the bible, the koran, the book of mormon, or any other religious text. This is not a religious statement but a statement of lexical fact.

Whether anyone likes it or not — and I, for one, don’t care at all — the word “verse” legitimately refers to a passage or section or entire chapter of the bible, as it also legitimately refers to passages, sections, or entire chapters of all the other religious books in the word. This is what the word “verse” has over the course of centuries come to mean.

I’m interested in literature and the written word. It doesn’t make me a religious man — not any more than it makes me a Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or libertarian or any other such dogmatic nonsense which has no actual bearing on the art and study of literature, no matter how many people strive to make it so — no matter how many would if they could wish their dogmatic suppositions onto the rest of us.

The bible, old and new testament alike — and you may quote me wildly on this — contain more verse than any other book yet composed. This includes Homer. It includes Vergil. It includes Sanskrit. It includes Shakespeare.

The Koran and the Book of Mormon also contain more verse than Shakespeare or Vergil or Sanskrit or Homer.

Understand, I’m using the word verse here in its broadest and most fundamental sense: metered language.

Verse is metered language.

Verse is language in which some quality of the syllables, such as stress or quantity, is either strictly or at least relatively regularized. This applies to both written and spoken language.

This regularization can be consciously done or unconsciously done — it doesn’t in this context matter.

The determinate pattern is called the meter.

The resulting kind of literature is verse.

Not just the bible but much of the world’s poetry is verse, though not all of it:

The Illiad and the Odyssey are verse.

All the tragedies of the Ancient Greeks are verse.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is verse.

The poetry of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Algernon Charles Swineburne, Lord Byron, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, William Butler Yeats et alia — it’s all verse. It’s metered language.

And yet some of the world’s greatest poetry lacks meter: the King James version of the entire book of Psalms is one example.

This, then, provides us with the primary point I strive in this section to make:

All free verse is unmetered.

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What exactly does that mean?

It means among other things this:

The following is poetry but not verse (verse in the narrow sense of the term: metered language that’s regularized):

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

— Psalm 23, King James

The following is poetry in verse:

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

— Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

 

The following is verse — i.e. metered language — but nobody in her right mind would call it poetry. You might be able describe it as prose imposed upon by a sort of arithmetic, or doggerel imposed upon by some sort of arithmetic:

‘The meter makes the verse (whether the verse rhymes
Or instead goes against the historical norm)
But not, of course, the poem, which is more than mere
Arithmetic. The distinction being made here
Is not an unimportant one, since verse sometimes
Is thought sufficient to a poem because of form.

— Dick Head

 

Prosodically, all poetry can be divided into two and only two basic types:

• Metered poetry, which is verse.
• Unmetered poetry, which is what we call free verse.

Whether or not poetry is metered — which is to say, metrical — has no bearing on its ultimate merit. Ultimate, I repeat.

Walter Whitman, for example (who along with Emily Dickinson are in my opinion the two most overrated American poets EV-uh [trochee]), writes far better free verse — or, as Whitman himself described it, vers libre — than he does strict verse.

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Poetry and prose are, like music, primarily of the temporal arts.

This means that they’re art-forms concerned with sound moving through time.

Temporal arts are distinguished from what’s still sometimes known as plastic arts, such as sculpture and painting.

Yet unlike music — music without lyrics, I should say — poetry and prose require an additional component: the component of intelligibility — the intelligibility of the words and their grammar and their semantic meaning, all of which unite with the sounds and songs of the words when integrated.

This is why throughout history philosophers of art have often described literature as the most “cerebral” or “intellectual” of all the art-forms.

This may or may not be true. It is in any case the reason that poetry is properly classified as a subdivision of both music and literature.

The exclusively musical aspect of poetry as a science is named prosody.

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I prefer the word prosody over its two synonyms — “metrics” and “versification” — and why is this so?

Because metrics is to my ear slightly clinical, more than slightly mathematical — as in the “metric system.” It therefore doesn’t, in my opinion, encompass the scope of this complicated, boring, beautiful science.

The term versification, upon the other hand, like the term mixology, carries the heavy baggage of that which is mechanically contrived: the connotation of the mechanically contrived combined with the extrinsic.

But the word prosody — PRRAAAAH-zuuu-dee —  it’s a beautiful word. It’s a word that sings. Prosody touches — oh-so-gently and yet unmistakably — upon the sounds of the words which constitute poetry and the poetic, its interiority and ancient connection with music and the singing voice and the human hum and the human whistle. Prosody is the only word of the three which captures Eurydice singing and Orpheus on his lyre.

Personal preference?

Maybe, maybe.

I admit, though, I have speculated that this is the real reason all attempts, over all the centuries, to supplant in prosody the beautiful Greek vocabulary with an English or Latin vocabulary have failed.

Why? Why do I speculate this?

Because the language of prosody as we know it all across the world today is entirely Greek. The Greek has persisted — for its beauty and exactitude, and has for us all, no matter where on planet earth we live or what native language or languages we speak, a familiarity, which I think of (with a kind of reverence) as a familiar strangeness: strangeness and beauty.

In addition to which, there is always in all eras and cultures the risk of inventing terms that are no clearer — and often far less clear — and no more convenient than the Ancient Greek terms.

For instance, the term “duple rising rhythm” may feel more English than the term “iambic,” but the former goes to six syllables instead of three, on top of which the former is plainly forced, embarrassingly phony, pretentious-sounding — i.e. unnecessary.

Which is why I choose prosody above all the other terms — because I love prosody, and because to study prosody is to study syllable and sound and song.

Yet the study of prosody isn’t — nor ever has been, nor ever will be — essential to enjoying poetry and poems, neither necessary nor requisite to loving sound and meaning combined.

Children love and understand the quite complex poems of childhood, as they also understand well-written, intelligible poems for adults — as they love and understand also sophisticated melodies which are often the ones that moves them most.

Adult readers respond to poems by Goethe or Keats or Edna Saint Vincent Millay or Elizabeth Bishop or any number of others — yet without ever knowing anything about the technicalities and terminologies of Petrarchans and all the rest — because it doesn’t ultimately matter.

Poetry, poems, songs, music — these things are meant to be enjoyed, not analyzed. They enrich our lives and bring pleasure. The technical underpinnings are not requisite to this.

Prosody is there, for those who wish to go deeper into the poem — to X-Ray it, give it a physical, a clean bill of health.

But the drive to go behind the scenes, to investigate the components that make up the groundwork of the poetic art is not a required part.

And we should never forget this overwhelming fact:

The meaning of the words that compose any literature is always more elemental than its prosody. In literature, the song is important in tandem with the semantic meaning of rhetoric of words, yet intelligibility and meaning always remain the fundamental things.

Poetry is not prosody, though, scaffold-like, poetry is undergirded by prosody.

Poetry is the car you love to drive and experience — to cruise the open highway with the windows down and, if you choose, put the peddle to the metal. Prosody, on the other hand, is what’s underneath the hood. You needn’t ever tinker with it at all — unless you choose to.

Without it, the poem is still exquisite.

And if you want to, it’s there — the engine under the hood is there.

Investigate it only if you want to, only if you’re interested, only if you care.

But it’s most certainly not requisite.