Prosody is the study of the sounds of language moving through time.

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 inflections and rhythms.

Semantics is the science that analyzes the meaning of words.

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

Syntax, a subdivision 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 morphology — i.e. syllables, phonemes, morphemes — and how they’re pronounced, accented, unaccented, and how all these things combine and then read and ring out in phrases, sentences, stanzas, and paragraphs. It’s word-sounds without melody, yet with rhythms created when the words-sounds are brought together. Prosody is pronunciation and enunciation, stress and non-stress, and it’s the rhythms that this creates when grouped in specific patterns.

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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 both words — as I myself suspected for some time before I bothered looking into their origins. Etymologically, they’re not really related.

Prose — from the Latin prosa, proversus: “turned to face forward” — means “straightforward.” It’s pronounced: PRO’S.

Prosody is pronounced: PRAWS-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 here only to point out that the word prosody is itself a fine example (mercifully brief) of a dactyl.

This fine and mercifully brief example signifies what prosody itself studies: i.e. the word prosody is a dactyl because a dactyl is three syllables with the stress landing on the first syllable.

The word mercifully is also a dactyl.

And so is the word signifies.

The word dactyl, however, isn’t a dactyl. Its accent does fall on the first syllable — DAC-tull — but it’s only a two-syllable word, not three. The word dactyl, therefore, is in prosody called a trochee (pronounced: TRO-shay): a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.

The word trochee is a trochee. 

The word poet is a trochee.

As is: 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 arrangement will typically fall on the second syllable (a la: dick HEAD), in which case the phrase isn’t trochaic but iambic. Dick Head in this context is an iamb.

In English, iambs are the most common way of phrasing, though far from the only (as just glimpsed with all these trochees and dactyls, and we’re just getting started).

If by some stroke of good fortune you happen to be one of those rarified, unorthodox, gorgeous golden few who walks to the drum of a different beat, who never hunted with the pack — indeed, who never hunted at all because you were too busy singing in an emphatic vocal style all your own — you may, upon the occasion of seeing this Mr. Head for the first time in years, cry out:

“DICK! HEAD! It’s a great pleasure to see you again!”

If this is the case, you, sir or ma’am, with your articulate tongue, your infectious enthusiasm and irresistible spondees, should have a statue erected to you.

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Lines of verse can contain an iambic meter or a trochaic meter or a number of other meters denoted by means of obscure terminology — the following, for instance, 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 already 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 in part by the rhythm the poet has established, which is usually done by the way the poet pronounces the dominant single word (or dominant single words) in the opening of the poem during composition. This is when the pace and meter of the pace are set. When it’s well-written and deftly done you feel yourself pulled into the poet’s intended rhythm. When it’s exceptionally well-written and even more than deftly done you often feel yourself swept up by it, as I do with Thomas Hood’s lines here.

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

A diameter is a metrical line consisting of two metrical feet.

A metrical foot in prosody is a collection of syllables taken as a single unit.

Think of it in the following way, which is more literal than metaphorical:

A syllable is a single note.

A metrical foot is a single chord.

In music, a chord is a collection of a notes which when played simultaneously complement one another. You could say in a general sense they harmonize. They don’t clash but match. As certain colors go together and don’t clash but create a pleasing, complementary appearance, so too with musical notes, so too with the sounds of syllables.

A metrical foot is also sometimes described as a “beat-pattern.”

A beat-pattern is a cluster of syllables taken as a single unit — e.g. tenderly and slenderly are clusters of syllables which when taken individually, as a single unit, is called a dactyl. 

A chord is sometimes described as a “music object,” which is about as vague and general a term as it’s humanly possible to get.

The primary point to note here is that a chord and a metrical foot are both defined in the same basic way: a collection of separate sounds gathered together to form a single unit.

The definitional distinction for both “chord” and “metrical foot” is that they’re gathered together, or clustered, and then taken as one unit.

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Don’t underestimate the complexity of prosody, as many people do.

This subject-matter can become quite confusing quite fast– especially early on, when you’re first learning it, sorting through its devilish intricacies.

It can be helpful to have in your mind that the relationship between prosody and music is real and literal, as it is also specific, and not purely metaphorical or merely analogous.

The relationship between them is rooted most fundamentally in, to borrow from the terminology of music, measure and quantity, time-signature and duration — i.e. the overall speed or tempo of the poem, its time-signature and stamp, which governs how brief or long the syllables are drawn out and spoken (or read), whether aloud or in a kind of sub-vocal way or entirely within the confines of your own head, and this includes dynamics, which is a specific term in music theory that refers to volume, loud or soft.

When studying prosody, this is helpful information to have in mind and to remind yourself of from time to time.

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The criteria for what constitutes a metrical foot, the backbone of prosody, in any given line of any given poem, is the first thing which, early on, can confuse the aspiring prosodist. Why, specifically?

Because a metrical foot doesn’t correspond with the division of words or even the division of syllables in a word or phrase — i.e. one metrical foot does not equal one word, and one metrical foot does not equal a fixed syllable count across all types of meter.

Commit that to memory:

• A metrical foot does not equal one word.
• A metrical foot does not equal number of syllables across all types of meter.

Metrics in prosody is primarily about stressed syllables more than number of syllables  — specifically, a repeating unit (which includes the clusters taken as one unit) of stressed syllables paired off with syllables unstressed. It’s about the regularity that this pairing-off creates.

It’s a fact that you cannot calculate the number of metrical feet by syllable count alone, without knowing which syllables are stressed.

The ideal pattern, however, for a specific type of foot is fixed. It’s set down in stone and absolute. For example:

• An iamb is two syllables the first of which is unstressed and the second of which is stressed.
• A trochee is two syllables the first of which is stressed and the second of which is unstressed.
• A dactyl is three syllables the first of which is stressed and the second two of which are unstressed.
• A spondee is two syllables both of which are stressed.

These are hard and fast definitions, absolutely fixed. But these definitions only serve as baselines or templates — basic guides which the poet uses only with the intention of varying them.

First you learn how to play the song in the most basic and fundamental way. Once you master that, you then go on to learn how to play the song in a less rigid manner — a more varied and complex way, a way that’s expressive of your personality and personal style.

Or:

First you learn how to dribble a basketball in the most basic and fundamental way. Once you master that, you go on to learn how to dribble the basketball in a less rigid manner —  a more varied and complex way, a way that’s expressive of your personality and personal style.

The actual lines of actual poems contain variations and subtle substitutions all throughout.

Why is this so?

In large part to avoid sounding predictable, formulaic, stilted, by-the-book, wooden: substituting a trochee for an iamb to change up the rhythm can, for example, work wonders in breaking up metronomic monotony.

There are an endless number of inventive ways to vary the poem’s basic metric.

Here are a few others:

What this ultimately means is that to count the number of metrical feet accurately, in any given line of any given poem — should you for some outlandish reason wish such a mind-numbing task upon yourself — you must first learn something of the different categories of grouping: i.e. the metrics of prosody, which refers specifically to the words just discussed — iamb, trochee, dactyl, spondee — and two other words not yet discussed: amphibrach, which is a three syllable word wherein only the middle syllable is stressed (as in: performance, confusion, immoral, and amphibrach) — and anapest, which is a three syllable word wherein the first two syllables are unstressed and the final syllable stressed — as in the words understand and comprehend and anapest.

Amphibrachic meter has what you might call a lighthearted, bouncy, predictable quality — a “ba-DUM-ba” rhythm. For this reason, amphibrachic verse isn’t found in serious poetry or epics. It’s used exclusively in either old drinking songs, comedic doggerel, and most commonly limericks and children’s literature. This is why the undisputed master of amphibrachic verse is none other than Dr. Seuss:

And now comes / an act of / enormous / enormance!
No former / performer’s / performed this / performance!

Anapestic poetry, upon the other hand, which also has a fast and uncontainable quality to it, is not nearly as predictable as amphibrachic poetry. The following line, for example, from Lord Byron’s poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” consists of anapestic phrases:

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea

And the whole stanza as well:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

These lines, like the whole poem, are anapestic tetrameter.

Tetrameter is a line consisting of four metric feet.

The specific foot Lord Byron chose for his poem is the anapest, which is not a common choice. And yet in the hands of a skilled poet like Lord Byron, it’s exceptionally pleasing to both read and recite — addictive, almost, in a way that gets into your blood.

Note the number of syllables in each line above is, give or take, twelve. Note that there’s nothing in the description “anapestic tetrameter” which directly indicates twelve syllables. You only arrive at it by either counting each line’s syllables yourself — in which case you won’t necessarily know the name of the prosody being used but only the average syllable count per lines (which is okay, though roughly the equivalent of having good ears yet not knowing how to read music) — or by knowing that an anapest is three syllables and “tetrameter” refers to a line consisting of four metric feet. When you multiply three (the syllables of an anapest and an anapestic phrase) with four (the number of feet in a line of tetrameter), you’ll arrive at number syllables per line. But please remember what was noted directly above: prosody isn’t primarily or even secondarily about total syllable count. It’s about accented syllables versus unaccented syllables — or, if you prefer, stressed syllables versus unstressed syllables.

Anapestic verse is sometimes called a “galloping meter” or a “tumbling meter,” and both of these descriptions for me capture their rushing and headlong nature.

The great English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), Tennyson’s legitimate heir as Britains poet laureate and at his best (which is not consistently) one of my all-time favorite poets, used anapestic tetrameter better than anyone, with the possible exception of Lord Byron.

From Swinburne’s poem “Hymn to Proserpine”:

For the kingdom of death is a lowly degree,
And the souls of the dead are unshakable free.
But yours is the garden of death and the fruit
Of the deadly and beautiful flower and root.

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

The following is how in prosody that stanza scans as anapestic tetrameter. In prosody to scan or to perform a scansion means to analyze a line of verse or a poem to determine its rhythm and meter:

For the king / dom of death / is a low / ly degree,
And the souls / of the dead / are unsha / kable free;
But thine / is the gar / den of death, / and the fruit
Of the dead / ly and beau / tiful flow / er and root.

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To learn something of the different categories of grouping is to learn something of prosody, which is similar to the process of learning how to read music.

Both require that you become familiar with a new vocabulary.

It’s not a large vocabulary. It’s not a particularly difficult vocabulary. But it is a new vocabulary. If you approach the subject in this way, it will clarify before your very eyes. And why?

For one, you’ll free your mind of self-deprecation each time you come across a word you may or may not vaguely recognize, but the meaning of which you couldn’t begin to articulate: the incredulity, the frustration, the sense of self-doubt — all the sorts of things, in short, that stultify the human mind and assassinate motivation and the desire to learn — over things you for some reason think you should already know.

For another, when you approach the subject from the perspective that you’re about to learn a new language, you approach it in the spirit of exploration, with a sense of adventure awaiting you, which is exactly as you should approach it, because that’s what learning new things actually is: exploration and adventure. It’s not about reinforcing dogmas or confirming what you already know or think you know. It’s about discovering new and fascinating things — even at the expense of learning in the process that some of what you thought you knew to be true was false.

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Remember the following, and any subsequent knowledge of prosody you go on to build, however small, however large, you’ll build on bedrock:

• 1 syllable = 1 musical note
• 1 metrical foot = 1 musical chord

If you don’t yet know what a chord is, watch the first 25 seconds of this video, wherein Steve Stevens, Billy Idol’s amazing guitarist who also, incidentally, writes the music for every instrument — the musical brains behind the hits, this Mr. Stevens, from Rebel Yell to Blue Highway to Dancing with Myself to Can’t Break me Down — plays on his electric guitar the first five seconds of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western, which is what inspired the unique guitar work behind Billy Idol’s biggest hit. The first 8 of the aural objects you hear Steve Stevens plays are notes. The 9th thing you hear, right at the 25 second mark of the video, is a chord. This will explain everything. Observe how Steve Stevens goes from plucking the individual strings for the first 8 notes to strumming once on the 9th, so that the notes of the strings are played simultaneously to produce a chord.

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Read this a second time now:

Take her up tenderly,
Fashioned so slenderly.

Both lines contain two dactyls per line, though 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 dactylic phrases and are so termed because of how the three syllables taken together are accented. The type of dactylic verse used here by Thomas Hood is called dactylic dimeter.

A diameter is a metrical line consisting of two metrical feet.

Was it any clearer the second time around?

This, then, concludes the only technical aspects of prosody I’ll address in this post. I’ve addressed them primarily for the purpose of elucidating an obscure subject — prosody — but I’ve also addressed them for another reason: the service of beauty. Because Thomas Hood’s lines are very beautiful — and yet they’re almost never quoted. In them we see an excellent illustration of the technical combined with the artistic. It’s the science of prosody under the hand of one with a firm and capable grasp, combined with a light deft touch and the aesthetic sense of a true artist, a true poet, who shows us technical mastery blended with passion. We see someone who thought enough of a subject to take the time to create an entire work of art around it — to employ the expertise required for a difficult manner of predominant phrasing and put it out for all the world to read and enjoy: i.e. he did it dactylically.

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly
Young, and so fair.

Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
While the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing.
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing.

Touch her not scornfully.
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly,
Not of the stains of her,
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.

Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful:
Past all dishonour,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

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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 “The 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 merely 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, contains 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, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson Algernon Charles Swineburne, 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. This is what the “free” in “free verse” refers to.

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But what exactly does that mean?

It means, among other things, this:

The following is poetry but not verse (i.e. 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:

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 to describe it as prose imposed upon by a sort of arithmetic, or doggerel imposed upon by some sort of mathematics:

The meter makes the verse (whether the verse rhymes
or instead goes against the historical norm
of rhyme), 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 in his typical grandiloquent style, 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 are still sometimes known as the 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. In this way, these components are deeply interrelated and affect one other at the most fundamental level. Grammar and prosody influence meaning and vice-versa. Imagine, for instance, Lord Byron’s lines above cast not in anapestic meter but in the amphibrachic meter of Dr. Seuss. In doing that, you’ll see how sound can shape meaning.

This, in part, is also why throughout history philosophers of art have often described literature as the most “cerebral” or “intellectual” of all the art-form. Which may or may not be true. It’s in any case the reason that poetry is properly classified as a subdivision of both music and also literature.

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

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I prefer prosody over its two synonyms — metrics and versification — because to my ear “metrics” has a slightly clinical ring and a more than slightly mathematical ring — as in the “metric system.” It therefore doesn’t, in my opinion, encompass the scope of this complicated, boring, beautiful science.

The term versification, on the other hand, much 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 — is 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, 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’ve 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’s 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 and pretentious-sounding — i.e. unnecessary.

Which is ultimately why I choose prosody above 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 in loving sound and meaning combined.

That, really, is the entire point of this post.

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 and persist all throughout their lives.

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 terminology of Petrarchans and all the rest: because it doesn’t ultimately matter.

Poetry, poems, songs, music — these things are primarily meant to be enjoyed, not merely analyzed. They enrich our lives and bring us 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 and rhetoric of words — they’re symbiotic and affect each other deeply — and yet intelligibility and meaning will always remain the fundamental things.

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

Poetry is the car you love to drive and experience — to cruise the open highway in, 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 tinker with it at all — unless you choose to.

Without it, poetry and poems are still exquisite.

And if you want to, it’s all there — the engine under the hood and all the other parts are there. Investigate it only if you want to, only if you’re interested, only if you care.

But it’s most certainly not requisite.

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* People who have a deep grasp of a subject are often people who’ve been immersed in it for years — even as far back as early childhood. Because of their long or even lifelong immersion, such people are often incapable of conceiving the possibility of a human mind that knows nothing whatsoever of the subject. Their own knowledge is assumed. They take if for granted to such an extent that it never enters their head that a person with no knowledge of it at all could be. No such a person could exist, they think. So common is this, in fact, that it’s even been given a name. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.

The Curse of Knowledge is when knowledge of any kind, on any subject, is so thoroughly assumed by the possessor of such knowledge that questions never arise in his or her mind that others might not know the subject as well or in the way that he or she does. Frequently people cursed with knowledge in this way have completely forgotten not only when and how they at one time learned such things but that they learned them at all.

When teaching the subject-matter, which because of their deep grasp they seem eminently qualified to do, disaster often results. The one most harmed by these disastrous results are the students who comes to the subject with a clean uncluttered mind free of all presuppositions, preconceptions, dogmas, biases, and foreknowledge — a mind eager and receptive, untouched, untrained, unsullied, no dog in the fight, no skin in the game, but there to take it all in and to learn everything the mind can take in and learn about an unfamiliar subject, beginning at the beginning … only to be then met with frustration, impatience, condescension, and only to leave forever after scarred: the lifelong conviction from that point onward her or his mind isn’t bright enough, alert enough, or capable enough or smart enough for true and earnest grasping, but impaired flawed, genetically deficient, dumb.

What’s the ultimate reason for this commonplace and completely unnecessary tragedy? Why is it the rule rather than the exception? The biggest reason: the premises of the subject are never explained — indeed, are often not fully understood by the teacher.

When the foundations upon which all subsequent knowledge of a subject remain unexplained, untaught, assumed, taken-for-granted, the subject to that extent remain completely in the dark. They’ve become in the mind of the teacher an unquestioned set of facts which every human-being, even children, simply know. In this sense, they become a dogma.

Dogma is the deadliest thing known to the human mind.

It goes without saying that the fault in all such scenarios lies entirely with the one who’s teaching — i.e. the one who isn’t capable of understanding through the questions the students ask and the mistakes they make what specific things might lie at the source of the students’ confusion, what premises are being assumed, what principles are being left unexplained.

The fault is with the coach or teacher who isn’t thoughtful enough to reflect on the history of how she or he learned the subject and the ways in which. Nor is this teacher or coach able to perceive by means of the students’ questions and mistakes that, in fact, the student is reasoning in a perfectly proper way — striving to comprehend — when, abruptly, her reasoning dead-ends, brought to a grinding halt the moment reasons concerning premises and principles are called for: because the teacher can’t or at least won’t answer them. The reasoning methods of the student show perfect soundness. It only falters when explanations falter — when the explanations are unsound, incomplete, unforthcoming.

When the principles for why and how aren’t taught or even discussed but remain strictly assumed, the teacher is always the one at fault — egregiously at fault, damaging human minds often for life.

When the premises that give rise to innumerable specifics remain buried, unexcavated, and the foundations of knowledge left hidden, the student is never to blame. How could she be?

When there are no deeper reasons given for why, retention vanishes. Memory doesn’t exist without context. In many ways, memory is context, as context is memory. Because context forms links. No memory for any subject being taught, neither its methods of inquiry nor its techniques of testing nor its historical chronology or pedigree, exists in a vacuum. No memory exists unanchored to anything. When, however, the links of cause and effect are revealed, memory flourishes.

More often than not in such cases, the one teaching this material is herself unable to teach the premises and principles of the subject, were she even aware that she should, because she’s never explicitly identified these premises and principles in her own mind. She grasped the specifics of the subject-matter early and has thoroughly absorbed it, never identifying the fundamental nature of what she’s grasped. If asked to explain the fundamental nature and substance of her expertise, she’s unable to. This happens all the time, in every discipline, across all areas of inquiry. No matter the subject or activity, including games, sports, recreational activities, as well as science and math and medicine,  if learning is involved, it happens chronically:  eager, energetic, healthy young people, as well as eager, energetic, healthy neophytes who aren’t young, meet with pure frustration and discouragement, their lives forever marked, because the teacher, coach, or mentor in charge of their learning assumes premises that he himself has never identified explicitly, and because of which is incapable of fully explaining to others. It’s among the very greatest of all avoidable tragedies in human life — precisely because it’s so easily avoided, provided one thing: dogma is banished from the brain.