Stress Weight: Unwilled Order, Clothes Lines & Crowned Teeth

摘要

There are many ways of describing rhythm in poetry, all of them to some extent artificial and none of them giving the absolutely true picture of what is happening. What follows is another such; it is one poefs way of hearing how language interacts in the tradition and the dialect out of which that poet works. At best, it describes a different way of hearing the rhythm; at worst it is the nearest this poet can get to describing how he hears language interact. In the paper that follows I intend to present and explain the interaction of words across the poetic line in a number of examples chosen from the work of poets with a Hiberno-English or Irish Language background and attempt to find reasons for those interactions in terms of their linguistic heritage. The paper will discuss how the line functions within this system as both the basic musical unit and the base unit of sense in a poem, exploring how tensions between the two can be exploited. Starting from two basic premises: that poetry is an aural art; and that part of the idea behind the art form is to reflect and imitate in an artful way the natural modulations of speech, the paper investigates one way of describing metrics which avoids rendering metre in a mechanical fashion but recognises the complexity of the living breathing language.