apparently Faust employs more metrical variations than any other work in german "God speaks in five-stress iambic verse with cross-rhymes; Faust alternates between yearningly flowing four-stress lines, tercets, and unrhymed trimeters; Mephisto's parlando unfolds in the casually cosmopolitan Madrigal verse of varying length: 'I am the spirit that perpetually negates / and rightly so; for all that comes to be / deserves to perish wretchedly; so it were better nothing would begin.' The work is studded with songs, ballads, hymns, and choruses. In Faust the entire formal language of poetry is gathered together. It is truly a Summa Poetica"
There is also the anapest (opposite of a dactyl), which is “unstressed unstressed STRESSED”, and that’s how I would scan the heavn’ly line:
Of HEAV | n’ly GRACE (anapest) | and GOD | proCLAIM | ing PEACE
Dactyls and anapests are like poetic analogs to triplets in music, which I think are key because you can’t always break everything in twos. “There ONCE | was a MAN” is an iamb followed by an anapest, for example. Or that Wallace Stevens line:
“COFFee and (dactyl) | Oranges (dactyl) | in a SUN (anapest) | ny CHAIR (iamb)”
That makes sense haha, since he could write out “heaven” instead of “heav’n.” I wasn’t thinking of the full context. How do you read it out loud? “Heav-ly grace”?
I Want to Rotate Words,
in all directions
their rhythms, highs and lows
of sweet perfection.
My posts on prosody might interest you: https://poemshape.substack.com/
apparently Faust employs more metrical variations than any other work in german "God speaks in five-stress iambic verse with cross-rhymes; Faust alternates between yearningly flowing four-stress lines, tercets, and unrhymed trimeters; Mephisto's parlando unfolds in the casually cosmopolitan Madrigal verse of varying length: 'I am the spirit that perpetually negates / and rightly so; for all that comes to be / deserves to perish wretchedly; so it were better nothing would begin.' The work is studded with songs, ballads, hymns, and choruses. In Faust the entire formal language of poetry is gathered together. It is truly a Summa Poetica"
There are also spirits, who speak in lines of 5 syllables, AaaAa, with rhyme in a pattern I cannot discern. See Geister https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21000/pg21000.txt
There is also the anapest (opposite of a dactyl), which is “unstressed unstressed STRESSED”, and that’s how I would scan the heavn’ly line:
Of HEAV | n’ly GRACE (anapest) | and GOD | proCLAIM | ing PEACE
Dactyls and anapests are like poetic analogs to triplets in music, which I think are key because you can’t always break everything in twos. “There ONCE | was a MAN” is an iamb followed by an anapest, for example. Or that Wallace Stevens line:
“COFFee and (dactyl) | Oranges (dactyl) | in a SUN (anapest) | ny CHAIR (iamb)”
Oh, but Milton in Paradise Lost always uses "heav'n" as a monosyllable.
That makes sense haha, since he could write out “heaven” instead of “heav’n.” I wasn’t thinking of the full context. How do you read it out loud? “Heav-ly grace”?