In poetry, accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English, as opposed to syllabic verse which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.

Children's poetry

Accentual verse is particularly common in children's poetry; nursery rhymes and the less well-known skipping-rope rhymes are the most common form of accentual verse in the English Language. The following poem, "Baa Baa Black Sheep," has two stresses in each line but a varying number of unstressed syllables. Bold represents stressed syllables, and the number of syllables in each line is noted.

<poem style="margin-left: 2em">

Baa, baa, black sheep, (4)

Have you any wool? (5)

Yes sir, yes sir, (4)

Three bags full; (3)

One for the mas-ter, (5)

And one for the dame, (5)

And one for the lit-tle boy (7)

Who lives down the lane. (5)

</poem>

In this case, "boy" is part of the metrical foot in which "lives" is stressed, through elision.

Accentual verse derives its musical qualities from its flexibility with unstressed syllables and tends to follow the natural speech patterns of English.

History

English

Accentual verse was a traditionally common prosody in Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland and Britain. Anglo-Saxon poets made frequent use of epithets to achieve the desired alliteration, and had various other more complex rules and forms, though these have not been as popular in later poetry.

Accentual verse lost its dominant position in English poetry following the Norman conquest of England when French forms, with their syllabic emphasis, gained prominence. Accentual verse continued in common use in all forms of Middle English poetry until the codification of accentual-syllabic verse in Elizabethan poetry; thereafter it largely vanished from literary poetry for three hundred years while remaining popular in folk poetry. A notable example from this period is William Langland's Piers Ploughman, here retaining the alliteration:

A well-known source for accentual verse from the post-Elizabethan period is Mother Goose's Melody (1765). Accentual verse experienced a revival in the 19th century with the development ("discovery") of sprung rhythm by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Although Hopkins' example was not widely adopted in literary circles, accentual verse did catch on, with some poets flirting with the form, and later poets more strictly following it. A modern codification was given by Robert Bridges in 1921, in his Bridges' Prosody of Accentual Verse section of Milton's Prosody. Modern literary use includes W. H. Auden, and it has notably been advanced by Dana Gioia. He used lines with three stresses.

The poet wrote, that the word dearest to him, "mother-country", is on his lips very rarely. The scansion is:

This pattern became the most popular. There is also six-stress pattern. This was used among others by Julian Tuwim.

See also

  • Milton's Prosody

References

  • A Beginner's Guide to Prosody: Part IV (Anglo-Saxon Accentual Meter), Tina Blue, November 24, 2000