Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Supernumerary there
'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' From memory I had this sentence down as 'In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit' -- a version which seems to me (not to get too pedantic) as better in several ways: not just briefer but with more of a feel for the rhythmic flow of the line. It breaks into three anapests, with an unstressed final syllable. That supernumerary 'there' clogs the prosody. Ah well.
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4 comments:
Ah, but if you write it as poetry, you'll see the difference. You like it like this:
In a hole,
In the ground
Lived a hobbit.
But, surely, we'd like our hobbit to have a line to himself, like this:
In a hole,
In the ground
There lived
A hobbit.
Maybe; though I'm still wrongfooted by that 'there lived' line 3 of your second poem. Hmm ...
No, follow the stresses. It's Tolkien's old favorite, iambic tetrameter:
'n a hole'n
the ground
there lived
a hob[bit].
(As much iambic tetrameter as a lot of Shakespeare is penta-, anyway.)
(Yes, I'm reading month-old Europrogocontestovision entries. It's that kind of Friday afternoon.)
(It keeps going, too:
not a nas/ty, dir/ty, wet/ hole, filled
with the ends /of worms /and an ooz/y smell,
nor yet a dry, /[] bare, /[] san/dy hole
with noth/ing in't /to sit down /on or to eat...)
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