Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said he discovered this previously unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. He used diacritical marks on syllables to indicate which should be stressed in cases "where the reader might be in doubt which syllable should have the stress" (acute, e.g. shéer) and which syllables should be pronounced but not stressed (grave, e.g., gleanèd).
Some critics believe he merely coined a name for poems with mixed, irregular feet, like free verse. However, while sprung rhythm allows for an indeterminate number of syllables to a foot, Hopkins was very careful to keep the number of feet per line consistent across each individual work, a trait that free verse does not share. Sprung rhythm may be classed as a form of accentual verse, due to its being stress-timed, rather than syllable-timed, and while sprung rhythm did not become a popular literary form, Hopkins's advocacy did assist in a revival of accentual verse more generally.
Video Sprung rhythm
Example
Maps Sprung rhythm
Scansion
Since Hopkins considers that feet always begin in a stressed syllable in sprung rhythm, for a scansion it is enough to specify which syllables are stressed. One proposed scansion of this poem is
Authorities disagree about the scansion. The scansion of this poem is also discussed in . Although they don't give a complete scansion, their proposal differs in the 10th and 14th lines.
See also
- Grail Psalms
Notes
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
0 Comments