A Little More on Meter

So the last line of the last poem I wrote raises an interesting quandary, or at least question: what meter is it in? The line is "Even just a parenthetic smile," and the answer you give (which can differ!) depends on three factors: how you pronounce "smile," what the surrounding context is, and how free your scanning is.

First of all, it makes in this instance a great deal of difference how you pronounce smile. Is it one syllable (smyl) or two (smy-uhl)? If it's the former, we have a couple options: this could be iambic pentameter with a missing first unstressed syllable, trochaic pentameter with a missing last unstressed syllable. Alternatively, if it's two, we again have two options: iambic pentameter with a missing first unstressed syllable and a feminine ending, or pure trochaic pentameter.

Usually we would say it's best to just take the simplest scansion: in this case, trochaic pentameter. But that's where context comes in. Pronunciation of smile is not done in a vacuum: we have to pronounce "worthwhile" in the line before. Now obviously the choice here is more dialect-based than a true free choice, and "worthwhile" gives us either pure iambic pentameter (two syllables) or a feminine ending (three) and fits in perfectly well with the preceding 12 lines of iambic pentameter. But there's the rub: in my dialect at least, that's a feminine ending (it's three syllables) so we must pronounce smile with two syllables. Yet then it wants to be trochaic. But the poem likes iambs a whole lot.

Here's where freedom in scansion comes in. If you're free in the sense of saying "ignore that context, scan the line as the line," hello trochees. If you're free in the sense of "ignore that easy, logical, obvious trochaic scansion and twist the stupid thing into iambs," well, you have to add and subtract syllables. Eek. So it's a matter of your choice of what is fixed: the rule of cleaner scansion or of coherent context. Personally, I say it's a sonnet: the meter is fixed, so twist away to make iambs. But it is not always an easy choice, especially with less fixed forms of poetry, or more confusing lines (imagine if half the lines were like this: would you twist them to iambs or the others to trochees?).