Syllabic verse

Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed number of syllables per line or stanza regardless of the number of stresses that are present. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed such as Japanese or modern French or Spanish, as opposed to accentual verse, which is common in stress-timed languages such as English.

The following stanza from "Especially When The October Wind" by Dylan Thomas is an example of syllabic verse in English. Each line is made up of 10 syllables.(Note how the line "And cast/ a sha/dow crab/ upon/ the land/" can be scanned as regular iambic pentameter even though it is considered syllabic in the context of the poem)

Especially when the October wind: With frosty fingers punishes my hair,: Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire: And cast a shadow crab upon the land,: By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,: Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,: My busy heart who shudders as she talks: Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Syllabic poetry can also take a stanzaic form, as in Marianne Moore's poem "No Swan So Fine", in which the corresponding lines of each stanza have the same number of syllables.

No water so still as the::: dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,: with swart blind look askance: and gondoliering legs, so fine::: as the chintz china one with fawn-: brown eyes and toothed gold: collar on to show whose bird it was.
: Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth::: Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-: tinted buttons, dahlias,: sea urchins, and everlastings,::: it perches on the branching foam: of polished sculptured: flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.: My raptured song shall ever be, : God has been merciful to me.

When writing syllabic verse, there is some flexibility in how one counts syllables. For example, diphthongs may count as one or two syllables depending on the poet's preference.

A number of English-language poets in the Modernist tradition experimented with syllabic verse. These include Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, and Leo Yankevich.

Dissent

In languages like Spanish and Japanese all syllables are pronounced with nearly the same length and nearly the same stress, so syllabic verse sounds perfectly natural. However, in English, unstressed syllables are much weaker and shorter than stressed syllables, and it is natural for us to adjust the timing of unstressed syllables so that there is always the same amount of time between one stress and the next. This means that an English speaker cannot hear the number of syllables within a line unless an unnatural, Spanish-like, manner of recitation is adopted, while Accentual and Accentual-syllabic sound like verse when read in the natural way. Robert Wallace compares counting the number of syllables in a line as the equivalent of counting letters.

Notes

# Robert Wallace, Meter in English (essay) reprinted in Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, University of Arkansas Press, 1996. ISBN 1-55728-444-X.

See also

*Tanaga - a Tagalog syllabic verse form of four lines of seven syllables
*Haiku