Division of labor drives thriving economies, and orchestras and rock bands. The bass provides the harmony; the vocal, or a soloing guitar, sings the melody; and then there’s the beat, nailed down by the man behind the drum kit. Can these riches be had with poorer means? Yes, just see Bach’s cello suites: like magic, one lonely instrument defines harmony, melody, and beat, all by bowing notes on four strings.

Metric poetry is a similar low bandwidth / complex signal enterprise. Of course poetry’s means are much reduced, even compared to solo cello—the simplest melody is impossible. But also its aims have shifted, to saying or expressing something (in the good case, something significant), while at the same time creating and sustaining a regular beat or rhythm:

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A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

When the trick is turned, how’s it done? One proposal, the theory of meter in The Rhythms of English Poetry by Derek Attridge, reads as if inspired by the musical analogy. It is certainly worth examining.

Attridge’s discussion ranges from nursery rhymes and ballads to Shakespeare and Wordsworth; from the limerick to the heroic couplet. My topic is iambic pentameter, the most important meter in English (literary) poetry. Attridge’s theory of it, in slogan form is:

A line of verse is in iambic pentameter if it is a "five beat" line.

If this sounds trivial, it’s because the weight-bearing theoretical term—beat—has slipped in unnoticed. If I asked you to read

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But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

And asked you which syllables fall "on" the beat, you’d say the bolded ones here:

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But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It turns out, in this case, that those are also the stressed syllables in the line. But we’d hardly be writing books about meter today if

A line of verse is in iambic pentameter if it has exactly five stressed syllables

answered our question. Same, even if the answer were the more complex (but more plausible)1

...if it has exactly five stressed syllables, each preceded by an unstressed syllable,

or, if you like Greek, "exactly five iambs." Counterexamples to this theory are easy to find. Macbeth says to Banquo’s ghost (focus on the last line; bold marks stress):

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What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble: or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword.

The final line, with only four stresses, not only disproves the "five iambs" theory, it shows that Attridge’s theory, to get off the ground, cannot use "beat" to mean "stressed syllable." In fact Attridge is quite explicit about this: a unstressed syllable may still "realize a beat." Similarly, a stressed syllable may fail to do so—in which case it "realizes an off-beat."

The question you should all now be asking, then, is

What is Attridge talking about, when he talks about "beats" in poetry?

Here’s the best I’ve got. Beats are supposed to be an audible property of metric poetry. Stresses are as well, but as we’ve seen, beats and stresses are distinct. So to convey what a beat is, Attridge can only remind you that, as a competent reader, you can (already, if you try) hear when a syllable realizes a beat, and when an off-beat. (You’ll "hear" this in your head, if you’re reading silently.) Lucky for us, becoming a competent reader does not require long hours with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, just fluency in English and sufficient exposure to pop music, especially the lyrics of Taylor Swift.

No further definition of "beat" is possible. But this explanation—the hope is, and Attridge’s hope must be—is enough for you to glom on to the notion and notice it in your experience. Try it: read again

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 And dare me to the desert with thy sword.

Do you not sense that, unstressed as it is, "to" nevertheless falls on, or "realizes," a beat? I sort of agree. Let’s see where Attridge takes this.

To test the theory, we can follow two easy steps. Step 1: make two long lists of lines, one a list of iambic pentameters, the other a list of...not iambic pentameters; step 2: check if every line on the first list has five beats, and every line on the second has fewer, or more. If the answers are all yes, gold stars all around.

But how do we assemble the two lists? And how do we do the checking? Step 1 is easy: we may assume that Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, etc, knew what they were doing, and rarely failed when they tried to write iambic verse. Step 2 is harder. I could check the lists, or Attridge, or even you; but really how expert are we at detecting beats? Attridge seems to be of two minds about this, and one of the minds produced some rules that will "tell you" where the beats in a line of verse are.

The "default" rule says that stresses realize beats, and non-stresses realize off-beats. But, like the laws of physics in The Matrix, this rule may be bent, and sometimes broken. Other rules govern the bending and the breaking. One of them is the rule of "promotion":

Promotion: If three unstressed syllables occur in a row, the middle one may realize a beat.

This is the rule that tells you that "to," in

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And dare me to the desert with thy sword

realizes a beat, and so that this line (according to Attridge) has five beats, as it must if his theory is to be correct.

The theory has some nice features. Many lines that are certainly in iambic pentameter do not line up their beats ta-TUM ta-TUM. Sometimes beats are "delayed," sometimes "advanced": when Marc Antony says, over Caesar’s dead body,

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All PIty CHOKED with CUSTom of FELL DEEDS.

the beat that "should" fall on "of" is delayed, to "fell" (in the quoted line, caps marks beats). This gives a double-beat (fell deeds), a doubling that Attridge’s theory permits, so long as the delay is accomplished by swapping a beat with an off-beat (so that the double-beat is preceded by a double off-beat; in this case, the preceding -om of). Similarly, a beat may be advanced, if the resulting double-beat is followed by a double off-beat. The "classical theory" of meter founders on this phenomenon.

Attridge’s rules multiply and get somewhat complicated and this is not the place to go into the full list. Nor is seeing all of them needed to grasp the evidence that, I believe, proves Attridge’s theory false.

Let’s continue to grant (but see below) that beats can be heard in poetry. Then there are, I claim, lines of iambic pentameter that have six (and therefore not five) beats, and thus disprove Attridge’s theory. Here are a few for your amusement (the relevant lines are in bold). First, from Antony and Cleopatra:

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Speak to me home, mince not the general tongue.
Name Cleopatra as she is called in Rome;
Rail thou in Fulvia’s phrase, and taunt my faults
With such full license as both truth and malice
Have power to utter.

Here (I claim) are the six beats, in caps:

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With SUCH FULL LICense AS both TRUTH and MALice

The play’s next page has a seven-beat line ("I" falls on a beat):

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THERE’S a GREAT SPIrit GONE. THUS did I deSIRE it.

More examples, from King Lear:

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You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
SINGE my WHITE HEAD. And THOU, ALL-SHAKing THUNder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world.
CRACK NAture's MOLDS, ALL GEMens SPILL at ONCE

Attridge is not unaware of these examples. His response, applied to singe my white head, is that "white," while stressed, realizes an off-beat, not a beat. In general, according to Attridge, when (i) a monosyllabic adjective is (ii) followed by a noun whose stress falls on its first syllable ("head," in this case), then (iii) the adjective realizes an off-beat, even though it is stressed.

Well, I just don’t get it. Attridge can claim that "white" falls on an off-beat. But when I read or say the lines above, I do not hear or perceive the transgressive syllables as falling on an off-beat. His claim is false. Remember—Attridge doesn’t get to just "make up" where the beats in a line of verse fall. We are all able (allegedly) to perceive beats already, before exposure to his theory; and so his claims about where the beats fall could be wrong, as the man is wrong who says that roses are green and violets are red.

There are also four-beat lines of pentameter that falsify Attridge’s theory. Here are two from Paradise Lost:

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withIN the VISible diURnal SPHERE

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So EASily oBEYED aMID the CHOICE

Again, Attridge will say that his promotion rule places the last syllables of visible and of easily "on the beat." Again, I don’t hear it.

But really I think the flaws in Attridge’s theory are deeper than it sometimes misidentifies the beats. I that that its conceptual framework is unsound.

He says that in verse one can perceive stressed and unstressed syllables, and also these new (to us) features: beats and off-beats. These new features are central to his theory of iambic pentameter as a "five beat" line. Attridge asserts that in singe my white head, not all the stresses are heard as beats; I don’t hear it that way. This could be because he’s wrong about how many beats there are. Worse for him is my favored diagnosis: it’s because there are no such perceptual features of verse as beats to begin with.

I still like the idea drawn from the cello suites: metric poetry says or expresses something (significant), while at the same time creating and sustaining a regular beat or rhythm. Rejecting Attridge’s theory is not rejecting this. His is a false hypothesis about how iambic pentameter "creates and sustains" its characteristic rhythm (weak-strong etc); for all that, the rhythm may still be "created" in some other way.2

See also: Against Feet.

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