The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

That’s an interesting one, the last. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet opens in a way that allows different emphases. Is it Shall I compare thee, Shall I compare thee or Shall I compare thee? The last would be a spondaic substitution. You remember the spondee, two equally stressed beats?¹⁷What do you feel? How would you read it out? There’s no right or wrong answer.

Trochaic substitution of an interior foot is certainly not uncommon either. Let’s return to the opening of Hamlet’s great soliloquy:

Here, the fourth foot can certainly be said to be trochaic. It is helped, as most interior trochaic switches are, by the very definite caesura, marked here by the colon. The pause after the opening statement splits the line into two and allows the trochaic substitution to have the effect they usually achieve at the beginning of a line. Without that caesura at the end of the preceding foot, interior trochaic substitutions can be cumbersome.

That’s not a very successful line, frankly it reads as prose: even with the ‘and’ where it is, the instinct in reading it as verse is to make the caesural pause after ‘makes’–this resolves the rhythm for us. We don’t mind starting a phrase with a trochee, but it sounds all wrong inserted into a full flow of iambs.

That’s better: the colon gives a natural caesura with which to split the line allowing us to start the new thought with a trochee.

For this reason, you will find that initial trochaic substitution (i.e. that of the first foot) is by far the most common.Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenWORDSWORTH: ‘Milton!’Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!KEATS: ‘Ode to Autumn’

Just as it would be a pointless limitation to disallow unstressed endings to a line, so it would be to forbid stressed beginnings. Hence trochaic substitution.

There’s one more inversion to look at before our heads burst.

Often in a line of iambic pentameter you might come across a line like this, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes

How would you scan it?

‘Contracted to thine own bright eyes’ is rather ugly, don’t we think? After all there’s no valuable distinction of meaning derived by hitting that innocent little particle. So has Shakespeare, by only the fifth line of his great sonnet sequence already blown it and mucked up his iambic pentameters?

Well no. Let’s scan it like this:¹⁸

That third foot is now pyrrhic, two unaccented beats: we’ve taken the usual stress off its second element, we have ‘demoted’ the foot, if you like. We have, in metrical jargon, effected pyrrhic substitution.

This is most likely to occur in the third or fourth foot of a line, otherwise it disrupts the primary rhythm too much. It is essential too, in order for the metre to keep its pulse, that the pyrrhic foot be followed by a proper iamb. Pyrrhic substitution results, as you can see above, in three unaccented beats in a row, which are resolved by the next accent (in this case own).

Check what I’m saying by flicking your eyes up and reading out loud. It can all seem a bit bewildering as I bombard you with references to the third foot and the second unit and so on, but so long as you keep checking and reading it out (writing it down yourself too, if it helps) you can keep track of it all and IT IS WORTH DOING.

Incidentally, Vladimir Nabokov in his Notes on Prosody is very unkind about calling these effects ‘substitutions’–he prefers to call a pyrhhic substitution a ‘scud’ or ‘false pyrrhic’ and a trochaic substitution a ‘tilted scud’ or ‘false trochee’. I am not sure this is any clearer, to be honest.

Anyway, you might have spotted that this trick, this trope, this ‘downgrading’ of one accent, has the effect of drawing extra attention to the following one. The next strong iambic beat, the own has all the more emphasis for having followed three unstressed syllables.

If the demotion were to take place in the fourth foot it would emphasise the last beat of the line, as in this pyrrhic substitution in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which as it happens also begins with a trochaic switch. READ IT OUT LOUD:

Both the excerpts above contain pyrrhic substitution, Shakespeare’s in the third foot, Owen’s in the fourth. Both end with the word ‘eyes’, but can you see how Shakespeare’s use of it in the third foot causes the stress to hammer harder down on the word own and how Owen’s use of it in the fourth really pushes home the emphasis on eyes? Which, after all, is the point the line is making, not in their hands, but in their eyes. (Incidentally, I think the trochaic substitution in the first foot also helps emphasise ‘hands’. Thus, when read out, the line contrasts hands and eyes with extra emphasis.)