The Wild Wind

[abu nuwas]

Loretta, I cannot compete with Dale and his tetrameters (by which he means four feet to the line), but when I read this, making allowances for what I assume to be your American way of pronouncing some words, I heard a good deal of rhythm, and it reminded me of Sir Walter Scott's 'Lochinvar', like this:

Lochinvar



''O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,
He rode all unarm'd, and he rode all alone.''


Or eve this one, of rather the same period:

''The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.''

They have good old rolling ring to them, yet, in fact, if you look at the meter carefully, in each, it rather changes, or jumps about. The writers could do that because they had an ear for what was right. For us amateurs, the best advice, on properly metered writing, rhyme or no, is to get one form running through your head say iambic tetrameter, that is, 4 x de DA. Then words will tend to slot in quite naturally, and if there is an extra half foot here or there, so much the better.

As for Shelley, never mind him: he was a fine poet, but he can't have a monopoly on the wind....

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But I'm still not sure what you mean about feet and tetrameter? Iambic, 4Xde DA? Loretta

There are different types of ''feet'' which is just what the most basic unit is called in poetic meter. S0 -- I imagine your name goes 'lor-ET-a' with the stress on the middle syllable? If so, you might write:

LorET /ta IS/ the BEST/ of ALL/ deDA deDA deDA deDA . That makes four deDAs. A deDA is called an iamb, and 'tetra' means four, so iambic tetrameter means a meter where there are four iambs in a line. If there were five, it would be iambic pentameter; or three, is trimeter.

A trochee is the reverse of an iamb. Instead of deDA, it is DAde like this:

MIlo/ IS a/ POet (three trochees = trochaic trimester)

But by all means use the info on the site.