Note, though, that this poem about agreeable balance makes a kind of music out of the sentences, often balanced agreeably around a semi-colon, instead of the syllables that scansion measures.Įdwin Morgan's 'Song of the Loch Ness Monster' presents a great challenge to most attempts at scansion. Some poems, such as D J Enright's 'Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant', avoid even accentual regularity. A scansion is the process of scanning/observing a particular poem What term is defined as the identification of the meter by scanning the feet and the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. The usual marks for scansion are for a short or unaccented syllable, or for a long or accented. To see Beer's first stanza displayed thusĭemonstrates its regularity and variations, and helps a reader or listener understand why those "last sparks" are so central to this stanza - the moment of irregularity within what is otherwise regular makes them stand out for the ear.īy contrast, scanning Alan Brownjohn's 'Incident on a Holiday' reveals that, although he largely eschews a regular foot, he does maintain a five-stress line in the first stanza, and in most of the poem, thus giving the poem something of the irregular rhythms of prose, while the accentual metre simultaneously keeps a form of regularity. To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan. For a discussion of the others, I refer you to Fussell, page 18. Since the most commonly and most easily used is graphic, we will use it in our discussion. What this process achieves is a diagrammatic representation of the metrical effects of a poem. There are three kinds of scansion: the graphic, the musical and the acoustic. The third line, however, introduces a variation, holding back its first stress for an extra syllable - "at the last sparks", which can be scanned | uu | // |, after which the iambs pick up again until the end of the stanza. With x being used as a 'missing' syllable - like a rest in music - this line can be scanned as | x/ | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ |, still maintaining the iambic pentameter. In most cases it creates a nasty smell and oozes snail-slime-like liquid everywhere, infecting others as it enters the nasal tracts and with even clothing contact. The next has clear stresses on "one", "clock", "looked" and "round", which is only four at first glance, but there is also a lighter stress on the "for" at the start of the line, particularly as the following "the" is less stressed. Noun ()(always meter ) A device that measures things.(always meter ) A parking meter or similar device for collecting payment.gas meter (always meter ) (dated) One who metes or measures. A flesh eating inflamation of the patellae, spreading slowly to the tibia and fibula, until gangrene kicks in and urgent amputational surgery is necessary. The first line has stresses falling thus: "aRRIving EARly AT the CEM e TERY", or u/u/u/u/u/, which sets up a clear pattern, | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ | u/ |, an iambic pentameter. Patricia Beer's poem 'The Conjuror' might be taken as an example. 'Mark' can be taken to mean both 'notice' and 'annotate', the latter often done with a u for an unstressed syllable and a slash, /, for a stressed one. Scansion is the process of marking the stresses in a poem, and working out the metre from the distribution of stresses.
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