As part of my overall Medieval European Poetry Project, I’ve recently written a couple of villanelles. They’re an old form, and they can be written in a variety of meters. So as to get my head out of the sonnet-oriented iambic pentameter, I decided I’d write these in iambic tetrameter instead. Not a big difference, right?

I was honestly astonished by how big a difference it made. For a start, a single syllable that hadn’t the proper emphasis stood out, throwing the reading of the whole poem, in a way that just doesn’t happen in pentameter. And then, apart from that much more forward rhythm, it gives the whole thing what I can only describe as a velocity that’s not present in pentameter.

To show an instance of the syllable-out-of-place, my original line in Friend or Foe went:

Not cause to hide silver in caves

If you had that line – with an extra couple of syllables – in pentameter, it would flow reasonably well (“Not cause to hide valued silver in caves”, say). In tetrameter, the emphasis falling on the second syllable of silver, when the word wants it to fall on the first, makes a mess of the whole line. I changed this to

Not cause to hide the gold in caves

… and since “gold” is where the emphasis falls naturally, the whole thing now works.

I’m used to using tripped rhythms and enjambments in sonnets. The degree to which they absolutely do not work in tetrameter is fascinating, and it’s making me think that a sonnet or a sestina in tetrameter might be an interesting side-venture. Whatever about the rhyming forms of poems, meter frequently (at least in the English forms) didn’t settle until much later than the SCA period, so it’s not even out of place.

Then there’s the pace of the poem. Pentameter is thoughtful, slow, seems to take a while to get where it’s going, and it’s fine with a long word here or there. Tetrameter demands you move on to the next line, and throws all the longer words out (unless they fit the rhythm absolutely perfectly, in which case, alright, they can stay).

As with many aspects of research – particularly practical research – in the SCA, a lot of the initial work is finding all the levers you can adjust, before you get anywhere near what you can adjust them to. It looks like meter is going to be one of those levers for me.