Perhaps significant that in "Slow, slow!" he's emphatically reasserting a rhyme long since elapsed, as if to mirror the grasping of the moment before autumn slips away.
Thanks, Zina. I love the poem. But on those troublesome lines that start with a downbeat, to continue the musical analogy, it introduced a brief change in rhythmic feel, from 4/4 time to 3/4 time. If you tap the rhythm on your knee, you will hear a regular beat, but when you come to 'Make the day seem to us less brief', the extra syllable between stresses in 'Make the day seem' stretches out the line, actually slows it, since we instinctively try to maintain equal syllable length. The stress takes longer to reach, and even the following feet sound more like short long, short long in tempo, like a waltz. So the places where Frost wants an audible stretch is where he inserts the extra beat. That line becomes more of a dance and less of a march. What I like best is where he brings things to a complete stop: should waste them all. THUD. And again at Slow! Slow! THUD THUD Grapes crossing!
You are quite right. It’s a joy to have such musical people listen to (and read) my Substack. The idea of music in poetry is more a loose analogy rather than superimposing a poem onto a piece of music. For example, Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening is a poem I can recited to a 4/4 metronome (done it! It’s fun!) but not four stresses per line; it is three stresses — trimeter. So perhaps I should not argued so much as to be taken literally. But I love your expertise and completely hear what you are saying.
And yes, I think the point of the short “Slow, slow!” line is not so much that we’ll stress the syllables one way or the other (who cares), but that with just two syllables we’ll naturally tend to stretch them out, just the way you read it (signaled by that exclamation point!), the way a singer might in a song too (eg, Nina Simone’s “Go slow” is sung just like that, stretched out).
It’s tempting to think of tetrameter as singable, but with one line per 4/4 bar, that would be two syllables sung in each beat. In pop music, I think it’s generally the other way, with fewer syllables than beats. So, at an extreme, we have something like Dolly Parton’s famous song and its line “I will always love you,” which is 6 syllables sung in 3 bars of 4/4 time (12 beats). I can think of examples where there are more syllables than beats, but not twice as many.
The “Whose leaves” line has 9 syllables. I suppose “already” is one of those words like “fire” where “-ready” could be swallowed up into a single syllable.
Yeah, the music analogy is a much looser one than I make it sound. Lots of tetrameter can’t actually be superimposed onto actual music. However, there’s a musicality to meter that is *similar* to singing music. Not sure that makes sense the way I just typed it out. But I appreciate your detailed comment very much!
Perhaps significant that in "Slow, slow!" he's emphatically reasserting a rhyme long since elapsed, as if to mirror the grasping of the moment before autumn slips away.
I really like that interpretation, Stephen!
Thanks, Zina. I love the poem. But on those troublesome lines that start with a downbeat, to continue the musical analogy, it introduced a brief change in rhythmic feel, from 4/4 time to 3/4 time. If you tap the rhythm on your knee, you will hear a regular beat, but when you come to 'Make the day seem to us less brief', the extra syllable between stresses in 'Make the day seem' stretches out the line, actually slows it, since we instinctively try to maintain equal syllable length. The stress takes longer to reach, and even the following feet sound more like short long, short long in tempo, like a waltz. So the places where Frost wants an audible stretch is where he inserts the extra beat. That line becomes more of a dance and less of a march. What I like best is where he brings things to a complete stop: should waste them all. THUD. And again at Slow! Slow! THUD THUD Grapes crossing!
You are quite right. It’s a joy to have such musical people listen to (and read) my Substack. The idea of music in poetry is more a loose analogy rather than superimposing a poem onto a piece of music. For example, Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening is a poem I can recited to a 4/4 metronome (done it! It’s fun!) but not four stresses per line; it is three stresses — trimeter. So perhaps I should not argued so much as to be taken literally. But I love your expertise and completely hear what you are saying.
Fun post.
And yes, I think the point of the short “Slow, slow!” line is not so much that we’ll stress the syllables one way or the other (who cares), but that with just two syllables we’ll naturally tend to stretch them out, just the way you read it (signaled by that exclamation point!), the way a singer might in a song too (eg, Nina Simone’s “Go slow” is sung just like that, stretched out).
It’s tempting to think of tetrameter as singable, but with one line per 4/4 bar, that would be two syllables sung in each beat. In pop music, I think it’s generally the other way, with fewer syllables than beats. So, at an extreme, we have something like Dolly Parton’s famous song and its line “I will always love you,” which is 6 syllables sung in 3 bars of 4/4 time (12 beats). I can think of examples where there are more syllables than beats, but not twice as many.
The “Whose leaves” line has 9 syllables. I suppose “already” is one of those words like “fire” where “-ready” could be swallowed up into a single syllable.
Yeah, the music analogy is a much looser one than I make it sound. Lots of tetrameter can’t actually be superimposed onto actual music. However, there’s a musicality to meter that is *similar* to singing music. Not sure that makes sense the way I just typed it out. But I appreciate your detailed comment very much!