Todays assignment in Rhyme and Meter is to compare a poem by Byron to one by Pushkin, who was a big fan of Byron. We scanned the poems and put them into a grid to compare them with the 'ideal' meter they were written in: 12 lines of 4 feet of iamb. Then we counted up the number of words with three or more syllables. Byron's poem had three such words- Pushkin's had twelve. The difference between the two languages in word length very much effects the difference in stress patterns. The poem by Pushkin had fewer stresses per line than did Byron's, which gives the poem a different feel.
This class is not really linguistics, yet it is decidedly related to linguistics. It will be fascinating to learn more about the language of poetry, and how it is put together- both in English and in other languages.
No comments:
Post a Comment