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two three
two is just
stupid
I don’t have access to my primary archive at the moment, but I assure you there are good ones.
I find mirror language poetry books (ones that have a poem in the original language on one side of a page and the translation opposite) really fun, and a great way to see how structure changes, or doesn’t, when the poem changes languages. It makes you wonder if there are any poetic, or even literary, devices that are suited only to one language, or a group of them.
Well, that one was good. A suggestion in the first stanza is completed in the second but leaves a new and broader tension, which is resolved in the third. A singular idea concisely expressed; its precision is guaranteed by the form regardless of its veracity.
I prefer iambs. The following example isn’t pentameter, and really I don’t know what you’d call it. The lines have all different numbers of syllables but I don’t care.
…………………….
MY ONE-EYED LOVE by Andrew Jefferson
I’ve fallen in love- I don’t know why
I’ve fallen in love with a girl with one eye.
I knew from the start. It was plain to see
That this wonderful girl had an eye out for me
She’s charming and witty and jolly and jocular
Not what you’d expect from a girl who’s monocular.
Of eyes – at the moment – she hasn’t full quota
But that doesn’t change things for me one iota.
It must be quite difficult if you’re bereft.
If your left eye is gone and your right eye is left.
But she’s made up her mind. She’s made her decision.
She can see it quite clearly in 10/20 vision.
She’ll not leave me waiting, not left in the lurch
If she looks slightly sideways she’ll see me in church.
I’ll marry my true love who’s gentle and kind.
And thus prove to everyone that loves not quite blind.
Source:https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/my-oneeyed-love
That is a very interesting study. Certainly some types of meter are better for a given language. Likewise, the traditional poetry of various language/culture combinations often stresses different features, poetic devices, and mnemonic devices. In Malaysia, the poetry is most about repetition, so the pantoum is all repeated lines. Another factor is what leads to my footnote about haiku. Some languages are more compact regarding syllables than others. A language like Japanese or Spanish may spit out a hundred syllables to say what we say in twenty. Another factor is if the culture has taken to copying another, more dominant, culture. For instance, the Norman influence on English poetry is a great example. There are so many factors that go into the style of poetry, and not all forms are truly emulatable in every language.
Another wild factor is poetic complexity. Some cultures tend to be much more complex in their forms, such as the Welsh. I at one time had a theory of poetic complexity being the inverse of military prowess for a culture.
That’s not iambic. It’s a triplet rhythm, sort of like hickory dickory dock. Which is appropriate to the sort of light verse/doggerel it is.
That seems as if it ought to be true. It supposes enough of a unity of society for military development to be causally related to a less sophisticated
intelligentiapoetic class?And I bet the same couldn’t be said for depth of knowledge of nature – I’d bet on that correlating positively to all realms of material ability, especially military.
I remember when I was talking to my Islamic Empires prof about the Arabic class I was taking, he explained to me that Arabic had a high barrier to entry, but once you got past the first 2/3 years it was pretty easy, while Persian was the converse. And I think Persian is generally considered the superior poetic language, certainly huge swaths of Arabic language and subcontinental (mainly Mughal) poetry are based on Persian forms and motifs. Don’t know if that means anything in particular, but I thought it was interesting, especially because he said part of the reason Persian was so difficult was that it’s given to a more abstract, complex style of composition.
That might fall apart with the Islamic Empires of the 14th-18th centuries. When the Ottomans were in their golden age artistically was also when they were ruled by the most powerful and military successful sultans. Ditto with the Mughals. The Safavids probably fit the pattern you mention, but they were always kind of an aberration in that region, and were limited militarily because of a relatively small population, precarious Shah, and underdeveloped economy. It would make an interesting case study, though.
Drat. One little historical fact shatters another beautiful theory. I suppose a modern scholar could find some statistical measure to support it.
Indeed, I’d love to see @bossmongo ‘s take on this idea.
That is the sort of thing I am speaking of.
Not sure if you understand what I mean by complex verse forms:
Byr A Thoddaid
Description: A Welsh syllabic quatrain form. It consists of two couplets, either of which can appear as the first couplet of the stanza. One couplet consists of two eight-syllable lines that rhyme with each other. The other couplet consists of one ten-syllable line and one six-syllable line. The ten-syllable line has a rhyme before the end in the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable that rhymes
Note: Both the Welsh and the French were so inventive with their prosody that it’s no wonder that the Anglo-Saxons came to dominate the world rather than either of these two groups.
Schematic:
A byr a thoddaid verse might look like:
xxxxxxxa
xxxxxxxa
xxxxxxxbx1
x1xxxb
or
xxxxxxxbx1
x1xxxb
xxxxxxxa
xxxxxxxa
where the 1 represents the association through assonance, alliteration, or rhyme. The “a” and “b” are the more normal rhymes.
I’m less sure because I haven’t taken a year long class on it, but I think big poetic output in China and Japan also tended to occur both in periods of greatest cohesion (and military strength) and in periods of dissolution. The theory may hold, but more for Western powers than anyone else. Although the military revolution theory as argued by Parker occurred at a time (1500s and 1600s) with some of the most well regarded poetic output in the Western canon, often in the countries where the revolution started or found foothold.
Don’t be hasty. The Arabic and Persian forms are not very complex. The Welsh and French are much worse.
It probably also depends on how one choses to rate the poetry in question. I think the poetic output of the Islamic Empires might, when we are considering the value of poetry in relation to military strength and complexity, need to be considered in its cultural context rather than in all of world poetry. Different cultural norms and aesthetics produce fundamentally different forms of expression in many cases. There’s also a pervasive religious element (poetry is an important part of Sufi mysticism and Islamic cultural more generally) that kind of promoted its production at a relatively high level of quality regardless of military circumstances, because it often wasn’t too hard for Sufi brothers or others who wrote poetry to move with caravans to find new patrons. And the more militarily successful patrons often would also be able to pay the most and help the best poets continue to produce.
Ah, sorry. I see what you mean now. This is what I get for hanging out on Ricochet at 3:51 in the morning, when I can’t sleep.
I think you’re arguing a different sort of theory. It is not about the amount of poetic output or how refined it is considered. It is a simple measure of complexity of form versus who wins the military battles.
Consider the great Ogden Nash:
Fleas
Adam
Had’em
The need for words to fit poetic structures ought to influence language, poets being among the language-defining sort of people. Are there linguistic artifacts of these complex poetic forms, that go beyond breath-oriented meter and simple rhymes, in modern language?
That is compelling. It would make a fascinating, and probably very complex, case study to take one form or subject of poetry that occurred across all cultures (funerary, etc) for a set period of years, and find the positive or negative correlation between the complexity in form that it achieved vs military success. There would probably have to be a bunch of caveats and control factors, but still it’s something that begs to be explored, even if it’s ultimately disproven. Probably worthy of a master’s thesis or a very, very long journal article. Ugh, you almost make me want to play around with that idea and data sets, but I’m not anywhere near experienced or bright enough to get anywhere far with it.
Now, to compare against the Welsh, we look at a Persian form:
The Ghazal has the following rules.
While there are six “rules,” what it comes down to is semi-independent isorhythmic couplets with the second line of each couplet rhyming with the first line of the first. That covers four of the six requirements. It is much easier to get and understand than the special requirements for the Welsh form where the rhyme and “association” are in certain floating positions, etc.
Do you know anyone who speaks Welsh or another Celtic tongue?
Another thing. I have twenty-three Welsh forms catalogued. While I do not claim it is complete, I only have two Persian forms with two more variations of one. I probably have another three that are Arabic or related. As I said, probably not complete, but I suspect it is indicative.
@kirkianwanderer, Jimmy Carr’s best feature is his ridiculous laugh.
It would be interesting to have a scholar look at the poetry that was produced by minority communities within larger Islamic empires, like the Safavid Persian one, and see if there is a greater multiplicity of poetic forms. I know that within the Ottoman Empire, for example, some Jewish communities wrote in Turkish or Arabic using Hebrew script. It doesn’t disprove your theory in any way, but it could be a useful metric for seeing how much the dominant culture bled into the literary and thus intellectual lives of religious minorities (like with the Ottoman Jews; they are holding onto their own culture in script, but adapting in actual language, so how close are forms and motifs to either traditional Hebrew poetry or Arabic/Turkish?).
Addressing this another way, poetry affects our speech in many ways. While English prosody can be complex among academic or Nineteenth Century poets, generally everything you need to know about English poetry, you learned from Doctor Seuß or on the sports page. And those are really three main things: rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration. That is the gist of English prosody.
Now, I can list a whole passel of poetic devices, most with Greek names, that we recognize, but few are required for our prosody, for our poetic forms. So, to find what you are asking about, you have to go to the languages and cultures where they exist.
You see, plenty for a Ph. D. right there. Maybe two or three. 😁