Poetry is well known for its rhythm and its meter, particularly by those who know that not all poetry relies on such. Many an English speaker has fond or at least present memories of childhood rhymes like Mother Goose, traditional limericks, and all the rest. Christians, too, have an abundance of hymns written in meter, from Amazing Grace to The Son of God Goes Forth to War and beyond, and cursory inspection of nearly any popular genre of lyrical music will show off a meter and a rhythm in their language. But how are we to use this meter, this pattern of unstress-stress, in our prose, which lacks poetry’s explicit, if sometimes difficult, integration thereof?

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, stressed syllables are emphasized and unstressed deemphasized. So in the word ‘Amazing,’ typically we stress (accent) the second syllable, leaving the first and third syllables unaccented, unstressed. Additionally, though we won’t get into it much here, not all stresses are the same, even in a language like English without tonality. Roughly speaking, syllables can be stressed, unstressed, or partially stressed, allowing for constructions like that in fornythislag¹ where acceptable line patterns include a high-to-low four step fall in stress (example: ‘bright archangels,’ pronounced so that each syllable is less stressed than its predecessor).

First, we must establish that when we’re writing prose, we aren’t following a meter. Your stress-unstress should not fall into a precise pattern- that way lies poetry, even if unintentional. This does not mean, however, that you won’t have patterns at all, just that they will be emergent, subtle, and intuitive, not intentional and precise. As a matter of fact, English has a tendency towards certain patterns, with iambic (unstress-stress) being fairly easy.

In prose, then, we will have rhythm, but it will not be meter. Feet (patterns of stress and unstress) will appear and reappear, will repeat and vary, and that’s all good. To be too aware of the rhythm can actually be dangerous; incautious rhythm in prose can too easily become sing-song or introduce a compulsive rhythm that throws the reader off when it’s broken (to get an idea of what I mean, read an obviously rhythmic poem like ‘Lepanto’ but give a few words with metrically inconsistent replacements).² Stringing together too many of the same feet (stress-unstress patterns, typically 2-3 syllables long) starts sounding like bad poetry instead of good prose.

Prose, actually, uses rhythm a little differently from how obviously metrical poetry uses it. Whereas metrical poetry aligns the words to the meter, prose uses the rhythm and (crucially) its variations to aid the meaning of the words. In writing prose, we can use the instinctive stress-unstress patterns of the words to:

• Emphasize important elements
  • In the most basic application, we should generally seek to move the stresses³ so that they fall on the words we want emphasized. This is made easier by our natural tendency to unstress less prominent words.
  • Note that stresses are almost always subtle in prose, unless you draw particular attention to the moment.
• Emphasize particular words contrary to their natural stressing
  • By putting a usually unstressed word where somebody expects a stress to be (instinctively, not intellectually), we can draw them into noticing it, into emphasizing it.
    • ‘I roared, and I howled, and I up drew the water.’
    • This is not the best example sentence I admit, in part because of this art’s finickiness. The stress in the above sentence could conceivably fall on ‘up,’ my goal, but ‘I’ (with a lesser stress on ‘drew’ and ‘wat’) or even ‘drew’ are also plausible. The context will influence this.
• Use unusual stressing to draw attention
  • Observe the following sentence: “That is something up with which I will not put.” By a particular ordering of the words, the paraphrase of Churchill draws the speaker into an unusual stress pattern which makes this sentence a little difficult to recite quickly. The unusual placement of the prepositions disrupts the expected cadence of a sentence, drawing them into the limelight.
• Aid in the imagery of the scene
  • Rhythm plays a part in how we perceive the content of the story, so a rhythm full of spondees (double stresses) will create a much more breathless impression, as a rule, than one dominated by longer unstressed periods.
  • Spondees, two consecutive stresses, nearly force a pause or break between them. The most extreme can be found in something like, ‘Fire! Flee!’ where the pause is obvious, but less extreme examples will be found littered throughout literature.

As an example of some of these, consider a sentence from a recent project of mine which uses rhythm more prominently than average:⁴

“Flashed Sikki and struck Sikki and slit Sikki throat and tendon; Kullervo drenched in blood beneath the pile, unwounded as he strove, swift strike of steel before him as he danced, as flesh he rove away from life, as carved he blood from veins, Kullervo was death’s bringer, ruddy stained by all save for himself.”

Note first that the construction of the first triple series of clauses, with the verb-subject structure (made clear by using intransitive verbs in the first two clauses) and polysyndeton, emphasizes the name ‘Sikki,’ putting that weapon intentionally at the fore, with all its harsh sounds (aided by sibilance and consonance of the ‘s’ and ‘k’ sounds respectively- though note that ‘throat’ and ‘tendon’ also have some internal consonance). The pattern of stresses is u-s-u-u/u-s-u-u/u-s-u-s-u-s-u, and the effect is to create a rise and crash centering on Sikki’s name in the first two clauses. This rise-and-crash is then modified in the third clause by the stress-unstress alternating evenly, maintaining speed for a satisfying stop (as the trailing stop of the rise-crash pattern would, in my judgement, expect a more thorough pause than I wanted, entailing a complete end to the sentence (thus ending /u-s-u. Note that the final crash, by lacking the ‘and’ which punctuates the other two, would be noticeably shorter).

The next element of the sentence continues the momentum but shifts the subject, using the medium-size pause of the triple-pattern’s ending and the semicolon to adjust the reading. The unconventional structure, with the subject succeeded first by a series of modifiers and then by a repetition of itself, serves to the effect I wanted from this sentence, that of a vivid moment captured, like an illustration which bursts to move for all it is still. In the descriptors, too, the sentence structure serves to emphasize words I want highlighted- ‘strike’ joined with ‘steel,’ ‘flesh’ contrasted with ‘life,’ ‘carved’ related to ‘blood’ and ‘veins.’

The final phrase, the sentence’s conclusion, then brings it at once to a rest and to a point. The sequence of unstressed syllables from ‘save for him…’ serves to draw down the tempo, the intensity, while ‘self,’ being stressed, ends the entire sentence conclusively, decisively, not letting it trail away and wait, as would not fit the sentence.

This sentence was not, however the analysis may seem to you, written with all these thoughts in me. Certainly I was aware of its rhythm (and even modified a few phrases- ‘as flesh he rove,’ and ‘all save for himself,’ specifically- to work better with said rhythm), but the calculation laid out in the brief analysis is nearly all post hoc. What happened is this: I started writing a sentence with an unusual structure, and I developed the see of the idea organically, following what the story demanded, feeling out the rhythm, and thus I got (very nearly) what I’ve shown off here. This is how prose rhythm should generally be, actually. In editing, I may (and you may) take thought for a sentence whose rhythm is off, but by and large it is by instinct that we will identify and fix those sentences, not by hard-and-fast dictates. Do it well, though, and the prose becomes a joy in itself to read, as certain of Tolkien’s passages can be, as parts of Chesterton are, as Isaiah and Revelation often seem to me (although Isaiah is largely poetry, which is admittedly cheating). Oh, and that’s also one of the secrets of learning this skill: read its masters, read and re-read, steep your thoughts in them (particularly right before writing), and the rhythm will start to infect your pen.

God bless.

Want more? Check out this mini-article on the definition of poetry. I intended today’s article to be two mini-articles but ended up writing too much for the second.

Footnotes

1 – The ‘th’ in that word is a thorn in the source I get the name from, page 46 of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (edited by Christopher Tolkien). The form referenced is the form used by Tolkien in that posthumously published poem.

2 – Here’s my attempt, with modification bolded (from memory, so the punctuation may be bad):

‘White founts falling in the courts of the sun,/ and the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as there run./ There is laughter like the fountains in that countenance of all men feared;/ it stirs the forest darkness, the darkness which is in his beard.’

3 – Test where stresses fall by reading aloud, if you are unsure, and possibly by having somebody else read it aloud. Over time you’ll develop an internal ear for it, so that you can generally sense a sentence’s rhythm without having to actually, physically hear it.

4 – Whether it is over-wrought I leave for others- and my future self, when I edit the story, which is nearing its rough draft’s completion- to discern.