Help with metre (1 Viewer)

[RecklessRick]

Consider the following line spoken by Ariel from Act V Scene I of The Tempest:

"Mine would, sir, were I human"

I seem to be having significant trouble figuring out the metre of the damn thing - I think it must be the "sir" that's throwing me off. "Mine would" seems to just be a regular old trochee and "were I human" is also trochaic dimeter. But if you add in the "sir," it throws off the trochaic tetrameter because it's single syllabic. What is the metre of this line? I'm tempted to just say it's just trochaic tetrameter with an added strong syllable?

inb4 just completely wrong
pls assist this is my hsc on the line

 

[Shadowdude]

So basically, where you're going wrong is that you don't realise that some poetic feet can be of length three. With that said:


MINE would sir WERE i HU-man


clearly it's irregular, with a dactylic foot (stressed-unstressed-unstressed), then two trochaics



More importantly, after using fancy words like 'dactylic foot' and 'trochaic foot' - what's the point? How does this feed into your analysis?

I did a presentation this past Wednesday on some Yeats poetry, and there was some synecdoche there - and yeah sure, I'll sound smart by using such a word - but in terms of what I was trying to argue, it was completely useless. I focused on metaphor, first person perspective, some anaphora, caesura and alliteration - very HSC-friendly terms. Probably the most flowery term I used was 'asyndeton', but that was justified because I concentrated on how that changed the pace of the line and the sound of the words.

Don't pick out techniques that have nothing to do with what you're arguing. I don't think focusing on this line's metre will give you anything of significance.

 

[RecklessRick]

So basically, where you're going wrong is that you don't realise that some poetic feet can be of length three. With that said:


MINE would sir WERE i HU-man


clearly it's irregular, with a dactylic foot (stressed-unstressed-unstressed), then two trochaics

Ah shoot that makes a lot more sense, I think I was just going too hard on the stress of 'sir' to notice that it could be dactylic. Cheers for that

More importantly, after using fancy words like 'dactylic foot' and 'trochaic foot' - what's the point? How does this feed into your analysis?

Oh it doesn't at all, this was just bugging me.