On correct use of prosody.

Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:


All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.


I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"

Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.

Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)

Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.