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ACCENTUATE_THE_DEVIATIONS

                                             December 10, 2006

Three examples of rhymes in song:

   Hendrix

   "With the power of soul
    anything is possible"

   Human League

   "And who will have won
    when the soldiers have gone?

   Leonard Cohen

   "But you don't really care for music, do you?
    ...
    The battle king composing Hallelujah"

In all cases, the rhymes depend on
the accents of the person singing.

If I were to sing it, "soul" and "possible"
wouldn't rhyme at all.  And "won" and
"gone" would be a very forced rhyme.

When John Cale recorded a cover of the Leonard Cohen
song, he couldn't bring himself to Americanize the
"you" to "ya" so for him, the rhyme with
"Hallelujah" disappears.

    Instead, with "do you", he gets
    an internal rhyme.



The thought that I'm after here,
is that the Principles of Poetry
they teach you in High School            My expectation would
have much fuzzier edges than they        be that by the time
let on...                                you get to graduate
                                         level study of poetics,
There's a 19th Century                   these points are well
quality to it, an attempt at             known.
systematizing the humanities
that seems a little forced if                And they no doubt
you look at it closely.                      have systems to
                                             describe the
                                             deviation from the
It always seemed very difficult              systems.
to me to find the patterns of
stressed and unstressed syllables
that you need to understand if
you're going to write formal
poetry.

   Some words seem obvious,
   others I have to repeat to
   myself many times, before
   guessing where the stress
   is supposed to be.


      In retrospect, it seems clear
      to me that my difficulty lies
      in part with the language, and
      not just with my ear...

      It's just not a binary question.

      o  Some stressed
         syllables are stressed
         harder than others.

      o  It depends on context:
         in some words the stress
         may move depending on
         the sentence it's embedded in.

      o  Some words have a very mild
         stress distinction -- there
         are words where all syllables
         can be said with the same
         stress, or with arbitrary
         stress.

      o  Deviations from the "natural"
         stress are used with different
         inflections to highlight different
         parts of a sentence, to indicate
         emotion, etc.


      o  And I would guess that the
         stress pattern of a word
         varies with accent:

             It is not the same for
             all English speakers.


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