Scanning Donne's Holy Sonnet 7: "All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyranies . . ."

[Metrist2021]

Greetings,

I'd greatly appreciate it if those of you who enjoy analyzing poetic meter
could check my scansion of John Donne's seventh holy sonnet ("At the
round earth's imagined corners, blow"), the unmarred text of which can be found at the link below.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44105/holy-sonnets-at-the-round-earths-imagind-corners-blow

My scansion below uses straight capitals for stressed syllables, lower-case
for unstressed, parentheses around lower-case letters for intermediate
stress, and parentheses around capital letters in the one case where I feel
that two intermediate levels of stress are in order. Foot breaks are denoted
by "|", caesuras by "||", and metrical (syllable-length) pauses by "^ ".

Some of my scansion choices have been influenced by my reading of Thomas Cable's 2002 article "Issues for a New History of English Prosody."
Indeed, the scansion of the line "Shall behold God and never taste death's
woe" is Cable's own. The lines that I find very hard to scan are the middle
ones, from "All whom the flood did" to "But let them sleep":

at (the) | (ROUND) EARTH'S | im A | gin'd COR | ners, BLOW
your TRUM | pets, AN | gels, AND | a RISE || a RISE
from DEATH, | you NUM | ber LESS | in FIN | i TIES
of SOULS, | and TO | your SCA | tter's BO | dies GO;
ALL | whom the FLOOD | ^ DID | and (fire) SHALL | o'er THROW,
all whom WAR, | dearth, AGE | ^ A | gues, TY | ra NIES,
de SPAIR, | law, CHANCE | hath SLAIN, || and YOU | whose EYES
shall be HOLD | ^ GOD || and NE | ver TASTE | death's WOE.
but LET | them SLEEP | lord || and ME | MOURNE | a SPACE,
for IF | a BOVE | all THESE | my SINS | a BOUND,
'tis LATE | to ASK | a BUN | dance OF | thy GRACE
when WE | are THERE; | ^ HERE | on this LOW | ly GROUND
TEACH | me HOW | to re PENT; || for THAT'S | as GOOD
as IF | thou'hadst SEAL'D | my PAR | don WITH | thy BLOOD.

Thank you.

[Metrist2021]

On Friday, August 11, 2023 at 12:52:20 AM UTC-7, Metrist2021 wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I'd greatly appreciate it if those of you who enjoy analyzing poetic meter
> could check my scansion of John Donne's seventh holy sonnet ("At the
> round earth's imagined corners, blow"), the unmarred text of which can be found at the link below.
>
> https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44105/holy-sonnets-at-the-round-earths-imagind-corners-blow
>
> My scansion below uses straight capitals for stressed syllables, lower-case
> for unstressed, parentheses around lower-case letters for intermediate
> stress, and parentheses around capital letters in the one case where I feel
> that two intermediate levels of stress are in order. Foot breaks are denoted
> by "|", caesuras by "||", and metrical (syllable-length) pauses by "^ ".
>
> Some of my scansion choices have been influenced by my reading of Thomas Cable's 2002 article "Issues for a New History of English Prosody."
> Indeed, the scansion of the line "Shall behold God and never taste death's
> woe" is Cable's own. The lines that I find very hard to scan are the middle
> ones, from "All whom the flood did" to "But let them sleep":
>
> at (the) | (ROUND) EARTH'S | im A | gin'd COR | ners, BLOW
> your TRUM | pets, AN | gels, AND | a RISE || a RISE
> from DEATH, | you NUM | ber LESS | in FIN | i TIES
> of SOULS, | and TO | your SCA | tter's BO | dies GO;
> ALL | whom the FLOOD | ^ DID | and (fire) SHALL | o'er THROW,
> all whom WAR, | dearth, AGE | ^ A | gues, TY | ra NIES,
> de SPAIR, | law, CHANCE | hath SLAIN, || and YOU | whose EYES
> shall be HOLD | ^ GOD || and NE | ver TASTE | death's WOE.
> but LET | them SLEEP | lord || and ME | MOURNE | a SPACE,

Oops, I made a typo there. I meant to include a metrical pause
before "MOURNE." Incidentally, I intend "lord and ME" to be
understood as a single (anapestic substitution) foot in the line, with
the caesura coming after the first unstressed syllable in the foot:

but LET | them SLEEP | lord || and ME | ^ MOURNE | a SPACE,

[Jerry Friedman]

Why an E in MOURNE? And while I'm at it, what are the carets for?

> but LET | them SLEEP | lord || and ME | ^ MOURNE | a SPACE,
> > for IF | a BOVE | all THESE | my SINS | a BOUND,
> > 'tis LATE | to ASK | a BUN | dance OF | thy GRACE
> > when WE | are THERE; | ^ HERE | on this LOW | ly GROUND
> > TEACH | me HOW | to re PENT; || for THAT'S | as GOOD
> > as IF | thou'hadst SEAL'D | my PAR | don WITH | thy BLOOD.

I pretty much agree. If I were reading it to an audience (unlikely), I'd
probably have a rather weak accent on "to" in the fourth line, and fairly
strong ones on "dearth" and "law". Not quite so strong on "Lord". I'd
also be tempted to make "fire" two syllables.

I don't know how Donne meant it to be scanned or how a contemporary
would have read it. ObQuotation: According to the poet William
Drummond, Ben Jonson said "That Donne, for not keeping of accent,
deserved hanging."

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/30/the-whole-rigmarole/

--
Jerry Friedman

[Metrist2021]

Thank you very much, Jerry. The "e" that I used in "mourne" was an
accident. As to the carets, each denotes what I hypothesize to be a
metrical pause, standing in the place of an unstressed syllable in the
foot in which the caret symbol appears.

The metrical pause in "Shall behold God and never taste death's
woe" is suggested by Thomas Cable in "Issues for a New History of
English Prosody." He uses an "x" in parentheses to denote the pause: (x).
I got the caret symbol for the pause from a 1920s prosody dissertation I read.

Cable makes a very interesting explicit assumption in that article (2002):
"The assumption here is that foot divisions are never made between positions
of non-ictus. One way of putting it is that there is no possibility of a trochee and
an iamb."

I'd be interested to hear what you think of that idea. I have mixed feelings about it.
One the one hand, it flies in the face of what I learned from Alfred Corn in his awesome
traditional handbook. Corn analyzes, e.g., "Like to the lark at break of day arising"
as beginning with a trochee followed by an iamb:

LIKE to | the LARK | at BREAK | of DAY | a RISE ing

On the other hand, Cable's assumption seems more intuitive, in that there is nothing
intuitive about the idea of a foot division between two unstressed syllables, as Corn
finds there to be between "to" and "the" in "Like to the lark." Moreover, such a sequence
can conveniently be reanalyzed as an acephalous iamb followed by an anapest. : )

LIKE | to the LARK | at BREAK | of DAY | a RIS ing

> > but LET | them SLEEP | lord || and ME | ^ MOURNE | a SPACE,
> > > for IF | a BOVE | all THESE | my SINS | a BOUND,
> > > 'tis LATE | to ASK | a BUN | dance OF | thy GRACE
> > > when WE | are THERE; | ^ HERE | on this LOW | ly GROUND
> > > TEACH | me HOW | to re PENT; || for THAT'S | as GOOD
> > > as IF | thou'hadst SEAL'D | my PAR | don WITH | thy BLOOD.
> I pretty much agree. If I were reading it to an audience (unlikely), I'd
> probably have a rather weak accent on "to" in the fourth line, and fairly
> strong ones on "dearth" and "law". Not quite so strong on "Lord". I'd
> also be tempted to make "fire" two syllables.

Wonderful. Thanks again!