Hcfyk

We're all familiar with the iambic and trochaic metres in verse, but how about prose? I wonder if we can improve our everyday writing by using those 'natural' rhythms in a more conscious and deliberate way.

OK, here goes.

Réad your words aloud and you will find
they’re trochaïc: stress in front, non-stress behind.
You wrote trochaïcly by accident:
my mind to an iambic line was bent.

If you look at these lines, you will see that I have made the stressed syllables bold. So you can see (with only a little cheating) that the language has fallen fairly easily into these rhythms. So much so that you fell into it without noticing.

Remarkl points out that the use of iambic metre in prose can be soporific. That can be right. In general, the use of verse should be for the high points of speeches and writing generally.

Take the end /beginning of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (I shall use '//' to show where the novel 'ends' and runs back to where the reading goes back and starts again at the beginning:-

A way a lone a loved a long the // riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Joyce ends the rhythm mid-sentence to enter the more mundane world of narrative. Take Churchill early in WW2, rejecting talk of armistice after Dunkirk:

We will have no truce or parlay with you, Hitler, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. Churchill pauses for the laugh which he intended from his combining iambic metre with alliteration. When the laughter subsides, he goes on. You do your worst and we will do our best.

Or take Bertrand Russell's letter pleading against the onset of the first world war.

And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and its hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, have chosen that it should occur, rather than any of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride…

This passionate plea against the onset of war is interesting in your context because it is not consistently iambic or trochaic. It falls into other rhythms. So it begins "And all this madness, all this rage..." before fgalling more or less into prose. Tony Blair's memorable characterisation of the late Princess Diana was iambic:-

She was the people's princess.

The use of rhythm in rhetoric goes back into history. The first century BC orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero was famous for the use of rhythmic endings to sentences and paragraphs, known as clausulae or 'closings'. Literary specialists recognise a variety of such clausulae.

Cretic | spondee (| – u – | – x |) was the most common - the 'x' means it long-or-short: 'tum-ti-tum tum-tum'.

| – x – | – u x | or | – x – | – u – x |. In both of these, the first measure is like the cretic, but with the middle syllable able to be short as well as long. The second measure of the first is either 'tum-tum-tum' or 'tum-ti-tum'; the second is essentially trochaic, which can be either 'tum-ti-tum-ti' or 'tum-ti-tum-tum'.

The clausula continued as an element in mediaeval Latin, and there are even examples into more modern times (perhaps not surprising, when we consider that Latin was taught as part of the curriculum of both private and grammar schools into the 1960s). Essentially, however, the point is that high oratory is designed to appeal to the emotions and so is by its nature poetic. But, as remarkl points out, we should not overdo it.