Meter (a Tempo, a Piacere)

Abstract

he more time I’ve spent with the keyword I chose to think about earlymodern lyric, themore difficulty it has givenme. This is in part, I think, because “meter” is something that can often come across as profoundly unlyrical. By this I don’t mean that we don’t account for meter when we approach the analysis of a lyric poem: that is fundamental to poetic and prosodic interpretation. What I have in mind is, rather, the critical tendency—or the readerly tendency—to designate rhythmically regular or emphatic or predictable verse in a category apart from the “lyrical,” as the “metrical.” And so, to resist that tendency to see what insights may result, my idea is a simple one: that meter, being closely tied to, and indeed emerging from, the concepts of sound and rhythm, can serve as a key to understanding the category of lyric in early modern England and to the experience of reading it. I do not propose (here) to align myself with any of the several camps that have formed in lyric studies. “Lyric”will serve simply as my term of approach, one that foregrounds the connection between poetry andmusic, a thread also picked up in the essays by Wendy Beth Hyman (“Patterns, the Shakespearean Sonnet, and Epistemologies of Scale”) and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld (“Do You Hear What I Hear?”). In the sixteenth century, the earliest sustained theorization of English meter appears in George Gascoigne’s 1575 Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English. One of the first notes discusses “measure,” a cognate for “meter,” and is devoted to the question of holding “the iust measure wherwith you begin your verse.” This is decided by the number of syllables in a line (“whether it be in a verse of sixe syllables, eight, ten, twelue, etc.”) rather than the number of rhythmic feet;