If music be the food of love…

That’s from the opening line of Twelfth Night. It just made me think about the similarities between music and verse, in particular the fact that meter in poetry is as subtle as rhythm in music. Poets don’t mark the meter in their verse, but there’s often a clear pattern to it. This is, of course, especially true of classical forms like The Sonnets. But even when the meter is clear, regardless of variations from regular forms, there is still much room for interpretation, just as there is in music. A musical score might show precisely how long each note is and the relative speed and loudness of one section compared to another. But two performers will invariably play the same piece differently. There are many subtleties that cannot be indicated in the score. The same is true for verse. Even if we can determine the meter, assigning to each foot its proper stresses, there will still be many choices to make in reading the verse.

In The Sonnets, there is disagreement even about the basic variations from iambic pentameter. The normal iamb is a foot with two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. I find only four variations in The Sonnets: trochees (first syllable stressed), spondees (both syllables stressed), pyrrhics (both syllables unstressed, and feminine endings (an eleventh, unstressed syllable at the end of a line). Even this simple classification has difficulties. Most spondees have not exactly the same stress on both syllables—sometimes the first, sometimes the second is stronger. And sometimes the difference between a spondee and an iamb or a trochee can be very slight. Even more subtle are the pauses between syllables. Sometimes these are marked by punctuation and sometimes not. Sometimes there is a strong pause at the end of a line and sometimes none at all. Sometimes the meter flows with the sense of the words; other times the meter and the sense are at odds. I find these different effects  may come and go depending on how I read a poem at different times. I think this must be true of music, too. There is not one way to play a piece of music. There is also not one way to read a poem. I wonder if musicians are particularly good at reading poetry. Any musicians out there?