Welcome to The Trochaic Dispatch,
a newsletter where I discuss whatever unedited nonsense is on my mind.
Today’s nonsense is the newsletter’s namesake: trochees.
In English poetry, the most common unit of poetic meter is the iamb, or two syllables where the first is unstressed and the second is stressed. Think about the words before, micro, macaw.
Meter has a long linguistic history that I don’t have time to get into today, but as a point of reference, I’ll include that Shakespeare’s primary meter that he used for his lyric plays was iambic pentameter, or five iambs per line. Iambic has a bouncy but natural-sounding cadence that best mimics the natural patterns of human speech in poetry.
Trochees are the opposite of iambs. They still have two syllables, but the first is stressed and the second is unstressed. Think apple, headphones, crumpet.
Shakespeare loved a trochee, too, but only in certain settings. Take Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example: the human characters hailing from Athens all speak in either rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter--but the supernatural beings that inhabit the forest outside Athens’ city limits regularly speak in trochaic tetrameter:
Fairy: I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
It’s especially noticeable when a character is performing an incantation, or using their words to effect transformation or disrupt the plot:
Oberon: What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true-love take,
Love and languish for his sake:
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wakest, it is thy dear:
Wake when some vile thing is near.
It shows up in other plays, too, including the Scottish play, where some witch’s conjure some nonsense with the words:
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.
For charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double,double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and couldron bubble.
Even if you’ve never seen or read a Shakespeare play, you’ve probably heard part of that particular cant. With Spooky Season in full swing, it’s likely you’ve been the last couplet somewhere. Shakespeare had no idea in 1606 that he’d be writing the definitive pop culture witch speech.
Whether or not the trochee became spooky because Shakespeare used it for his supernatural children or Shakespeare put trochees into the mouths of his spooky children because the trochee was already spooky is a chicken-and-egg question I don’t have the answer to at the moment. Regardless, there’s something in the trochee that says “boo, ya’ll.” Maybe because it’s the opposite of the most natural foot, the iambic, that it comes across as the most unnatural.
I spent my first semester in my MFA program trying to figure out how poetry can unsettle folks--how can words arranged in stanzas make your skin crawl? I came up with 7 different common denominators between spooky poems which I may include in a later post. Here’s two I forgot about at the time that I’m remembering now:
Write in tercets
Use trochees
The working title for this newsletter is The Trochaic Dispatch because of my lifelong fascination with both poetry and things that are slightly to the left of normal. The internet loves a niche, and I don’t have one. But I have managed to identify the three things that matter the most to me right now:
Poetry
Christianity
Spooky nonsense
If you’re into those things too, subscribe maybe.
or also maybe