Edited by C. Jac Conradie, Ronél Johl, Marthinus Beukes, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 9] 2010
► pp. 347–363
This paper looks at the interdependence of metrical and linguistic units, focussing on metrical inversion and enjambment. While metrical texts favour (diagrammatic) iconicity as a result of equivalence (repetition) on the level of stress, foot, verse, stanza, etc., another source for iconicity is to be found in non-equivalent phenomena such as metrical inversion and enjambment. An example for inversion is the beginning of the first line of one of Keats’ sonnets — “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold” — where metrical inversion coincides with syntactic inversion. The basis for enjambment is a discrepancy between metrical and syntactic structures, a discrepancy which may even affect morphology, as is the case at the beginning of Hopkins’ The Windhover, where the change of the lines results in cutting asunder a word: “king- / dom”. Having demonstrated, at the level of meter, the interaction of the principles of equivalence and non-equivalence — according to Jakobson a fundamental quality of poetic texts in general — the paper points the way towards a poetics of verse.
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