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Forgive the alliteration, which I've heard is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I've got Gardner's book requested at the libary, but I'm a little impatient. If you have any short excerpts of notable prosody, please share them here. And if you have time for it, a little lecture on what you see them doing?
Virginia Woolf comes to my mind first, which is a little irksome because I can't see her style fitting easily into the YA Fantasy I'm revising. (Maybe the next book? Or after that....)
“With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least: she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen: with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag.” ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
This isn't the whole passage, but it was readily available. I love the way Woolf weaves with repetition because 1) I know it's deliberate, 2) and therefore I can enjoy the artistry instead of flinch at the gaff, and 3) it evokes the mood greater than most other paragraphs I've ever read. I'm sure the diction choices add to that, as well as my sympathies for the gentleman's selfish chivalry.
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In Gardner's chapter on Technique, he touches on scansion. He contrasts a couple variations of the same sentence, pointing out how these 2 are the most distinct from each other:
Light: "Rhythm and variation are as basic to prose as to poetry." Trudge: "All prose must force rhythms, just like verse."
I was surprised a little. I can sense that his description is accurate---the anapest-esque gallop of the first runs lighter than the stop-motion line of accents. But my assumptions would have put the sentence with more 'filler' words as likely to be slower/heavier. I guess the difference is also coming from the monosyllabic diction in the second.
For my toolbelt, I want tuck in a principle that says 'Anapest runs light and monosyllabic trudges.' But I'm worried that would be too easy to be reliable.
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O Henry "The Gift Of The Magi" first paragraph:
"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas."
Diction scansion of the above examines the hard and soft consonants and vowel sounds, again, hard and soft, plus a spectrum of intermediate accentual emphasis.
Nine syllables, also scans as three groups of three: amphibrach's open light medial rise and fall, bacchus's light exaltation rise, and tribrach's light open fall. The overall scan is a loose meter of multiple unit division types, accentual emphasis apropos of everyday speech rhythms though poetically organized to raise and lower emphasis, again, apropos of everyday speech.
Note the accentual emphasis progression from low to high stress to low stress that leads into the next accentual progression.
Similarly, note the paragraph's syntax scansion follows the same emphasis progression, from low to high to low stress, evidenced foremost by sentence length, though as well diction accentual emphasis.
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But here's the rub; with such literary tricks, as John Gardner has pointed out, you are in danger of alienating the genre reader. In your search for the proper cadence, metre, and tempo you run the real risk of exchanging clarity and understanding for confusion and incomprehension.
Personally, I rely on an actor's ear for dramatic pacing and emotional intensity; so read your drafts aloud--to an audience if possible. I realise this is hardly an empirical measure that can be replicated by others, but it works for me.
If you try to consciously implement "rules" such as the one you've found involving anapest-ish rhythm, you can take the heart out of what you are writing.
Much better to educate your ear with stuff that works the way you want to work, and then listen to it read out loud (by someone else, if possible).
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Study of rhythm metrics for emphasis intents develops the "ear" for their effects. Study develops second-nature skills, intuitive uses, and timely earlier hunches than blind free-association instinct a word choice or syntax organization is awkward or doesn't deliver an intended emphasis arc. A predeveloped skill for rhythm emphasis lessens doubts and efforts and time spent instinctively adjusting a draft's voices, from second nature and stronger rhythm instincts learned through study. Later, during revisions, perhaps a more concentrated effort focuses on clumsy, unintended rhythms.
The actual draft of a degree of instinctive free association or degree of studied emphasis intent, or a revision, might be a natural rhythm and no less be poetic. Only the one principle is substantive, that a rhythm not call undue attention to itself as an artificial construct and thus show too much external influence; that is, a writer's omnipotent hand on the keyboard, which can spoil readers' willing suspension of disbelief and throw them out of a narrative's magical mystic reading spell.
The noted Gardner example of the "Trudge: All prose must force rhythms, just like verse." is a sort of irony. Overtly, the sentence is an imperative that insists rhythm must be artificially forced; however, the subtext is that prose rhythms must be naturally forceful, emphasized in an arc of stress rises and falls according to natural speech and thought rhythms, ideally suited to a narrative voice and separately suited to individual character's voices.
"The Gift of the Magi" rationale for an example of poetic prose is the everyday natural rhythm of stream of consciousness from a character's thoughts voice, albeit with a touch of likewise narrator voice melded, and calls very little, if any, attention to the natural, lightly forceful rhythm and emphasis arc.
The Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse example's rhythm, perhaps calls some undue attention to itself, is somewhat artificially forced, and naturally forceful, and intended such for ironic effect. To me, the ironic effect is sublime and profound and exactly of a forced natural degree suited to the topic, voice, and intent and meaning.
Study of rhythm metrics for emphasis intents develops the "ear" for their effects. Study develops . . .
But I have so many other things I need to study. Things that pertain to my genre style of dramatic writing which I considerer hold greater import for me than poetic prose. If, on the other hand, I were a literary dramatist then such a study might be pertinent. But it isn't.
As for O. Henry's fragment I see both merit in the argument for poetic prose and it's simultaneous condemnation within the sphere of genre writing. For me the first three sentences are a most powerful piece of prose; they foretell and foreshadow revelations of great import to the character. They raise, in a few short words, the dramatic tension to a giddying height--and then?
In the following sentence: “Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.” O. Henry successfully murders the dramatic tension with irrelevancy. He even admits his error by reintroducing the observation: “One dollar and eighty-seven cents.” before he hits us with the scenic crisis: ”And the next day would be Christmas."
For me, poetic prose has it uses, in a limited fashion. However I am a genre dramatist, not a literary one.
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I'm also a play-it-by-ear type, or -by-eye, since I'm more visual. But I like having some guidelines to explore with when a sentence doesn't sound/look right. There are times when I've wanted to make a sentence run faster (and also slower), but wasn't sure what exactly to revise for that affect. Anapest-ing and trudging will, hopefully, help the next time I need that. So I can see the value of the deliberate study extrinsic mentions.
Are you other by-ear revisionists saying that you read aloud, tweak, read-aloud, tweak until it sounds fast enough for you? More/less random experimentation until the sound is right? (I guess that's what I've been doing, since this is the first time I've ID'ed some guidelines for it.)
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Curious, that some readers feel long sentences bog down, some readers feel they gallop a headlong rush, and some note little difference between long and short sentences. Maybe the phenomena is due to different textual signal reception.
In the long O Henry sentence, conjunctions and prepositions break the sentence into natural phrase and clause divisions similar to commas. They extend their pauses between sentence units and also connect portions and emphasis proportions from start, middle, or end location of a main idea, respectively, a loose (main idea at the start), medial (mid sentence main idea), or periodic sentence (sentence end main idea). The O Henry sentence is periodic. which gives it the gallop rush to get to the main idea.
Recast without the conjunctions -- asyndeton -- and one preposition, and grand style punctuation inserted:
//Pennies saved one[,] two at a time[,] bulldozing the grocer[,] the vegetable man[,] the butcher [--] until cheeks burned[,] from the silent blame for thrift shrewd bargaining implied.//
Several word omissions, substitutions, and one phrase reposition in the above, plus punctuation inserts that resemble poetry's line divisions and enjambments. The main idea is the same, about shame for a perceived moral disease of poverty and crucial to the story's outcome and message.
That recast though is more jumpy and busy-cluttered and as pivotal of gallop, stall, or neutral for individual readers as the original. Maybe some of the bog is removed, some added. I don't know; the recast reads faster and more emphatic to me.
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extrinsic, it isn't the length of the sentence, it's the content. In the O. Henry passage this sentence, “Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.” is a diversion down a dramatic by-water to a dead end in my humble opinion. It is a diversion into characterisation that at that particular moment is unwarranted.
Without the diversion the fragment holds its intense emotional impact. In fact it builds on it as it rises to a climax. The edited version reads like this:
“One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.”
Not having read the book perhaps my focus on the emotional intensity, bordering on despair, is inappropriate. It could be that Della finds the idea people think she is parsimonious is far more important to her than her apparent dearth of funds the day before Christmas.
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The "Gift of the Magi" is a short story; I'm sure you've heard of it. It's where the wife cuts her hair to buy her spouse a watch-chain, but he sells his heirloom watch to buy her a comb.
I think the sentence helps show more clearly what the wife has done---not just saved coins, not just cut her hair, but also risked damaging her relationships and receiving public derision. The emotion isn't just despair to prompt scrimping, but in a sort of relational sacrifice she's made.
My critique of the O. Henry's sentence is that the final accent falls on a less powerful idea. I'd re-sequence the end:
"...until such close dealings also earned the silent imputation of parsimony and each time she entered their shops now, her cheeks burned."
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The sentence's single point is the shame of poverty perceived as a moral disease. One characteristic of the sentence, the paragraph as a whole, and its import to the story is that moral complication of poverty perceived as the vice of sloth. The moral complication is pivotal to the story and its outcome.
If the story had been clearer what it's about, that could have made the story more of a philosophical bent: assertion of a moral law. The practical irony of the start dissimulates, says more from less, in regard to what the story is really about and becomes instead a moral truth discovery, mainly implied by the subject sentence's misdirection and satisfied by the outcome pivot. The overt and tangible story's action and complication notwithstood, actually, is artful congruence and incongruence between the tangible and intangible complications.
Anyway, much delight and insight derives from a copia exercise to recast the sentence infinite ways. Though, as Grumpy old guy, notes, the sentence does reduce emphasis, perhaps inarticulately or artlessly, the rhythm and emphasis changes do call due attention from the sentence's difference from the other sentences and picks up again for the last sentence. A downbeat, so to speak, before the last sentence's expressed desperation and urgency. The subject sentence's emphasis contrast, for me, sets up stronger emotional emphasis for the last sentence and at the same time strongly implies the moral complication of the whole. Sublime, to me, exposition in the sense of introduction of what a story is really about.
No wonder the story is a model and template of masterful prose composition and assigned reading, once upon a time, for grade school literature and later composition courses. Teachers assigned the story in several grades when I was in grammar, intermediate, and high schools; eight times, I recall. Curiously, the story's Gilded age language is no longer timely. Because the story is now in the public domain, possibly, perhaps an update is indicated, pertinent to today's language and tangible and moral complications.
The feminine and masculine motifs of long beautiful hair (feminine vanity) and a pocket watch (masculine vanity) are sublime, though today's divisions of sexual identity markers might be more contemporary and stronger hyperbole, perhaps less so sexual contrasts and more so universal human vanity solely.
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