Sprung rhythm
Sprung rhythm is a poetic metre in which the metrical feet consist of one stressed syllable followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. In practice the metrical feet contain between one and four syllables, i.e., they consist of a stressed syllable on its own or of a stressed syllable followed by one, two, or three unstressed syllables.
The term sprung rhythm, though not the practice of writing poetry in sprung rhythm, was invented by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), who discussed its nature in a short essay with which he prefaced a manuscript collection of his poems (Author's Preface, pp. 94-97 in Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Poetry Library, Oxford University Press, 1995). Hopkins believed that sprung rhythm reflects the natural speech patterns of the English language: it is, he wrote, "the most natural of things. For ... it is the rhythm of common speech and written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. ... It is found in nursery rhymes, weather saws, and so on" (Author's Preface, pp. 96-97). He claimed that sprung rhythm was used in some early English poetry (e.g., Piers Plowman) and that his use of the metre revived a practice which English poets abandoned at the end of the sixteenth century. See alliterative verse.
Here as an example are the first two stanzas of Hopkins' poem Inversnaid. The feet are divided by vertical lines, and the stressed syllables are printed in bold type. The accents on certain syllables were added by Hopkins himself to show where the stress should fall. You will see that each line has four stressed syllables and therefore has four feet. Notice also that the last metrical foot in a line sometimes runs over into the next line so that a foot which begins with the final stressed syllable of one line may be completed by a number of unstressed syllables at the beginning of the next line (e.g., the foot which begins with 'brówn' at the end of line 1 is completed by 'His' at the beginning of line 2, and the foot which begins with 'broth' at the end of line 6 is completed by 'Of the' at the beginning of line 7).
- This | dárksome | búrn, | hórseback | brówn,
- His | rollrock | highroad | roaring | down,
- In | coop and in | comb the | fleece of his | foam
- Flutes and | low to the | lake falls | home.
- A | windpuff-|bónnet of | fáwn-|fróth
- Turns and | twindles | over the | broth
- Of a | póol so | pítchblack, | féll-|frówning,
- It | rounds and | rounds Des|pair to | drowning.
Other poems by Hopkins written in sprung rhythm include Pied Beauty and The Windhover.
Hopkins' claims about the distinctiveness of sprung rhythm as a poetic metre have not always been accepted, and in practice it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a poem is written in sprung rhythm or in a variation of some other metre or is simply a piece of free verse. In this connection notice, e.g., that the second line of Inversnaid is a straightforward iambic tetrameter and that some of the other lines in the poem could reasonably be regarded as variations on this metre.
See further blank verse, alliterative verse.
