Journal Article

Unsettled Scores: Meter and Play in Two Music Poems by Browning

Tucker, Herbert F.

2014

Overview

The meter of a poem is to its rhythm as a composed score is to its performance and also as a text is to its interpretation, whether one takes interpretation in its hermeneutic, written sense or in the sense of an experienced vocalization--whether, that is, one takes it into the library or into the auditorium, the literate domain or the oral. Now the practice of scansion, or prosodic textual markup, by its very nature participates in both these domains. As a visible notation of an imagined performative utterance, for which it serves concurrently as record and as guide, scansion both confesses and exposes that acoustic nostalgia which has inhabited the printed voice in its virtual orality ever since poems first fell from the air onto the page. Arguably since manuscript antiquity, and decidedly since the Renaissance inauguration of print, competent reading of verse has depended on a regular interplay between the visual and the aural mode (the latter nearly always entailing its homonym, the oral mode) of verbal experience. Scansion is a highly artificial technique that engages all three modes, really, but the first two especially. Here, Tucker examines the two musician monologues from Robert Browning's 1855 collection Men and Women: \"A Toccata of Galuppi's\" and \"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.\"

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago, acting through its Press
• Subject: Browning, Robert (1812-1889) / English literature / Lexical stress / Literary criticism / Musical meter / Musical rhythm / Organists / Poetic meter / Poetry / Stanzas / Syllables / Trochee / Victorians