{"id":139725,"date":"2019-09-24T10:57:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T14:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139725"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:39:38","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:39:38","slug":"you-too-can-have-a-viral-tweet-like-mine-demystifying-poetic-meter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/24\/you-too-can-have-a-viral-tweet-like-mine-demystifying-poetic-meter\/","title":{"rendered":"You, Too, Can Have a Viral Tweet Like Mine: Demystifying Poetic Meter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here are some things that happen when you go viral on Twitter for pointing out that the first two lines of Stephen Sondheim\u2019s \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd\u201d can be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201cHallelujah\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Your notifications will blow up with hyperbolic expressions of anguish and hostility, Twitter\u2019s preferred mode of praise. (\u201cI hate this.\u201d \u201cThis hurts me.\u201d \u201cThis can\u2019t be legal.\u201d \u201cQuick question, how dare you?\u201d \u201cA curse upon you.\u201d \u201cThe mindfuck of this has given me a deeper appreciation for characters in Lovecraftian horror. It \u2026 should not be.\u201d) The Classic FM website will run a story on you<\/a> headlined \u201cSomeone is setting Sweeney Todd lyrics to the tune of \u2018Hallelujah\u2019 and it\u2019s honestly fantastic,\u201d misidentifying you as \u201ca young writer from Connecticut, US.\u201d Your mother will kvell over her viral daughter on Facebook and in a mass email to all her friends. You will wonder why this is all happening around this<\/em> tweet, which is decidedly B material, while your A material languishes in obscurity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Above all, though, you will be confronted by men who insist on being confidently, floridly wrong at you. I\u2019m given to understand that this is common on Twitter in general, but up till this point, my anonymity and gender ambiguity had spared me. Once I went viral, though, the men-who-were-wrong came out in full force. One guy in particular\u2014a partner at a law firm, according to his Twitter bio\u2014retweeted me along with the enthusiastically incorrect remark, \u201cIambic pentameter FTW.\u201d And with that, I realized why so many people were so disproportionately impressed by my Sweeney Todd\/Hallelujah observation: a widespread misunderstanding of how meter works.<\/p>\n

At the risk of giving away the secret to my success, I\u2019d like to demystify meter for the good of the people.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The \u201cIambic pentameter FTW\u201d reply guy was wrong on two counts. First of all, the lyrics in question are not in iambic pentameter, a poetic meter best described as \u201cthe one that goes da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA\u201d (that is to say: five iambs, or \u201cda-DA\u201ds, per line). And second of all, FTW, or \u201cfor the win\u201d\u2014a prepositional idiom that Wiktionary defines<\/a> as \u201cbeing the best; being great, awesome, amazing or spectacular; sure to succeed\u201d\u2014is not a phrase that remotely applies to iambic pentameter, the most overrated of all meters. It\u2019s a perfectly serviceable meter, but it\u2019s the Sweeney Todd\/Hallelujah tweet of meters: with so many other good ones out there, why does that<\/em> one get all the glory?<\/p>\n

Because of school, of course. Most of us learn about iambic pentameter in the context of Shakespeare, a guy who loved himself some iambic pentameter, especially in his sonnets. His plays, however, don\u2019t rely on it quite as much as your high school English teacher may have led you to believe. If it\u2019s been a while, you might surprise yourself by cracking open a Shakespeare play and looking at how often his characters speak in unmetered prose; in fact, if you\u2019re looking at Much Ado About Nothing <\/em>or The Merry Wives of Windsor<\/em>, you won\u2019t find any metered verse at all. When Shakespeare\u2019s characters do use verse, it\u2019s not limited to iambic pentameter: Puck and his fellow fairy underlings in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> speak largely in trochaic tetrameter (\u201cIf<\/em> we shad<\/em>ows have<\/em> offend<\/em>ed \/ Think<\/em> but this<\/em> and all<\/em> is mend<\/em>ed\u201d).<\/p>\n

As a rule, Shakespeare reserves iambic pentameter exclusively for his aristocratic characters. That\u2019s why A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> uses iambic pentameter for the dialogue of the Duke and Duchess of Athens, the King and Queen of the Fairies, and the four high-born lovers, while the working-class \u201crude mechanicals\u201d speak entirely in prose. When you go to Hamlet<\/em> and hear the title character speak his first line\u2014\u201cA little more than kin, and less than kind\u201d\u2014the iambic pentameter is Shakespeare\u2019s way of signaling to you, just in case you missed it from context clues, that Hamlet is a prince.<\/p>\n

Iambic pentameter also served a second, more practical function for the ever-practical Shakespeare: it made long speeches much easier for an actor to memorize. Onstage, an Elizabethan theater star could pass off his iambic pentameter soliloquies as spontaneous, off-the-cuff speech (\u201cBut soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!\u201d) after having privately drilled them like military cadences (\u201cBut soft<\/em> what light<\/em> through yon<\/em>der wind<\/em>ow breaks<\/em> \/ It is<\/em> the east<\/em> and Jul<\/em>iet is<\/em> the sun<\/em>\u201d). This trick still works, by the way, even with contemporary English: the comedian Jacqueline Novak admitted in a recent interview<\/a> that part of her one-woman show, On Your Knees<\/em>, is secretly written in iambic pentameter\u2014not for the audience to notice, but just so she could memorize it quickly.<\/p>\n

The idea behind this is that iambic pentameter, out of all poetic meters, most closely mimics the natural rhythms of casual spoken English. As far as I know, this is not an established linguistic fact, but there does seem to be something to it. Some years back, a friend and I went to see La B\u00eate<\/em>, a contemporary play written in iambic pentameter as a gimmick; afterward, on the subway home, we kept cracking up to find ourselves inadvertently speaking in iambic pentameter. (\u201cI really liked the part with what\u2019s-her-name, the princess, with the sparkles on her gown\u2014\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re doing that on purpose!\u201d \u201cNo! Are you?\u201d)<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a flip side to iambic pentameter\u2019s conversational quality: it is a distinctly unmusical meter. You will never hear a song whose lyrics are in iambic pentameter. I just typed that sentence on a hunch, but then I Googled \u201ciambic pentameter songs,\u201d and the first result<\/a>, a peculiar piece of clickbait called \u201cSix of the Greatest Lyrics Sung in Iambic Pentameter,\u201d proves my point: of the six highly obscure entries on that list, four of them are not in iambic pentameter at all, and the remaining two are isolated lines that fit the meter only by coincidence. It\u2019s simply not well suited to music. If we wanted songs to sound indistinguishable from speech, all radio would be talk radio.<\/p>\n

So, to reiterate, this Twitter man was mistaken: my Sweeney Todd\/Hallelujah mash-up is not in iambic pentameter. I wasted no time informing him so. \u201cNope, it\u2019s actually iambic tetrameter,\u201d I admonished him in a public reply. \u201cAnd more saliently it\u2019s ballad meter.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with great viral fame comes great responsibility, and this is the point at which I must admit that I, too, was wrong. It\u2019s not ballad meter, either.<\/p>\n

In my defense, I had good reason to assume it was. First of all, the song is literally called \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd.\u201d Second of all, ballad meter is the poetic meter that most famously lends itself to this type of comical lyric-swapping. The first such gag I ever encountered, as a child, was the axiom that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of \u201cYankee Doodle.\u201d This turns out to be an exaggeration\u2014not every<\/em> Dickinson poem fits\u2014but it works delightfully often; try it with \u201cBecause I could not stop for Death<\/a>.\u201d Better yet, try it to the tune of the theme song from Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em>. Or, for something more thematically appropriate, swap in the words of Coleridge\u2019s \u201cThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner<\/a>.\u201d Play around with mixing and matching the tunes and lyrics of \u201cGod Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,\u201d \u201cO Little Town of Bethlehem,\u201d the theme song from Pok\u00e9mon<\/em>\u2014or my very favorite:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The combinations seem endless. But you can\u2019t do it with \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd,\u201d and you can\u2019t do it with \u201cHallelujah.\u201d Or, rather, you can do it with the first line\u2014\u201cAttend the tale of Sweeney Todd\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ve heard there was a sacred chord,\u201d respectively\u2014but it breaks down in the second. That\u2019s because ballad meter is actually two different meters<\/em> stuck together: each verse is a quatrain that alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. In layman\u2019s terms, this means that each verse is four lines long; the first and third lines go \u201cda-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA\u201d (four iambs), while the second and fourth lines go \u201cda-DA da-DA da-DA\u201d (three iambs).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd\u201d and \u201cHallelujah\u201d don\u2019t alternate like that: their first and second lines are both in iambic tetrameter. Pure iambic tetrameter is not as musically common as ballad meter, but it\u2019s somewhat easier to write in, hence its irresistible comic potential. In fact, lyrical parodies of Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201cHallelujah\u201d are already a thriving subgenre of social media joke<\/a>. As tumblr user amatalefay<\/a> pointed out in September 2017:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My first childhood encounter with a pure iambic-tetrameter lyric swap remains my favorite: Robert Frost\u2019s poem \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening<\/a>\u201d sung to the tango tune of \u201cHernando\u2019s Hideaway<\/a>\u201d from The Pajama Game<\/em>. If you\u2019re not at that level of musical theater geekery, you can also swap in one of these more familiar tunes, as long as you stick to the first two lines:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Feel free to try it with other poems in iambic tetrameter:<\/p>\n

I think that I shall never see
\n<\/em>A poem as lovely as a tree
\n<\/em>But you don\u2019t really care for music, do ya?<\/em><\/p>\n

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
\n<\/em>A stately pleasure-dome decree
\n<\/em>He shaved the faces of gentlemen
\n<\/em>Who never thereafter were heard of again.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2019Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
\n<\/em>Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
\n<\/em>All mimsy were the borogroves, Jolene.<\/em><\/p>\n

But\u2014you may be wondering at this point\u2014why does this trick work in only one direction? It\u2019s all well and good to sing \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd\u201d to the tune of \u201cHallelujah,\u201d but why can\u2019t you do it the other way around? For that matter, why does it work only when you limit yourself to the first two lines of the song? Why can\u2019t you make the whole tune fit?<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the answer is boring: most song lyrics don\u2019t fit any particular poetic meter. They don\u2019t need to. On the page, a poet must rely on meter alone to convey rhythm and structure, but if you bring music into the mix, well, rhythm and structure are what music is<\/em>. When song lyrics do fall into an identifiable poetic meter, the phenomenon is rare enough to be ripe for comedy, as we\u2019ve just seen.<\/p>\n

In the case of \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd,\u201d though, there\u2019s a bit more to it. Sondheim\u2019s use of iambic tetrameter is no accident: Sweeney Todd<\/em> is set in Victorian England, and \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd\u201d deliberately models itself after Victorian poetry, which is heavily metered. The song\u2019s verses do abandon their iambic tetrameter after the first two lines, but that doesn\u2019t mean Sondheim abandons meter altogether. Let\u2019s take a look at what he does instead:<\/p>\n

Verse 1:<\/p>\n

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd
\n<\/em>His skin was pale and his eye was odd
\n<\/em>He shaved the faces of gentlemen
\n<\/em>Who never thereafter were heard of again<\/em><\/p>\n

Verse 2:<\/p>\n

He kept a shop in London Town
\n<\/em>Of fancy clients and good renown
\n<\/em>And what if none of their souls were saved?
\n<\/em>They went to their Maker impeccably shaved<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWho nev<\/em>er thereaft<\/em>er were heard<\/em> of again<\/em>.\u201d \u201cThey went<\/em> to their Mak<\/em>er impec<\/em>cably shaved<\/em>.\u201d Da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA. What we have here is another mash-up meter: half iambic tetrameter, half anapestic<\/em> tetrameter.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve taken several poetry classes in my life, and every time the teachers set out to explain anapestic tetrameter, they always use the same terrible example: Lord Byron\u2019s \u201cThe Destruction of Sennacherib<\/a>.\u201d I find this choice baffling for three reasons. For one thing, who still reads Lord Byron? For another, it\u2019s not at all clear to the modern reader that the word \u201cAssyrian\u201d is meant to be read as three syllables, rather than four, and this invariably results in a roomful of students awkwardly misreading it aloud\u2014\u201cThe uh-SEER-ee-an CAME down like UH wolf on THUH fold\u201d\u2014until the wheels come off the wagon. Most importantly, though, American popular culture is full of much more familiar, much better<\/em> examples of anapestic tetrameter:<\/p>\n

\u2019Twas the night before Christmas<\/em><\/a>, when all through the house
\n<\/em>Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
\n<\/em>The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
\n<\/em>In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Or better still:<\/p>\n

\u201cI know some good games we could play,\u201d said the cat.
\n<\/em>\u201cI know some new tricks,\u201d said <\/em>the Cat in the Hat<\/em><\/a>.
\n<\/em>\u201cA lot of good tricks. I will show them to you.
\n<\/em>Your mother won\u2019t mind it at all if I do.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Sondheim\u2019s Sweeney Todd<\/em> metric combination, however, is quite unusual. Very few poets alternate between iambic tetrameter couplets and anapestic tetrameter couplets. In fact, in all my research, I\u2019ve come across this form only one other time\u2014which is to say that there\u2019s only one other lyric that can be sung to the tune of \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd.\u201d<\/p>\n

It gives me no pleasure to tell you what it is. In fact, you\u2019re probably better off not knowing. Once you know it, you can never un-know it. Stop reading this right now. It\u2019s too late for me, but you can still save yourself.<\/p>\n

Well, don\u2019t say I didn\u2019t warn you.<\/p>\n

Jellicle Cats come out tonight
\nJellicle Cats come one, come all
\nThe Jellicle Moon is shining bright
\n<\/em>Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s true: the title song from Sweeney Todd<\/em> is metrically interchangeable with the title song from Cats<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I hereby relinquish my viral fame and accept my cancellation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast,<\/em> The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Frankie Thomas demystifies poetic meter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYou Too Can Have a Viral Tweet Like Mine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Frankie Thomas demystifies poetic meter\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/24\/you-too-can-have-a-viral-tweet-like-mine-demystifying-poetic-meter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"You, Too, Can Have a Viral 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