"But all the while I sit and think ..."—a punctuation dilemma?

[CSchwab]

As I read it, all we need to do to make the logic of Bilbo's sentence obvious is to add one comma:

"But, all the while I sit and think of times there were before, I listen ..."

I read "but" as belonging to the independent clause rather than the dependent clause. The bit of syntactical confusion here is caused by the omission of the comma after "but," which would bookend the parenthetical "all the while I sit and think of times there were before." Logically, the clause should be set off by a pair of commas, not a single comma.

It's common for writers to omit the first comma of a parenthetical phrase/clause in this situation, where it would follow a short conjunction that begins the sentence. Including the comma would make the sentence sound stilted. And, when we're reading at a normal pace (rather than parsing the sentence), we are more likely to become confused if the comma is included than if it is absent. Especially if the parenthetical is long and complex, as in Bilbo's poem—and the previous sentence. ;-)

At least, that is what I tell myself when I come across one of these as an editor and it makes my ears tingle.

My apologies if I'm repeating an observation someone has already made; I haven't had time to read all the discussion about this!

 

[Rachel Port]

Interesting. I have always read the clause as a modifier to the second clause, so it seemed strange to me that the professor and some others saw it as another independent clause and I still can't read it that way. In fact, only as I sat down to answer your post did I come up with a way to read it aloud so it sounded like a separate statement.

But, in reading it aloud, I also experimented with the comma you propose and found it changed the whole sound and shape of the stanza. (Yes, I did that.) First of all, the comma turns the first foot of the line into a spondee, or even leads to a pause after the "but" that changes the whole shape of the line. That's what a comma is - a breath or pause, even in music. In a poem this regular, that feels extreme; it emphasizes the explosive "b" sound, which picks up the "p" sounds in "people" in the previous verse. I don't think there is enough of a change to warrant that kind of emphasis. And I agree that the length and omplexity of the parenthetical phrase make it awkward. I think Tolkien was right: the comma is better left out.