Been really enjoying the poetry analysis this whole time, especially the careful and methodical progression through each little piece of each poem, moving from rhythmic shape to phonetic sounds to rhyme to meaning. However, it seems there's one aspect of all Tolkien's poetry and the discussion of it that is so conspicuous in its absence that I can't really understand why it hasn't been mentioned, and that is music.
A lot of these poems are described as songs, after all, which implies that they're set to some sort of music; and while it's all well and good to understand iambic and trochaic and spondaic meter and to discuss each poem as though it were being recited carefully in a spoken tone in front of a fireplace, it really seems like it's missing something that is common to all modern poetry, which is what song lyrics are. The rhythm of the music imposes its own rhythmic structure on the lyrics, and it often means throwing the whole concept of iambs and beats out the window.
Of course we get nothing about the musical intent in the text. But every adaptation of LotR has had to try its hand at setting the poems to music, and sometimes it's with a lot more success than others. During the recent discussion of I sit beside the fire and think, I kept flashing back to some of the ways that the Rankin-Bass Hobbit did its songs, and while I'm not suggesting we discuss how one adaptation or another has rendered JRRT's poetry, I do think it's instructive to see how they've chosen to interpret what on the page can by contrast come across as very staid, predictable, or monotonous, if what you're used to is the song version.
To take one example, The road goes ever on. As a poem, it's very straightforward and iambic. the ROAD goes EVer ON and ON. down FROM the DOOR where IT beGAN. Just plodding forward line by line. And sure, it gets the shape of that imagery across very nicely. But the way the Hobbit film does it, as indeed is dictated more strongly than the LotR version by having stressed initial syllables ("Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree,"), is to treat each line of text almost as a big long pickup-note for the coming measure. Roads go EVer ON and ... (new measure) ON! (musical interlude for the rest of the line follows, only picking up at the gathering of strength for the next phrase) Over Rock and UNder Tree!
You know what I mean? There's way more to the shape of the poem when it's set to music than there is just treating it as a straightforward set of feet, without the possibility of a syllable being drawn out to the length of a measure or a series of quick staccato words making up a rushed phrase in eighth notes.
(this is driving me crazy. I'm trying to find an online sheet music editor so I can sketch out what I'm trying to say here, and none of them seem to work or all of them require a paid subscription or something. I'm stuck using all this really clumsy language trying to imitate what I hear when a song lyrics are shaped to the music rather than just being a straight-up recited poem. I've been composing this post in my head all morning assuming that there would be some tool I could use to illustrate this stuff, and now it turns out there is no such thing. Argh!)
So then the canonical example, to me, of a Tolkien poem that feels more like a "song" to me than a "poem", and I'm positive it will get analyzed as a poem and sound absolutely nothing like the way it always sounds in my head, is Aragorn's "Gondor! Gondor, between the Mountains and the Sea" song. To me, it's always sounded as though it wants to be sung like:
GOOOON-dor, GOOOOON-dor
betwentheMOUNtains AND the SEA
Like a 4/4 version of "Daisy, Daisy" or something. Is this illustrative at all? I can't even tell. If I had sheet music I could put this together exactly how I want to show it but no such luck I guess.
But if you're going to pick it apart as a poem, I don't even know how you'd start. I guess the GON-dor, GON-dor troches can only really work if they're drawn out super long; because the "beTWEEN the MOUNtains AND the SEA" part becomes its own line. But reading it as a poem it comes out very differently than any type of song I can picture. Specifically, "GON-dor, GON" are all half notes, and "dor, be-" are quarter notes leading into the next "measure". That's the only way I can fit the second line's inherently iambic cadence into a repeatable stanza of uniform length with the WEEEEST WIIIIND line coming up which would have to follow the same pattern. And the thing is, when you actually introduce music into the equation, it changes the entire ball game, and the second line doesn't even need to be treated as iambic meter at all. In my head I always get "between the mountains" running together in quick eighth notes, followed by "AND the SEA" slowing down again into quarter notes.
When we finally get to that poem I'm really going to be interested to hear how it gets read, but I'm also pretty sure that it won't have any attention paid to how it's meant to be delivered as a song, which is a shame because that's always felt to me like a key part of the whole presentation. Without music and without the ability to play with syllabic structure to fit a tune instead of just the metrical tools available to a poet.
Ugh, this has been one of the most frustrating posts I've ever written. I hope some of it is coherent.
A lot of these poems are described as songs, after all, which implies that they're set to some sort of music; and while it's all well and good to understand iambic and trochaic and spondaic meter and to discuss each poem as though it were being recited carefully in a spoken tone in front of a fireplace, it really seems like it's missing something that is common to all modern poetry, which is what song lyrics are. The rhythm of the music imposes its own rhythmic structure on the lyrics, and it often means throwing the whole concept of iambs and beats out the window.
Of course we get nothing about the musical intent in the text. But every adaptation of LotR has had to try its hand at setting the poems to music, and sometimes it's with a lot more success than others. During the recent discussion of I sit beside the fire and think, I kept flashing back to some of the ways that the Rankin-Bass Hobbit did its songs, and while I'm not suggesting we discuss how one adaptation or another has rendered JRRT's poetry, I do think it's instructive to see how they've chosen to interpret what on the page can by contrast come across as very staid, predictable, or monotonous, if what you're used to is the song version.
To take one example, The road goes ever on. As a poem, it's very straightforward and iambic. the ROAD goes EVer ON and ON. down FROM the DOOR where IT beGAN. Just plodding forward line by line. And sure, it gets the shape of that imagery across very nicely. But the way the Hobbit film does it, as indeed is dictated more strongly than the LotR version by having stressed initial syllables ("Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree,"), is to treat each line of text almost as a big long pickup-note for the coming measure. Roads go EVer ON and ... (new measure) ON! (musical interlude for the rest of the line follows, only picking up at the gathering of strength for the next phrase) Over Rock and UNder Tree!
You know what I mean? There's way more to the shape of the poem when it's set to music than there is just treating it as a straightforward set of feet, without the possibility of a syllable being drawn out to the length of a measure or a series of quick staccato words making up a rushed phrase in eighth notes.
(this is driving me crazy. I'm trying to find an online sheet music editor so I can sketch out what I'm trying to say here, and none of them seem to work or all of them require a paid subscription or something. I'm stuck using all this really clumsy language trying to imitate what I hear when a song lyrics are shaped to the music rather than just being a straight-up recited poem. I've been composing this post in my head all morning assuming that there would be some tool I could use to illustrate this stuff, and now it turns out there is no such thing. Argh!)
So then the canonical example, to me, of a Tolkien poem that feels more like a "song" to me than a "poem", and I'm positive it will get analyzed as a poem and sound absolutely nothing like the way it always sounds in my head, is Aragorn's "Gondor! Gondor, between the Mountains and the Sea" song. To me, it's always sounded as though it wants to be sung like:
GOOOON-dor, GOOOOON-dor
betwentheMOUNtains AND the SEA
Like a 4/4 version of "Daisy, Daisy" or something. Is this illustrative at all? I can't even tell. If I had sheet music I could put this together exactly how I want to show it but no such luck I guess.
But if you're going to pick it apart as a poem, I don't even know how you'd start. I guess the GON-dor, GON-dor troches can only really work if they're drawn out super long; because the "beTWEEN the MOUNtains AND the SEA" part becomes its own line. But reading it as a poem it comes out very differently than any type of song I can picture. Specifically, "GON-dor, GON" are all half notes, and "dor, be-" are quarter notes leading into the next "measure". That's the only way I can fit the second line's inherently iambic cadence into a repeatable stanza of uniform length with the WEEEEST WIIIIND line coming up which would have to follow the same pattern. And the thing is, when you actually introduce music into the equation, it changes the entire ball game, and the second line doesn't even need to be treated as iambic meter at all. In my head I always get "between the mountains" running together in quick eighth notes, followed by "AND the SEA" slowing down again into quarter notes.
When we finally get to that poem I'm really going to be interested to hear how it gets read, but I'm also pretty sure that it won't have any attention paid to how it's meant to be delivered as a song, which is a shame because that's always felt to me like a key part of the whole presentation. Without music and without the ability to play with syllabic structure to fit a tune instead of just the metrical tools available to a poet.
Ugh, this has been one of the most frustrating posts I've ever written. I hope some of it is coherent.
