versification

n.

[L. versificatio: cf. F. versification.]
The act, art, or practice, of versifying, or making verses; the construction of poetry; metrical composition.

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versification, the techniques, principles, and practice of composing verse, especially in its technical aspects of metre, rhyme, and stanza form; or the conversion of a prose passage or work into metrical verse form.

Verb: versify.

See also prosody.

1. Rhythm and Metre

In the standard view, the metrical foundation of regular French verse is syllabic, which is also to say isosyllabic: its lines are composed of a fixed and equal number of syllables. Although the principle of isosyllabism may imply that that syllables are quantitatively equal (isochronous), this is clearly not so, as experimental phonetics has demonstrated.

The ascendancy of the syllable as the unit of metric definition in French is a result of the gradual erosion of accent (stress): originally French accent was either oxytonic (falling on the last syllable of the word) or paroxytonic (falling on the penultimate syllable of the word, if the final syllable was an articulated e mute, or e atone). But as it weakened, accentuation shifted from word to word-group (syntactic segment), where, correspondingly, it fell on the final syllable of the group (if no e atone was involved).

French verse's system of accentuation, then, depends on the arrangement of word-groups within the line, which is itself constituted by a given number of syllables. The metrical rules for French verse are in fact minimal: the final syllable in the line must be accentuated, as must the final syllable of any unit (half-line) created by a caesura (see below); other accentuation is optional. Thus, the alexandrine (12-syllable line), which has a fixed medial caesura, must have accents on its sixth and twelfth syllables. It usually has two further accents, one in each halfline (hemistich), but neither the occurrence nor the position of these ‘secondary’ accents is prescribed. The standard alexandrine might be presented thus:

The octosyllable, on the other hand, which has no caesura—a caesura occurs only in lines of nine syllables or more—has just one obligatory accent, on the eighth syllable; but it usually has one other accent (sometimes two), which, again, may occur on any other syllable (s) in the line; thus:


The rhythm of a French line is usually described in terms of the syllabic groups created by the accents:

J'étais séul | près des flóts ‖ par une núit | d'étóiles.

(3 + 3 + 4 + 2)

Pas un nuáge ‖ aux ciéux, ‖ sur les mérs ‖ pas de vóiles

(4 + 2 + 3 + 3)

(Hugo, ‘Extase’)

or

Allons, Julíe, il faut t'atténdre

(4 + 4)

A me vóir quelque jóur en céndre.

(3 + 3 + 2)

(Musset, ‘A Julie’)

An important distinguishing feature of regular French verse has been the retention of the articulated e atone, long after its disappearance in the spoken language. In regular verse, an e atone within the line is counted as a syllable, and pronounced, when it is followed by a consonant or aspirate h (as in ‘une’ and ‘quelque’ above); it is elided before a vowel or mute h (as in ‘nuage’ and ‘Julie’ above). At the end of the line, it is treated as extra-metrical (not counted) and serves to define the rhyme as feminine (see below). When an articulated e atone occurs immediately after an accentuated vowel, as in Baudelaire's lines:

Je t'adóre à l'égál ‖ de la vóûte noctúrne,

(3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3)

Ô váse de tristésse, ‖ ô gránde tacitúrne,

(2 + 4 + 2 + 4)

the consequences are twofold. First, the e atone is normally counted as part of the measure following that in which the accentuated syllable occurs—e.g. ‘de la voû: ‖ te nocturne’—creating a coupe enjambante (a word, ‘voûte’, straddles the coupe, or barline, of the measure): in other words, rhythmic measures are the syllabic spans between one accent and the next. Secondly, the e atone lengthens the accentuated vowel preceding it, and thus not only has a liaisory function between words, but also injects tonality or emotion (compassion, regret, irony, admiration) into the accentuated vowel. But there are occasions when, for syntactic or expressive reasons, the articulated e cannot be carried forward into the following measure. In Racine's line, for example:

Mais párle: de son sórt ‖ qui t'a rendú l'arbítre?

(Andromaque, v. iii)

if we read ‘Mais par: ‖ le de son sort’, we change the syntax of the line. We must instead read ‘Mais parle: ‖ de son sort’, and notate the rhythm as 3' + 3 + 4 + 2, where the apostrophe on the first ‘3’ indicates that the measure, unusually, ends with an e atone, called a coupe lyrique. In other instances, the coupe lyrique, because of its tendency to rupture the line, might be called upon to reinforce expressive effects. In Leconte de Lisle's line from ‘Midi’:

Tout se tait. L'air flamboie ‖ et brûle sans haleine a 3 + 3 + 3' + 3 reading might be preferred to a 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 one, simply to emphasize the literally breathtaking torridity, and to introduce the stillness which ‘sans haleine’ then confirms. Alternatively, one might feel that 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 does better justice to the sense of suffocating envelopment.

2. The Caesura

The nature of the caesura remains problematic. It is not a pause (interruption) properly speaking, though it may be accompanied by one; it is rather a point of linguistic and structural (semantic) insistence; it is best seen as a feature of the sixth syllable rather than as an event which takes place after the sixth syllable. In addition, the caesura is a syllabic checkpoint. If, as Cornulier's findings indicate (1982), the ear is incapable of reliable syllabic perception beyond a limit of eight syllables, then the caesura is a necessary safeguard of the line's syllabic presence and integrity.

The fixity of the caesura in the alexandrine came, in the 19th c., to represent all that was fossilized and mechanical in French verse. If, ironically, the decasyllable, whose caesura is not metrically fixed, saw its standard 4 ‖ 6 and 6 ‖ 4 divisions shift to a symmetrical 5 ‖ 5 in 19th-c. practice, the medical position of the alexandrine's caesura was felt to yoke the line to a rhetoric dominated not by organic variability but by repetitive binary relationships of antithesis, apposition, and equation. In order to oust declamation in favour of the speaking voice, the Romantics sought to displace the caesura in two ways: first, by varying its location in the line, in the alexandrin brisé, and thus registering the fluctuations of dramatic speech; secondly, by effacing the caesura, in the alexandrin trimètre, where demands of syntactical cohesion override the demands of metrical separation and replace binary structure with a ternary one. Thus, a standard scansion of:

Il paraît donc assez simple et facile à croire

(Musset, ‘Mardoche’)

would interpose the caesura between an adverb (‘assez’) and the adjective (‘simple’) it governs. It would make better sense of the line's syntax to erase the caesura and read ‘Il paraît donc ‖ assez simple ‖ et facile à croire’ (4 + 3 + 5). But these ‘innovations’ need to be treated with circumspection.

The alexandrin brisé, as described by Ténint in 1844, is often only an alexandrine in which the natural hierarchy of accentual intensity has been changed, so that a secondary accent becomes primary, e.g.

Plus d'unité. Les nœuds des États des défont.

(4 ‖ 2 + 3 + 3)

(Hugo, Les Burgraves, 2nd part, i)

But to read this line with a 4 ‖ 8 division is to give undue weight to the major syntactic break and to define the caesura as a pause rather than as a metrico-structural articulation. The line reads perfectly well as 4 + 2 ‖ 3 + 3, which has the added advantage, precisely, of undoing ‘les nœuds ‖ des Etats’.

Similarly, the trimètre often has more expressivity if read as a regular alexandrine with enjambement at the caesura rather than as a trimètre: e.g.

Cet homme fait le bon mauvais, le mauvais pire

(Hugo, Marion de Lorme, IV. vi)

works better perhaps as 2 + 4 ‖ 2 + 4 than as 4 + 4

+ 4, and

Ne plus penser, ne plus aimer, ne plus haïr

(Gautier, ‘Thébaïde’)

better as 4 + 2 ‖ 2 + 4 than as 4 + 4 + 4. But there is no doubt that the alexandrine was becoming more fluid, more rhythmically ambiguous, and that it developed in the 19th c. towards the condition described by Mallarmé: ‘Les fidèles àl'alexandrin, notre hexamètre, desserrent intérieurement ce mécanisme rigide et puéril de sa mesure’ (‘Crise de vers’).

3. Rhyme

It is often argued that rhyme was treated as indispensable to French verse, until the end of the 19th c., because it had a metrical or near-metrical function: the structural recurrence of rhyme is exploited to mark the end of the syllabic string; and the acoustic foregrounding that accompanies rhyme intensifies the line-terminal accent, reinforcing both the boundary and the intonational shape of the line. Some commentators are less convinced of rhyme's line-demarcative function than they are of its stanzaic function. Rhyme-schemes are rhythms of repeated sound, patterns of interval, sometimes complicated by syllabic variations in the line (heterosyllabic stanzas); the basic ‘rhythms’ are: enclosed rhyme, or rimes embrassées (abba); alternating rhyme, or rimes croisées (abab); and couplets, or rimes plates (aabbcc). Rhyme-schemes are also patterns of intonation; the last two lines of a stanza in rimes croisées, for example, tend to repeat the intonational configuration of the first two at a slightly lower pitch, while a stanza in rimes embrassées produces an intonational suspension in its third line, which the fourth resolves with a more definitive cadence.

The metrical importance of rhyme in French is complemented by its expressive flexibility: in contrast to English rhyme, French rhyme distinguishes between different degrees of rhyme (pauvre, suffisante, riche), and between masculine and feminine rhymes, and their attendant ‘tonalities’. In recent verse-analysis a classification of degrees of rhyme according to the number of phonemes involved, regardless of whether they precede or succeed the tonic vowel—thus, rime pauvre (one phoneme, the tonic vowel: beauté ‖ aimé), rime suffisante (two phonemes: père ‖ frère), rime riche (three or more phonemes: rêve ‖ grève), rime léonine (two or more syllables: majestueuse ‖ fastueuse)—has superseded the earlier distinction between rhymes that include the consonant preceding the tonic vowel (consonne d'appui) and those that do not; in the older system, a shared consonne d'appui was the mark of a rime riche. Rich rhyme was much canvassed by the Romantics, since it invests rhyme-words with more resonance, colour, and dramatic presence, guarantees the depth and authenticity of thought and feeling, and safeguards the rigour of the poetic vocation. Generally, however, poets tend to mix degrees of rhyme, both out of necessity and to vary rhyme's intrusiveness.

The rule that masculine and feminine rhymepairs should alternate became generalized in the latter half of the 16th c. and acquired sufficient obligatoriness to warrant its being treated as a metrical feature. Even though the e atone, which identifies feminine rhymes, has disappeared from pronunciation, commentators have been in the habit of distinguishing between the different expressive ranges of the masculine and the feminine: the masculine rhyme is abrupt, hard, dry; the feminine yielding, soft, evanescent. Even if one deplores this sexual (sexist) mythology, the fact remains that masculine syllables have a tendency to be open (consonant-vowel) and feminine ones to be closed (vowel-consonant), ending with a protractable consonant.

4. Vers libéré and vers libre

The erosion of the loi de l'alternance des rimes began in the 1860s, with the emergence of that looser form of regular verse known as vers libéré. Poets, among them Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Corbière, and Laforgue, exploited with more frequency those devices which undermine the equilibrium and integrity of the classical verse-line: enjambement, the trimètre, the coupe lyrique, assonance in place of rhyme, and the vers impair, the line with an odd (as opposed to even) number of syllables, which sounds dangerously like a vers faux, a miscount, and thus helps to sap syllabic confidence. As a result, rhythms lost their firm contours and, consequently, their aptitude for controlled, oratorical utterance. Instead, they acquired a certain indeterminacy, an unpredictability, which favoured the intimate, the prosaic, the impromptu, the fantaisiste.

The final prosodic constraints, syllabism and rhyme (or assonance), were removed with the appearance of free verse (le vers libre) in 1886, in the pages of Gustave Kahn's journal La Vogue (work by Rimbaud, Laforgue, Kahn himself, Paul Adam, and Jean Moréas). The undoing of the syllabic system was facilitated by the increasingly ambiguous status of the e atone—should it be counted or not when unelided?—and by doubts about the syllabic value of contiguous vowels. Paradoxically, however, syllabic ambiguity produces rhythmic multiplicity; a single line of free verse is potentially several lines, each with its own inherited or invented associations. Furthermore, the dissolution of syllabism was accompanied by a corresponding renewal of interest in accent. Many analysts believed that the demands of accentual recurrence determined the relative length of measures and lineation, that rhythm was created by the distribution of accents rather than by numbers of syllables.

At the same time, accent was more flexibly perceived: aside from the accent tonique, the worldgroup accent which turns syntactic segments into rhythmic measures, theorists drew attention to subaccents within the measure, and to accents which transcended the measure, the accents of speech act and sustaining tone. Rhythm was now intimately linked with accentual activity of an intense and varied kind, varied in both source and degree. Rhyme, too, contributed to this sensitization of verse texture: it ceased to be the servant of rhetoric and became the instrument of purely associative mechanisms; by varying the interval between rhymes, by introducing rhymelessness and repetition alongside rhyme, by increasing line-internal echoes, the poet was able to multiply the levels of consciousness at which the poem operated. By allowing the uncontrolled and the improvised to inhabit verse, the verslibristes opened poetry to stream of consciousness. [See also Prose Poem.]

[Clive Scott]

Bibliography

• J. Mazaleyrat, Eléments de métrique française (1974)
• C. Scott, French Verse-Art: A Study (1980)
• B. de Cornulier, Théorie du vers (1982)

The art of writing verses, especially with regard to meter and rhythm. The term versification can also refer to a particular metrical structure or style or to a version in verse of something originally written in prose.