Rose Norman
At a first glance, teaching metrical scansion seemed to me an old fashioned, perhaps even commonplace use for tudents are supposed to have learned that sort of material in high school, I mentally observed, and anyway, teaching scansion in literature classes is like teaching grammar in composition classes--tedious, if not downright perilous. All those reservations and more have been replaced with enthusiasm, pleasure, even excitement as I've experimented this year with John F. Plummer's as yet unpublished program POETICS (see Table 1 ).
I first saw POETICS in the fall of 1984 when Plummer, a Vanderbuilt mediaevalist, demonstrated it as a guest speaker for our university colloquium on Technologies and Texts. He had just presented a paper arguing that "A Computer is Not a Hammer," a thesis admirably demonstrated by POETICS, a program that serves
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TITLE: POETICS
AUTHOR: John F. Plummer
PUBLISHER OR MARKETING ORGANIZATION:
John F. Plummer
Department of English
Box 6177-B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
AVAILABILITY: September 1986
HARDWARE: IBM PC and true compatibles
OPERATING SYSTEM: MS DOS, PC DOS
MEMORY REQUIREMENT: 64 K
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: Pascal
PRICE: $45, including disk and documentation for authoring new quizzes and
poems.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION: "POETICS" offers tutorials, exercises, and an authoring
system for teaching prosody to college students.
Students can choose to work on either "Introductory
or "Advanced" levels. The "Introductory" level offers
tutorial lessons emphasizing very basic terminology,
as well as exercises in identifying kinds of metrical
feet and lines. These exercises may be altered or
supplemented by the teacher. The "Advanced" level
features poem and explications created through the
authoring system. The disk also comes with several
explications already created. These are listed by
poet in an opening menu. Students choose a poet,
then a poem by that poet, and then scan each line
of the poem. Teacher-entered help screens allow
explanation of irregular lines, and up to five
lines of explication per verse line, up to 14 verses.
Table 1: Summary of Data on POETICS
p. 101as a medium (not a tool) for introducing college students to the critical reading of poetry.
After that exalted introduction, my description of the program is likely to sound pretty pedestrian. Certainly the program is not decked out with the sorts of bells and whistles so attractive to textbook publishers. In its present incarnation, however, POETICS offers ample branching through menus, starting with an opening menu that offers two levels of instruction, "Introductory" and "Advanced." I'll describe these two levels, and then explain the authoring system, a feature that gives this program enormous flexibility and potential as a medium for teaching writing. Details of hardware requirements, cost, and associated information are given in Table 1.
When students choose the "Introductory" level, the program branches to a menu offering either "Tutorials"-or "Practice." In turn, the "Tutorial" branch offers a choice of three lessons: "Introduction to Prosody," a review of alliteration, and meter; "Terminology of Poetry," a review of names for kinds of metrical feet and lines, such as iambic pentameter; and "Examples of Metrical Lines," which illustrate metrical variants. These "Tutorial" screens take the place of a textbook or handout and are intended solely as a handy review. The three lessons move quickly through narrative
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explanations of the rudiments of prosody, assuming a college-level audience with some background in prosody.
For students who prefer to review by taking a quiz rather than reading a lecture on screen, the "Practice" branch of the "Introductory" level is more instructional. "Practice" screens use the following format:
1. display a line of poetry2. ask for the name of the foot
3. display the scansion of the line (/'s and x's above the line denote the stressed and unstressed syllables)
4. ask for the name of the line length.
Students get two tries for each question, and can call help screens for reminders. The help screens are displayed in a window below the displayed line and serve as a built-in tutorial. The help screen for naming the foot, for example, lists and defines the terms for metrical feet. The program requires students to type the name of the different feet and lines (not choose from a multiple-choice list), so they get practice in spelling the terms correctly as well as recognizing the application. The program counts the right and wrong answers, and displays the results at the end of the "Practice" lesson. Using the authoring system, teachers can create their own quizzes and can have more than one quiz on a disk.
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It's the "Advanced" level program that makes POETICS exciting because this level is linked to an authoring system that allows teachers of literature and writing to build their own, customized poetry lessons. When students select the "Advanced" level from the opening menu, they are branched to a menu listing poets. Selecting a poet branches students to a menu of poems by that poet, and individuals can select a poem. Once they've selected a poem, the tutorial begins.
What's exciting is that all of this--poems, quizzes, and the tutorial--can be easily created by teachers. The menu listing poets is keyed to a file called POETS.AVL. To add a poet, teachers just call that file with their word-processing program, add the poet's last name, then follow simple instructions on creating the tutorial. To add a poem by a poet already on the list, again teachers can just use a word-processing program to enter the appropriate file and type in the poem according to instructions. Before describing this authoring system in more detail, I'll review the outline for the individual poem tutorials. My test disk came with tutorials for seven poets already created, two of them provided by Plummer, the others by my own colleagues who have been testing the program in their English classes. Here's what happens after students choose a poet from the main menu, and a poem from the poet's individual menu:
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The student gets two tries to type in the rhyme scheme. After a right answer, or after the second try, the screen displays the rhyme scheme along the right side of the displayed poem.
The student gets two tries before the program names the meter.
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When the student is finished, the program displays any irregular
lines the student missed.
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The best thing about POETICS is the authoring system that lets teachers enter their own choice of poems or excerpts (up to 14 lines), scansions, and help screens--and even change the scansion or help screens of the poems already on the disk. Teachers can create a file using an ordinary word-processing or text editing package, making sure to end each line with a RETURN (word wrap botches the program). There's no on-screen prompting for this, simply some easy-to-follow written instructions. Figure 1 shows an annotated sample of a completed textfile.
First, the teacher enters some simple preliminary data, such as the title of the poem, its rhyme scheme and meter, and the page number in the class anthology. Then he or she types the poem line by line, following each line with the preferred scansion. After typing the poem and scansion, teachers start writing the "Help" section. Here, each line of comment must be numbered to correspond with the line in the poem, and teachers can write up to five lines of comment for each line of the poem, as shown in Figure l. The program can handle up to 14 lines of poetry, so you can write 70 lines (a line may be up to 78 spaces long). After typing all the help notes (as many or as few as needed), teachers can create two more sections, one identifying irregular lines and one noting alliterative words in the poem.
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1 Number of poems in this file
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" Poem titles (in order).
(1 Marker for first poem
iambic Name of foot.
tetrameter and trimeter Kind of line.
ABABABAB Rhyme scheme.
546 Page number in anthology
8 Number of lines in poem.
A slumber did my spirit seal; Line one of poem
x / x / x / x / Scansion of line 1.
I had no human fears:
x / x / x /
She seemed a thing that could not feel
x / x / x / x /
The touch of earthly years.
x / x / x /
No motion has she now, no force;
s / x / x / s /
She neither hears nor sees;
x / x / x /
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
s / x / x / x /
With rocks and stones and trees.
x / x / x /
1 The regular accent on "did" gives more emphasis than
1 there would be if the line were by itself.
1 In this case the past tense is important.
2 A regular line. Notice that the rhythm accents "HUman."
3 Metrically regular again. "Seemed" picks up
3 "s" alliteration of line 1; it is a key word
4 "Earthly" is in parallel position to "human" in line 2.
4 The earthly and human ordinarily contrast with what
4 (in religious terms)?
5 The repetition of "no" is very emphatic.
5 What other "o" sound occurs in the line?
5 The line because of the secondary accents and "o" sounds?
5 (This is called assonance. ) What happens to the speed of
6 Doesn't this line seem brutally abrupt? Compare it to line 2.
6 What couldn't she "feel" in the first stanza?
7 A strong first foot. "Rolled" picks up the "o"
7 assonance of line 5- and there is the "r" alliteration
7 (look at "diurnal" too).
8 There has been a lot of discussion about why
8 Wordsworth has to have both "rocks" and "stones."
8 What about "stones" purely from the consideration of sound?
9 No comment on this line
5 7 Irregular line numbers
NO MOTION has she now, NO FORCE; Irregular lines
ROLLED ROUND in earth's diurnal course,
0 Signifies no alliteration route
Figure 1: Sample Textfile for POETICS (Annotations in boldface)
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What makes this tutorial outstanding is the simplicity of its authoring system and the flexibility that the system gives the teacher. How well those features are used depends upon the teacher. Sample help screens demonstrate a variety of ways that teachers can use the program to teach poetry. Most obviously, teachers will use help screens to obtain or defend a particular scansion, as in this comment one of my colleagues wrote for line 5 of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:
x / x / x / x / x /
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
I suppose you might want to reverse the stress on "Sometime," to mark it as a trochee, but I suspect that in Shakespeare's English "sometime" was still thought of as a compound, the more important half of which was "time."
Similarly, help screens can explain metrical features and related poetic devices, as in this comment on line 5 of Shakespeare's Sonnet 12:
x / x / x / / x x /
When lofty trees I see BARREN of leaves
"Barren" is a TROCHAIC substitution. That is, it is a TROCHEE in an IAMBIC line. The substitution places quite a bit of emphasis on the word "barren" and stresses the destructive effects of the coming winter.
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Or the screen can ask a question, as in this comment on line 3 of Pope's "Beyond the Reach of Art":
Music resembles poetry . . .The first foot is a trochaic substitution. Why is this a logical variation, given the meaning of the couplet?
Often metrical variation gives the teacher an opportunity to explicate a line, as in this comment on line 8 of Shakespeare's Sonnet 12:
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard--"Borne on" opens the line with TROCHAIC inversion; the effect is to place stress on these opening words. Summer being "borne" suggests passivity, in contrast to the vigor of the earlier times the speaker remembers.
The most striking feature is a by-product of the optional sequence that highlights irregular lines and alliterative words. After students finish this sequence, key words and lines point out the theme.
To my knowledge, there's nothing like POETICS on the market now, though others may be under development. The only other poetry computer programs I know of are Stephen Marcus's
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COMPUPOEM (see English Journal, February 1982, pp. 96-99), which helps students write short poems, and IBM's ELECTRIC POET, which has an authoring system that can be used to teach scansion. The February 1986 issue of Byte has an article explaining how computer programs can scan metric verse ("Machine Reading of Metric Verse," pp. 224-225). Plummer's program, though, is neither a text analyzer, nor a composing aid. Rather it is a tutorial that encourages students to read poems line-by-line, and spot words emphasized by alliteration. In sum, it encourages students to read critically.
Whether critical reading of poetry translates into better writing about poetry is a question that must be answered by individual teachers. POETICS is neither connected to an electronic scratch pad for note-taking, nor geared to writing instructions per se. The "Advanced" level lessons require student interaction, but the program emphasizes response economy. The most text a student will type is the names of metrical feet and lines in the "Practice" branch. And students who simply want to read the screens, without testing their ability to scan, can advance quickly through the lessons by pressing the "Return" key and the letter "H" to display the help screens. In this way, I've raced through "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" in as little as 41-seconds--a procedure useful to software reviewers but likely to be abused by students.
For students who genuinely want and need to be walked slowly through a poem by an intelligent and articulate teacher, POETICS is invaluable. And when, after two or three productive strolls through two or three poems,
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students begin to internalize the process, they will leave the computer with a skill they can apply to any metrical poem they encounter.
Plummer is developing another program for use in first-year English. Called WARP (Writing and Revising Program), it includes a NotePad(Drafter), Editor, Outliner, Printer, and Utilities.