Rambling

After class today I took another look at John Clare's "Reccolections after a Ramble" to look at the meter and variations in the meter. I know several people in class, including myself, commented on the consistent rhythm. Taking a more in depth look even just at pages 52-53, the first 8 stanzas, I realized the rhythm changed a lot more than I thought when I first read the poem. What is consistent throughout the poem is definitely the stressed syllable next to the unstressed syllable; there are few cases of spondees, two stressed syllables, or two unstressed syllables next to each other. However, iambic tetrameter changes to trochees with 7 syllable lines quite a bit. The first stanza is entirely iambic tetrameter, unless you want to consider the fourth line to contain a deviation: "And trembling dropped in the corn." If you pronounce dropped as drop-ed, it works with iambic tetrameter. If you pronounce it normally then the foot with "in the" becomes a trochee and the line ends on the stressed syllable of corn. The 2nd and 3rd stanzas are entirely not iambic tetrameter. They are composed of lines with three feet of trochees and one stressed syllable at the end of the line (7 syllables). Only at the last line of the 3rd stanza, "And shakd their heads at ills to come" goes back to iambic tetrameter, which makes the line stick out as iambic tetrameter. The fourth stanza starts with "While cows restless from the ground," where the first foot is an iamb, the second foot is a trochee, the third foot is a trochee, and there is one syllable hanging off the line. The stanza continues with lines of three feet of trochees and a syllable hanging off. I won't go through the whole poem like this because that would be pretty painstaking, but I think Clare, by changing his meter so frequently through the poem while also having a relatively steady rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables, shows his rambling and his lack of caring for conventional methods of writing poetry. His rambling comes out how he wants it to, not based off the conventions of a particular clear-cut form. This can be seen particularly in a stanza like the 8th stanza, where his meter changes several times within the stanza. The first three lines have the trochee feet with the syllable hanging off, the 4th line is iambic pentameter, the 5th line has the trochees, and the last 3 lines are iambic pentameter. Still, the most notable changes in rhythm for the reader, who probably does not notice as easily the 7 syllable lines versus the 8 syllable lines and whether or not the line starts with a trochee or an iamb, are the changes of meter within the line like the line mentioned above, "While cows restless from the ground." The reader hears the change of rhythm, and "restless" becomes a noteworthy word immediately.