COUNTERPOINT in POETRY

There are two instances where Counterpoint, known in music as the result of two melodic lines proceeding, or diverging, simultaneously, so that one actually hears two differing lines at once, appears in Poetry.

I.  Counterpoint - Meter and Language:   In metrics the term has been used to refer to the notion that when we read a line we hear the actual line with our outer ear, while the 'mind's ear' plays back simultaneously the ideal metrical pattern to which the line is meant to conform; the recognition of the differences between the two patterns, it is claimed, makes for most of the pleasure or interest in reading metrical verse. C.S. Lewis once called this 'double audition'.

Some critics dispute the above analysis, complaining that only one line is ever actually heard (Wright), and even then in the mind not the ear; some critics have preferred to speak of metrical 'tension' between the actual line and the ideal pattern 'behind' or 'underneath' it, while others have preferred to speak of 'expectations' created in the mind on the basis of prior experience of metrical verse - expectations which, in the micro-environment of the line during the reading process, are minutely and rapidly fulfilled or thwarted, creating thereby a complex and subtle interplay of cognitive response.

The disagreement lies in the question of whether we recognize or are aware of the meter and the prose rhythm of the line. However, the musical sense of Gerald Manley Hopkins' (see below) "two or more strains of tune going on together," is what he called 'counterpoint rhythm'.  In music we would call this 'syncopation'. (Hollander; G.T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, 1988).

II.  Counterpoint Rhythm: or 'Syncopation', is a rhythmical effect achieved through metrical variation, through temporary departure from the dominant metrical base, so that two rhythmic patterns begin to be noticed simultaneously, the new one being heard against the ground rhythm of the meter. Thus, in these lines from Yeat's :Leda and the Swan: (x denotes weak syllables, / strong ones)

 x   /     x      /    xx       /     x      /        x    /
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

  x  x      /      /       x      /       /       x   x    /
by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

the dominant iambic is interrupted in the first line by a momentary metrical variation, a third-foot anapest - 'stagg'ring' would maintain the meter but lose the aptness of a metrical 'stagger' - and in the second by a pyrrhic substitution in the first foot, a spondaic substitution in the second and by a trochaic substitution in the fourth. The rhythmical figure established in the 4th through 7th syllables of line 1 and 7th through 10th of line 2 will, if repeated again close enough for the echo to be noticed, come to constitute 'counterpoint'. Note that counterpoint cannot occur except against the ground of a relatively regular meter, for it is the ground which makes variation possible at all.

But intermittent single-foot substitutions like these are not sufficient to create 'counterpoint rhythm' as described by Gerald Manley Hopkins. If an alternative rhythm is to be superimposed on, or heard against, a given metrical base, then (1) it should normally occupy at least two consecutive feet (and particularly, perhaps, what Hopkins calls the 'sensitive' second foot), and (2) it should constitute a reversal of the dominant meter, (e.g. trochaic rhythm mounted on iambic, or dactylic on anapestic). Criterion (2) is a necessary qualification both because pyrrhic and spondaic feet can only be substituted feet, not substitute rhythms, and because any counterpointing of, say, a rising rhythm (iambic) by another rising rhythm (anapestic) will produce not counterpoint rhythm, but what Hopkins calls 'logaoedic' or mixed rhythm. Counterpoint rhythm occurs in the first two feet of this line from Hopkins' God's Grandeur

   / x  /  x       x      /       x       /       x       /
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.

Hopkins claims that if the poet counterpoints throughout, so that only counterpoint rhythm comes to be heard, then the line will be 'sprung' into a new mode, 'sprung rhythm'.

The following is an example of 'sprung rhythm' in Hopkins' poetry:

The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
   dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.