I've made no secret of it that—unlike Timothy's attitude toward scansion as being a more or less naive practice most evident in undergraduates' disfigurement of re-salable Norton Anthologies, or yours, Kasey,—I treat scansion like something of a Golden Key to modern poetry, and I like scanning to the point of "obsessivism." I consider it a vastly underutilized tool, especially in regards to the criticism/interpretation of free verse.

Why exactly that is, why find such depth in what others find so shallow, isn't fully clear to me (at the moment, as the hour gets later here on the Eastern Seaboard). For one, I think, I like that it reduces a text to a pure trace, to just a faint shadow of itself, to an after-impression with not only no "meaning" but not even any words remaining. It seems like the ultimate in anti-positivism, a translation of the poem down into its inherent negativity, into some kind of fundamental absence. Other criticism, by comparison, all still seems caught up in the placebo of "content." For another, I guess I like that it (semi-)objectivizes the poem, so that discussion could get beyond all the aesthetic illusion of, as you put it, Kasey, blue jay tails pestled to grey. Perhaps I fantasize that, in how almost instantly it all becomes unintelligible (since nobody ever seriously pursues these things in the first place and it all relies on antiquarian bric-a-brac), scansion analysis is genuinely "paragrammatic," too, in the sense that Craig Dworkin quotes Leon Roudiez: "'any reading strategy that challenges the normative referential grammar of a text by forming 'networks of signification not accessible through conventional reading habits'" (Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, p. 12 [2003: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL]).

 

—With apologies for not expounding upon it more fully (nor at all?)—for example, Jonathan Mayhew in a previous blog entry discussed the "meter" of William Carlos Williams' poem, "The Botticellian Trees" (actually, Jonathan invoked it and a Creeley poem to assert that enjambed free verse line-breaks are "spurious"). So, I sent him my scansion-cum-codification of what Williams is doing metrically in that poem. Please take a moment to look at it; it might take you post-poem:

 

_ / _ / _                  A
_ /                           i

_ / _ \ _                  A
/ _ _ /                     B

_ / _                       C
/ _ _ /                     B

/ _ _ /                     B
/ _                           t

_ _ /                       a
_ \ _ / _                  A

_
/ _ /                        D

_ _ / _ /                  ai
_ / / _

/ _ _ _
/ / _

_ / _ / _ /                E
_ / \                       (C)

/ _ / _ _ /                 *
_ / _                       C

_ / _ /                     F
. . . . . .

_ / _ /                     F
/ _ _                       d

/ _ _ / _                 dt
/ \ _ /                     (B)

_ / _ / _ _
/ _ _ /                     B

/ _ / _ _                  td
_ / _                       C

_ / _ _ /                  ia
/ _ /                        D

_ / _ / _ /                E

With this poem, I avoided my somewhat distracting and disputed prior tendency to parse scansions into the terminology of classical meter and feet.—That is, I do not, above, further confuse the issue by calling what's here marked "B" ( / _ _ / ) a choriamb, nor "C" an amphibrach. The result of the scansion that emerges, rather, I think, is that Williams, like many others, was here working with a distinct, elucidatable and distinct underlying metrical design,—which little but scansion can bring into visibility and open to discussion.

A, B, C, etc., simply label each type of line that recurs.

From the unsent remainder of my letter to Jonathan (the full text of the poem appears at the bottom of this comment):

 

'The first problem that both Williams and Creeley were working against, with those particular (pre-lineated) rhythms, was that, to a large degree, they start off rather uninventively and conventionally. You remembered the Williams "wrong" tellingly: the base rhythm is little more than alternating iambs and anapests, for the first six lines:

_ / _ / _ _ / _ / _ \ _ / _ _ / _ / _ / _ _ /.

(Indeed, the whole poem might be reduced to nothing except basic, trivial iamb-anapest variation, since even thereafter, there are extended stretches of it ["and the cold / have been illumined // with / pointed green // by the rain and sun--- / The strict . . .", ". . . of color, devout / conditions // the smiles of love", "and praise from secrecy / quick with desire", ". . . itself // above the muffled words---", etc.)---

were it not for

(1) the strange _ _ _ rarities of "-ciples of" and "-dancy / in", and

(2) the nine (or seven) spondaic exceptions: "thin / let-", "spelled / win-", "strict sim-", "straight bran-", "pinched-out / ifs" (which is metrically ambiguous but, if the secondary stress of "-out" is read as a full stress alongside the others, the single occurrence of a molossus [ / / / ]), "stript / sen-", "limbs un-" (also metrically ambiguous), "-sire / love's", and "song / sings". (SINGSONG?)

Of these spondaic exceptions to the general iamb-anapest rule, it might also be noted (—as either evidence of how Williams in this poem approaches spondaicizing in a rather uniform and metrically redundant? way, or as evidence of a strongly reiterated / / _ [palimbacchius] sub-rhythm—) that five of the spondees above all follow into the same / / _ construction: a stressed one-syllable word followed by a trochee-word.

It might equally be remarked, though, if part of the original interest here is "line-breaks" and how Williams approaches them, that six (or five) of those spondaic exceptions are all spliced right in the middle by line-breaks ("thin / let-", "spelled / win-"," "stript / sen-", "-sire / love's", and "song / sings" (similarly for the full-accented reading of "-out / ifs").

. . .

How you cited it ("The alphabet of the trees // is fading in the song of the leaves") is well on its way to the sort of loose three-stress conventionality that a New Formalist would revise it into, since they say anapests can be validly subtituted for iambs:

The alphabet of the trees
Is fading in the song
Of the leaves the crossing bars . . .

etc. There's even a "hidden" iambic pentameter:

By being modified by pinched-out ifs

William's "design", against the grain of that, runs:

A-   AB   CB   B-   -A   -D   --   --   E(C)   -C   F.   F-   -(B)   -B   -C   -D    E ,

which doesn't seem too accidental to me at all:

some of the shortest 4-syl. or 3-syl. types, so short that they're the ones one would be most dubious about, B (/ _ _ /) and C (_ / _), are so strongly re-emphasized that they recur 5 (or 4) and 4 (or 3) times, respectively;

one of the only two points where the same line-meter is run back-to-back (B // B is the other example), the iambic "F"-line, which leads into the ". . . . . ." ellipsis at the heart of the poem, picks up right where it left off after that exceptional hiatus, with another "F"-line—where it's most needed, to contradict the gap of the ellipsis and show that there's still continuity;

notice:

in three out of four instancees, a "C"-line closes a couplet (is the second line of a couplet);

four out of five times, a "B" closes a couplet;

"D" is used only in a second-line position in couplets . .  .'

-----------------------------------------------------------

THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
have been illumined

with
pointed green

by the rain and sun---
The strict simple

principles of
straight branches

are being modified
by pinched-out

ifs of color, devout
conditions

the smiles of love---
. . . . . .

until the stript
sentences

move as a woman's
limbs under cloth

and praise from secrecy
quick with desire

love's ascendancy
in summer---

In summer the song
sings itself

above the muffled words---