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Pease porridge hot pease porridge cold

Pease porridge in the pot- nine days old.

Now those of my readers who have never heard this poem pronounced according to the nursery conventionality, will find its rhythm as obscure as an explanatory note; while those who have heard it will divide it thus, declare it musical, and wonder how there can be any doubt about it. ,p>

Pease / porridge / hot / pease / porridge / cold /

Pease / porridge / in the / pot / nine / days / old. /

The chief thing in the way of this species of rhythm, is the necessity which it imposes upon the poet of travelling in constant company with his compositions, so as to be ready at a moment's notice, to avail himself of a well-understood poetical license- that of reading aloud one's own doggerel.

In Mr. Cranch's line,

Many are the / thoughts that / come to / me,

the general error of which I speak is, of course, very partially exemplified, and the purpose for which, chiefly, I cite it, lies yet further on in our topic. ,p> The two divisions (thoughts that) and (come to) are ordinary trochees. The first division (many are the) would be thus accented by the Greek Prosodies (many are the), and would be called by them astrologos. The Latin books would style the foot Paeon Primus, and both Greek and Latin would swear that it was compoded of a trochee and what they term a pyrrhic- that is to say, a foot of two short syllables- a thing that cannot be, as I shall presently show.

But now, there is an obvious difficulty. The astrologos, according to the Prosodies' own showing, is equal to five short syllables, and the trochee to three- yet, in the line quoted, these two feet are equal. They occupy, precisely, the same time. In fact, the whole music of the line depends upon their being made to occupy the same time. The Prosodies then, have demonstrated what all mathematicians have stupidly failed in demonstrating- that three and five are one and the same thing. After what I have already said, however, about the bastard trochee and the bastard iambus, no one can have any trouble in understanding that many are the is of similar character. It is merely a bolder variation than usual from the routine of trochees, and introduces to the bastard trochee one additional syllable. But this syllable is not short. That is, it is not short in the sense of "short" as applied to the final syllable of the ordinary trochee, where the word means merely the half of long.

In this case (that of the additional syllable) "short," if used at all, must be used in the sense of the sixth of long. And all the three final syllables can be called short only with the same understanding of the term. The three together are equal only to the one short syllable (whose place they supply) of the ordinary trochee. It follows that there is no sense in accenting these syllables with [a crescent placed with the curve to the bottom]. We must devise for them some new character which shall denote the sixth of long. Let it be the crescent placed with the curve to the left. The whole foot (many are the) might be called a quick trochee.

We now come to the final division (me) of Mr. Cranch's line. It is clear that this foot, short as it appears, is fully equal in time to each of the preceding. It is, in fact, the caesura- the foot which, in the beginning of this paper, I called the most important in all verse. Its chief office is that of pause or termination; and here- at the end of a line- its use is easy, because there is no danger of misapprehending its value. We pause on it, by a seeming necessity, just so long as it has taken us to pronounce the preceding feet, whether iambuses, trochees, dactyls, or anapaests. It is thus a variable foot, and, with some care, may be well introduced into the body of a line, as in a little poem of great beauty by Mrs. Welby:

I have / a lit / tle step / son / of on / ly three / years old. /

Here we dwell on the caesura, son just as long as it requires us to pronounce either of the preceding or succeeding iambuses. Its