Accent, Rhythm and Meaning in French Verse by Roger Pensom (review)

One might be forgiven for not realizing that there rages an ideological battle within the seemingly placid study of poetic form, but Roger Pensom argues here that that controversy is far from settled (p. 157). His response is polemical, claiming that the disjuncture between metre and meaning in poetic analysis of French verse can be repaired through closer attention to ‘accent-patterning’, or ‘accentual prosody’. He sets out his case in a concise but densely written Introduction, then illustrates it historically and linguistically in a long first chapter, before putting it to the test in a series of explications de texte. While this is all quite technical and a bit recondite, even for professionals, the case is made clearly, if a bit obsessively; he is able to lighten the tone on occasion with modesty and humour. He begins by looking to late antique Latin verse in order to argue that French verse is not really the great exception to Romance language theory that it is often claimed to be. French verse arises out of Latin, already inflected by Germanic speech habits, and has retained to the present day some elements of metre and rhythm inherited from those early models. The accent-patterning we find in the hymns of Ambrose or the Chanson de Roland is still with us, despite the claims to the contrary of strict syllable-count advocates. Pensom is admirably frank about exceptions to his model — Machaut, for one — and he argues that composers have usually been more sensitive to alternating accent than readers (including most critics). His choice of such poets as Thibaut de Champagne, Machaut, Du Bellay, Ronsard, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Apollinaire, and others, is catholic, if predictable; and his method involves first scanning the text as a linguistic document, without seeking out meaning, then moving to melodic settings or spoken renditions to gauge the interrelation between accentual prosody and semantics, arguing throughout that accent contributes to, even determines, metre. Questions arise, of course, and mostly unanswerable ones: How was verse declaimed in the era before recording and mightn’t that provide a key? Why the big change between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Machaut to Lully, and mustn’t that also have something to do with undetectable speech patterns, or musical tastes? Does it take a non-native speaker to detect this accentual alternance in French verse? In the final footnote to the Conclusion, Pensom provides an algorithm which he says is ‘mechanical: anyone can do it’ (p. 158). I am not so sure about that, but it does indeed allow us to put the analysis of prosody back on the table and, following through on his somewhat radical challenge to strict syllabic count alone, to bring musicality back into the equation. For that I am grateful, both to Roger Pensom, who sadly died before the final manuscript had been submitted, and to Adrian Armstrong for having taken it up and completed it with such care.