By request, the essay.

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On “Mnemonic”
Chris Anthony, Poetry (ENG 0308)

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable
Iambics march from short to long;
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Mnemonic” (254)

Samuel Coleridge Taylor's Mnemonic (or Metrical Feet) is interesting, and unusual among poems, in that it openly addresses both its purpose and its form. The poem is a memory device, ostensibly written to assist writers and readers of poetry in remembering five of the metrical feet which poets use most often: trochee, spondee, dactyl, iamb (or "iambic"), and anapest. The poem is both rhymed and metered, and contains a number of stylistic methods of ensuring that the brief work will stick in the minds of its readers.

Each line of the poem is set in the meter which it describes, and each is four feet long, leaving six lines of variable pentameter. (The first line, however, has a silent final beat.) The exception to this is the the third line, which compares Spondee and Dactyl; the line, "Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able", is broken halfway by the semicolon into spondee at the beginning and dactyl at the end: "strong foot! yet ill able". The quirk in metrical symmetry not only illustrates the essential playfulness with which Coleridge wrote the poem, but recalls other works by the author - in particular the masterpiece Kubla Khan, which seems change metrical patterns almost at the drop of a hat, and occasionally, as in Mnemonic, in the middle of a line.

Coleridge also uses meter in counterpoint with word choice to create memorable disconnects. The primary examples of this occur in the third and fourth lines. In the phrase “strong foot!”, the second word is visually accented, such that it looks as though the phrase should be a spondee like the first half of the sentence; however, to preserve the metrical structure of the line, “foot!” must be a short syllable in the dactyl “strong foot! yea”. By contrast, the fourth line contains a disconnect between meter and connotation - a mental counterpoint, rather than a visual one: the dactyl “come up with” places the word “up” - a syllable which looks like it ought to be long, as opposed to the “down” short syllables - on a short beat. Similarly, each instance of the word “short” in the poem is, in fact, a long syllable.

The third and fourth lines are also where Coleridge's rhyming scheme breaks down. Of the six lines in the poem, four rhyme perfectly with their neighbors, such that the first line rhymes with the second ("short" and "sort") and the fifth with the sixth ("long" and "throng"). In addition, both rhymes share a vowel - "o" - if not the exact sound of the vowel. By contrast, the rhyming of "able" and "trisyllable" rings false, even though the syllables in question are orthographically identical, both because of the differing sounds which the letter "a" makes in each word and because Coleridge has substituted a different vowel, breaking the pattern established by the first and third couplets.

Coleridge uses several poetic devices in Mnemonic aside from meter and rhyme, chief among them personification and consonance. His personification is as theriomorphic - comparing objects to animals - as it is anthropomorphic in its ascription of the qualities of living beings to the inanimate metrical feet. “Trondee trips”, as a child skipping down the sidewalk, and the regimented, military Iambics “march”: both very human activities. But “Slow Spondee stalks”, like a great, stomping beast - an elephant, perhaps, or a giraffe - and “swift Anapests throng”, conjuring images of herds of antelope leaping in tandem across the savannah.

Among the metrical feet listed in Mnemonic, it is - again - only Dactyl that is left out of the personification. Dactyl is described only in terms of its actual form - its “trisyllable” - and has no animal or human characteristic assigned to it. This is, perhaps, due to its name; of the mentioned metrical feet, only Dactyl is named after a part of the human body. “Dactyl” is the Attic Greek word for the finger, and its trisyllable reflects the three joints of the human digit.

Coleridge’s use of consonance throughout the poem often takes the form of alliteration: “Trochee trips”, “Slow Spondee stalks”, and the like. Indeed, the second line, “From long to long in solemn sort”, is not only virtually all alliteration, but also continues a pattern from the previous line. He does not limit himself to merely pairing initial consonants, however; the “t” in “Dactyl”, for example, matches the initial “t” in “trisyllable”, and similarly the “m” of “Iambics” is paired with the beginning of “march”. The only line of Mnemonic in which the consonance is questionable is the last: “With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng”. While it is possible to pair “Anapests”’s “t” with that of “throng”, it is difficult, and does not as immediately present itself as the other consonances throughout the poem. (However, “With” and “swift” are a tidy example of mid-line rhyming, even if the consonance between them is interrupted.)

These literary devices all aid the reader in remembering the poem, but the disjunctions in each device are perhaps as instrumental in memorization. By interrupting the flow of the devices, Coleridge makes the interruptions memorable, which in turn aids in remembering what the disjunctions are interrupting, and overall makes the poem more memorable - and more useful to novice poets.

(Probably unnecessary, but: © 2005 C. Anthony.)