Ukrainian stress

[William Ryan]

Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
... I have never doubted that bad poetry could be written. ;-) ...
---------------------------------------

I protest. W. S. Gilbert did not write bad poetry, he wrote good verse. 
Ingenious, satirical, parodic and very memorable verse, and any verse 
which is memorable must have something going for it. Most of the songs 
in Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas are memorable, and the librettos 
often superior, as verse, to the regrettable librettos in some serious 
opera. As an example of their memorable quality let me disclose that 
after the convivial reception at the AAASS meeting in Washington a year 
or two back Hugh Olmsted and I sang with appropriate gestures an ad hoc 
medley of G&S songs - from memory, of course, although his was better 
than mine - in the vestibule of the Omni Shoreham Hotel to a very small 
but mostly admiring audience. We were not thrown out.

I wonder if there is a Russian libretto for 'Iolanthe' (there is, I 
believe, for 'The Mikado') - and if so how the false stresses were dealt 
with.

The technicalities of matching words to music are, it seems to me, the 
same whether the words are sublime poetry or the most contorted 
translated libretto. There may indeed be a problem of matching poetry 
and music - Gounod's Faust is thought regrettable by some - but the 
problem which gave rise to this thread is not about music and poetry, an 
aesthetic matter, so much as music and verse, and the relationship of 
verse and the norms of a spoken language, a more technical matter. As 
Charles Kingsley is supposed to have said to a woman asking his opinion 
on her poems, ‘Madam, there is poetry and there is verse; and verse is 
divided into two kinds - good verse and bad verse. What you have here 
shown me is not poetry; it is verse. It is not good verse; it is bad 
verse.’ And Kingsley was an expert - he wrote a lot of it.

Will Ryan


> Daniel Rancour-Laferriere wrote:
>
>> Dear Paul,
>> Here is what Will Ryan wrote:
>>
>>> In English, consider the song of the Lord Chancellor in his  
>>> unfortunate encounter with the Fairy Queen in Gilbert and 
>>> Sullivan's  Iolanthe:
>>>
>>> A plague on this vagary,
>>> I'm in a nice quandary!
>>> Of hasty tone
>>> With dames unknown
>>> I ought to be more chary;
>>> It seems that she's a fairy
>>> From Andersen's library,
>>> And I took her for
>>> The proprietor
>>> Of a Ladies' Seminary!
>>>
>>> Six out of  ten words at the end of the lines can only be sung with  
>>> non-standard stress. It is true that Gilbert was looking for comic  
>>> effect, also true that he enjoyed mocking serious opera.
>
> I have never doubted that bad poetry could be written. ;-)
> And an attempt at humor is a strong incentive.

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