Rhythm in English Poetry

Abstract

The poem, which goes on to tell of the horrible fate of parents who don't pay sufficient heed to their children's warnings, comes from the collection by A. A. Milne entitled When We Were Very Young, first published in 1924 and reprinted at regular intervals ever since. (My two-year old copy is the 85th reprint.) I suspect that the reasons why this poem has been a favorite of mine and of many other listeners and readers extend further than its revolutionary sentiments and the wonderfully impossible name of its young hero. The word that most of us would use to characterize its special quality would probably be rhythm. Thousands, perhaps millions, of parents, children, and others-very few of them literary specialists--have opened the book at this page and begun to read, their voices almost immediately adopting the same slightly singsong contours and heavy stresses as they shape the words into a distinctive temporal pattern. Neither the traditional terms of academic prosody, based on the foot-scansion of classical verse, nor the more recent linguistic models of meter lend themselves to a description of this rhythmic pattern,