Beatles and The Bard For Tutors

Good writing and great writing - like good teaching and great teaching - are separated by subtle nuances that may not be immediately discernible to many people. Recently, a 10th grade client of mine had a great assignment for their poetry unit: to select a favorite Beatles' song and mark the scansion, in a fashion similar to typical instruction with Shakespearean sonnets. She has always loved the Beatles, as so many of us do. But why?

For those of you unfamiliar with concept of meter, scansion basically entails marking concave lines for unstressed syllables and vertical lines for stressed ones. English teachers often illuminate Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter by taking lines of blank verse from his writing and marking them. Notice in this famous line how the pattern of unstressed/stressed repeats in five "iambs" - or metrical feet:

But hark! What light through yonder window breaks?

The sound resembles a rocking horse, or human heartbeat. The heartbeat of love, as Romeo falls for Juliet. Classic.

After my student selected Eleanor Rigby, we began to note Lennon and McCartney's excellent use of parallel anapests. Anapestic structure, as distinct from iambic (thump, thump) involves a metrical foot composed of two short syllables followed by one long one, as in the word "seventeen". The subtle musicality - and the unspoken implications of these rhythms - arguably provides the basis for much of the song's appeal.

Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been...

Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door

Notice the effect of this rhythm - as if a wounded person is shuffling for two steps and then landing hard on the third. Anapestic rhythm denotes truncation, interruption, and instability.

Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear...

Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there

When form echoes content, prosody (the study of rhythms and stresses in written and oral language) reaches new levels of impact.

Died in the church and was buried along with her name...

Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

I can almost see poor Eleanor shuffling her tired feet in that old country church, and imagine Father McKenzie limping away from the dismal cemetery. Shuffle-shuffle-plop. Brilliant!