1. What does it mean to "SCAN" a poem?

2. How exactly does the letter and number identification of a poem work?
(ex. S1.......L4.......) Am I guessing correctly that this would be 4th line
of the 1st stanza? Are there other such systems for identifying parts
of a poem?

If it is too involved and someone would rather post a link, I would appreciate any direction. Thanks.

Marty

SCANSION
The systematic analysis of metrical patterns of stress, syllable by syllable, sound unit by sound unit.


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You are correct in determining the Stanza and Line numbering system.


Les



Post Edited (01-15-05 01:16)

[www.poeticbyway.com]

Next question, what is the difference, if any, between parse and scan?

Well, if you drop the first letter of both, you get "arse" and "can", neither of which I am personally qualified to comment on.

Not sure if I'm blind, tired, or what....but Hugh, I can't find "parse" on the link you provided.

I can understand "scanning" for syllables in poetry that has very strict guidelines.....such as Haiku's 5-7-5 rule, but are there really that many poem types that adhere to such syllable structure?

It seems like over analyzing or squeezing the life out of a thing to do this to all poems. I was thinking, particularly, of the Yeats poems we were looking at on an earlier thread.

Nevertheless, I like this sort of thing better, I think, than the little bit I've caught about MFA programs.

Marty

>It seems like over analyzing or squeezing the life out of a thing

Sometimes you feel you?ve squeezed the life out of it by scanning ? other times you feel you?ve given life to the poem.

In what way does scansion help while writing? The points i can come up with are:
- Adds a Rhythm - sometimes enhances meaning.
- Reduces verbiage.

Any others?

------

Is parsing more general (what you do when you are reading poetry during office hours) and scanning more detailed?

Breaking a sentence down into parts of speech and explaining grammatical form and function is parsing. I have never associated it too much with poetry.



Post Edited (01-15-05 23:35)

So scanning is an evaluation of meter, which is exclusive to poetry.......and parsing is an evaluation of sentence structure which is exclusive to prose?

My understanding of parsing was dividing the sentence into it's component parts

I'm with Marty. We would scan the meter of a poem and parse its grammar.

Still I cannot fault JSC's logic in that we can be parsimonious with our scansion, but not scansimonious with our parson.

You are parseley (parsley?) right about parsing.

PARSING, more broadly defined, means "To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components." The breaking into components is the key, whether you are parsing behavior, speech, prose, or poetry.

Think of the times that you've read a passage of, say, John Donne, and then had to read it over again just to figure out what it actually SAID -- what the subject is, what that adjective modifies, whether "content" is a noun or an adjective there, etc. Because the grammar or syntax was so complicated, you had to PARSE it.

So you could say that SCANSION is about form and PARSING is about meaning.

You are parseley (parsley?) right about parsing.

PARSING, more broadly defined, means "To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components." The breaking into components is the key, whether you are parsing behavior, speech, prose, or poetry.

Think of the times that you've read a passage of, say, John Donne, and then had to read it over again just to figure out what it actually SAID -- what the subject is, what that adjective modifies, whether "content" is a noun or an adjective there, etc. Because the grammar or syntax was so complicated, you had to PARSE it.

So you could say that SCANSION is about form and PARSING is about meaning.

>Parse: To give a grammatical description of a word or a group of words.<
Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Marian-NYC,
Where is parsing more broadly defined as "To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into compoments"? or by whom?

Because the definition you provide is the Grand Canyon compared to the definition in the dictionary. The dictionary speaks of grammar only. I usually find that if a word has more than one meaning, you will see both, or all, in the dictionary. In poetry, we have much more room to move about within language and assign other meanings to words. Is it the poetic community who has broadened the definition of "parse"?

Marty



Post Edited (01-17-05 20:44)

Hugh, parce is a grammatical term: (parse)


verb: analyze syntactically by assigning a constituent structure to (a sentence),

scan is a term from poetic analysis, you scan a line without regard to syntactic units as such,

So the difference is one of domain, syntactical analysis or poetic analysis. I guess they overlap, but their use is different because scansion doesn't necessarily have anything to do with semantic issues, whereas syntactic structures inevitably do (as Chomsky showed forty years ago).

Peter



Post Edited (01-21-05 18:40)

>Well, if you drop the first letter of both, you get "arse" and "can", neither of which I am personally qualified to comment on.

>Still I cannot fault JSC's logic in that we can be parsimonious with our scansion, but not scansimonious with our parson.

chi-"as"-mus

Chiasmus or antimetabole? Pshaw, more spoonerism (or marrowsky). What's a marrowsky? See the Ahoy, Chesil! thread.

[tinyurl.com]

Thanks for the Marrowsky link. It's a good one to know. Didn't know it.

Marty:

The definiton of PARSE that I posted, above, is from [dictionary.reference.com].

Marian,
Thanks for showing me the dictionary reference for parse. I've nearly forgotten the original question or its significance in this conversation and I'm more confused than before not knowing what I still don't know. I will never look at my Dictionary, or parsley, in the same way ever again, but when someone uses the word "parse", I at least will have a clue. Thanks.

Marty

You can scan sections of prose, but isn't broken up into the kinds of lines you get in poetry. You can scan any combination of syllables, accented or not.

Peter

It can serve as a kind of musical accompaniament to the lyric of the syllables.

Peter

sorta like Guitar Tabs