Meter

And it came to pass, in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that Yakko from the Animanics decided to do to the countries of the world what Tom Lehrer did to the elements of the periodic table, and Yakko's World was born.

Yakko's World is an excellent song, but his map of the world was wrong even before it became out of date. It is of great importance that this song be re-written in accordance with the United Nations' up-to-date list of sovereign nations. For how else will I ever beat Sporcle's Countries of the World quiz? (How could I get Sao Tomé and Principé last time, and miss out Kenya?)

The 6 lines in each verse are divided into 3 rhyming couplets, and each line is approximately a sixfold dactyl followed by a single stressed syllable, with a few optional anacruses... I'll draw you a diagram:

U = stressed syllable
v = unstressed syllable
[U],[v] = optional syllables
colours indicate rhymes

[v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
U v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U [v] /
[v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U [v]

I hope you followed that.

This is a pretty inflexible meter - any break in the pattern of U's and v's creates a jolt. The Nightmare Song from Iolanthe is in the same basic meter as Yakko's World, and when a long syllable in the text falls on an unstressed syllable of the meter...

"In your shirt and your socks, the black silk with gold clocks, crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle"

...the line is a devil to sing intelligibly at speed.

It's easy enough to set words to music in a way that matches long vowels with stressed syllables and short vowels with unstressed syllables. Being sensitive to the lengths of the consonants in between those vowels and their effect on the rhythm - "gold clocks, cross", for example - is harder. There's a line from Yakko's World that I think is beautifully constructed: "Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Turkey and Greece". No consonant clusters between words (thanks to Austria beginning and ending with a vowel). "Switz" and "Czech" are both slightly heavier than "Aus" which creates a secondary stress pattern.

The only imperfection is that there is no consonant either on the end of Czechoslovakia or at the start of Italy, so the final -a of the former is stretched out to microscopically more than its natural length. (Yakko puts a glottal stop in there rather than singing "Czechoslovakia, Ritaly", to which I say: hosanna in excelsis.) I might have chosen to replace Italy with, say, Germany for that reason - but that would sacrifice the pleasant alliteration of T's between Italy and Turkey, so I probably wouldn't.

Alas, I can't half-inch this line wholesale into Hazyshade's World, because Czechoslovakia is no more. Tangentially, this is a double shame because it was one of two countries that were perfect double dactyls (U v v U v v) all by themselves, and therefore very useful for a certain form of poetry also called the double dactyl in which six of the eight lines are double dactyls, exactly one of which must be a single word, for example:

Hankety-pankety

Boy in a blanket, he’s

Off on a goose-chase to

Look for a star,

Incontrovertibly 

Journeys through Faerie

Strip off the blanket to

See who you are.

Even worse, it's been replaced by Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is a trochaic country. (It would fit perfectly into Modern Major General/Elements Song.) If you try to shoe-horn it into a dactylic meter, you either understress Czech or overstress lic - or find an entirely different solution...? There are other countries as awkward and more, which makes this more of an intellectual and artistic challenge than just finding the countries that rhyme (of which there aren't really enough. Anyone reading this blog who's thinking of building a new Pacific island and declaring it independent, would you consider calling it Trance, or maybe Blurkey?) and then filling in the blanks.

Enough waffle: let me sketch out this thing, and if I think I've done anything particularly clever with it, I'm sure I'll let you know. I just like talking about poetic meter - it's a sort of fascination of mine, partly because modern poets seem to think the study of it rather beneath them.

Clap Progress Report: dropped plectrum through sound hole.