Frankie Thomas Demystifies Poetic Meter One Tweet at a Time
Visit Paris Review and read Frankie Thomas's latest article which deftly springboards from a viral tweet to a explore iambic pentameter. "Here are some things that happen when you go viral on Twitter for pointing out that the first two lines of Stephen Sondheim’s 'The Ballad of Sweeney Todd' can be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s 'Hallelujah'" writes Thomas. From there:
Your notifications will blow up with hyperbolic expressions of anguish and hostility, Twitter’s preferred mode of praise. (“I hate this.” “This hurts me.” “This can’t be legal.” “Quick question, how dare you?” “A curse upon you.” “The mindfuck of this has given me a deeper appreciation for characters in Lovecraftian horror. It … should not be.”) The Classic FM website will run a story on you headlined “Someone is setting Sweeney Todd lyrics to the tune of ‘Hallelujah’ and it’s honestly fantastic,” misidentifying you as “a young writer from Connecticut, US.” Your mother will kvell over her viral daughter on Facebook and in a mass email to all her friends. You will wonder why this is all happening around this tweet, which is decidedly B material, while your A material languishes in obscurity.
Above all, though, you will be confronted by men who insist on being confidently, floridly wrong at you. I’m given to understand that this is common on Twitter in general, but up till this point, my anonymity and gender ambiguity had spared me. Once I went viral, though, the men-who-were-wrong came out in full force. One guy in particular—a partner at a law firm, according to his Twitter bio—retweeted me along with the enthusiastically incorrect remark, “Iambic pentameter FTW.” And with that, I realized why so many people were so disproportionately impressed by my Sweeney Todd/Hallelujah observation: a widespread misunderstanding of how meter works.
At the risk of giving away the secret to my success, I’d like to demystify meter for the good of the people.
The “Iambic pentameter FTW” reply guy was wrong on two counts. First of all, the lyrics in question are not in iambic pentameter, a poetic meter best described as “the one that goes da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA” (that is to say: five iambs, or “da-DA”s, per line). And second of all, FTW, or “for the win”—a prepositional idiom that Wiktionary defines as “being the best; being great, awesome, amazing or spectacular; sure to succeed”—is not a phrase that remotely applies to iambic pentameter, the most overrated of all meters. It’s a perfectly serviceable meter, but it’s the Sweeney Todd/Hallelujah tweet of meters: with so many other good ones out there, why does that one get all the glory?
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