[books] Snarky Footnotes

[chadu]

From Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within:

Chapter 1, "Metre," footonote 14:
14. Milton, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as to always mark "heaven" as the monosyllabic "heav'n" whenever it ended a line. Finding two

Comments

[reverancepavane]

Cool!

[chadu]

Take it up with Fry.

(I believe he's saying that Milton was trying to FORCE it to be monosyllabic.)

CU

[taschoene]

"Heav'n" is a classic example of syncope, where the second syllable is lost by removing its vowel; the ending "N" gets blurred into the preceding "V." The relationship is a lot like the monosyllabic "can't" and the two-syllable "cannot."

Literary Dictionary: syncope

syncope [sink‐ŏ‐pi], a kind of verbal contraction by which a letter or syllable is omitted from within a word (rather than from the beginning or end of the word, as in elision). Obvious cases are heav'n for ‘heaven’ and o'er for ‘over’; ....