"I knew that, but I didn't know I knew it ... ."

I made an "interesting" mistake a few weeks back.

In the post about Gerard Manley Hopkins and his "sprung" rhythm, I said a scholar had possibly confused the Hopkins prosodic invention with so-called "fourteener" verse, which I said does not count unstressed syllables strictly.

I was the one confused.

I later reasoned (correctly) that the verse form wouldn't be called "fourteener" if the unstressed syllables don't count.

A "fourteener" line of verse has fourteen syllables, obviously. The verses are often formed as a "ballad" quatrain, alternating four iambic feet with three in rhymed lines.

Clearly, I was muddled. I do realize that, in music, "meter" is only one aspect of rhythm, so metrical verse written for songs needs more of a flow to allow a composer to fit a melody to the words (see Byron's "Stanzas for Music" for an example).

However, the more I try to explain verse for hymns (short measure or meter, long ... , common ... etc.) the more ignorance I expose. It's not something I studied way back (though now I find it really interesting), and I seem to recall being told in a poetry class as an English lit major to ignore it (as literature goes, anyway).

Here's an overview:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen

Look for the entry called "Hymnody and Hymnology" there.

This much I knew: hymns are metrical poems set to any one of several "tunes." What I'm learning: syllable count in hymnology is very important. (It's usually printed in the lower right corner of the hymn entry in hymnals.)