Playing With Fire: Syllabic Diversity in American English
- wordwomanvt4
- May 25
- 5 min read
One problem with writing formal poetry in American English is that we are not a formal people, yah know whud I mean, bub? Yo. Like that.
For us brave few who chose, nevertheless, to write haiku, sonnets, blank verse and other metrical poetry forms, writing in American presents logistical challenges as well as cultural hurdles. We are a country divided, not only by red and blue states, Red Sox and Yankees fans, and what name we use for deli sandwiches served on long loaves of bread, but also by our use of language. Phonetics vary widely across the U.S., in ways that not only change the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, but even the syllable counts of common words.
Depending on where you live in the United States, the name of the liquid stuff that comes comes out of your kitchen sink tap may rhyme with quarter, otter, or udder. For some New Yorker City residents, it’s pronounce woo-duh. Outside of New York, that pronunciation does not rhyme with anything, but within some dialects of the greater New York area, it rhymes with local pronunciations of kwa-duh, chow-duh and poor-duh (quarter, chowder and porter). So as a practical matter, two rhyming lines such as,
I asked the hotel porter
to fetch a glass of water
will rhyme, and have the same metrical count, in Brooklyn as well as in Los Angeles, although they will sound distinctly different read aloud in either place.
Not so when we get to other vowel combinations. In Vermont, where I live now, as in many rural parts of the American west, people are frugal and no-nonsense in their pronunciations. Words are orally presented in the shortest possible form. Hire, fire and buyer are all spoken as one syllable. So is beer and common cuss words like shit or damn—not that those are spoken often in Vermont, where the local vernacular tends to substitute colorful phrases like jeezum crow or jeepers when the situation does not call for a full-blown f-bomb (which is always, incontrovertibly, one harsh syllable).
But in small coastal towns of the mid-Atlantic states, terse northern pronunciation starts to relax and expand, like a cat on a sunny windowsill. Hire and fire become high-er and fie-er, with two very distinct syllables. My grandfather came from Maryland, where the second day of the week was beautifully pronounced tyewsdee. In his mouth, the gorgeously expressive words shit and damn transformed to two syllables in quotidian usage (shy-it and day-um, respectively), and ballooned miraculously to three syllables when the gravity of the situation called for it, such as when my grandmother totalled the classic Lincoln Continental he’d picked up cheap and spent years restoring to perfection because a bee had flown in the car while she was racing along the Black Horse Pike. My grandmother had a few broken bones, but the car was completely gone to shee-eye-it.
I find that I use these syllable counts inconsistently in my poetry. In the following two lines, from a sonnet in iambic pentameter out of my upcoming collection Love is Bullshit, I assign one syllable to the shit in bullshit, but two syllables to the word fire:
Love is bullshit. This much I know because
the world is full of fire, war, and snow...
Yet in these lines from another of my iambic pentameter sonnets, Wright Park Late Afternoon, I used both wire and fire as one-syllable words:
He is aware of me, and I of him.
Between us, pulling tightly as a wire,
lay this persistent fact: that he could fire.
Robert Frost, the reknowned early-20th century metrical poet of Vermont and Hampshire, used fire as a one-syllable word in these lines from his iconic poem, Fire and Ice:
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
Anne Bradstreet, a 17th century New England poet, also used the one syllable rendering in Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10, 1666:
That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”
Let no man know is my Desire.
Both of these bards rhymed fire with desire (note to self: overused?) and also counted desire as two syllables, rather than three (dee-zigh-er).
But Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th century Massachusetts poet, ascribes two syllables to fire on both appearances of the word in her poem #1063:
Ashes denote that Fire was —
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature's sake
That hovered there awhile —
Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates.
Another interesting aspect of Dickinson’s #1063 is that one can read the word pile and the second half of awhile as having either one syllable, thus rendering the poem in consistent ballad meter in both stanzas, or read those each as having two syllables, rendering the first quatrain in balanced four-footed lines and the second stanza in ballad meter. This is a good little illustration of how the reader actively engages with and changes a poem.
So what’s a formal American poet to do? Britannica Dictionary’s pronunciation editor Josh Guenter proposes a practical approach. In the online version of the Britannica Dictionary’s entry on the word fire, he writes:
The word fire can be pronounced with either one or two syllables. ... The word higher is always two syllables. Hence, if you rhyme fire with higher, then you are pronouncing fire with two syllables, whereas if you don't rhyme these two words, then you are pronouncing fire with just one syllable.[1]
Editor Guenter’s approach works well—as long as you aren’t rhyming fire with wire, hire or inspire. In such cases, you’ll need to make sure that your metrical scheme is clear and strong enough that your reader will understand how you intend the syllable count to work.
When a word like fire is internal to the line, and not in the position of the ending rhyme, placement within the metrical unit can provide guidance of your intention. Using the word in the emphasized beat helps readers see it as one syllable:
the world on fire is like a ring of hell
while using it on the first, unemphasized beat can either imply that it is meant to be read as two syllables, or may create confusion, as demonstrated by these two examples, both with five feet in the line:
shouting fire in a crowded theater
or
shouting fire in a crowded theater
This example is of course further complicated by the fact that theater is pronounced thee-tur, thee-uh-ter, or thee-ate-ur, depending on where you live. Such is the beauty of American diversity. Its complexities compel us to pause and be mindful of our intentions and word choices, inviting us to build, from our varied lives and language usage, a richly textured shared literary canon – a place where everyone can sit around the same poetical fire.
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