Conflicting Definitions, The Lovely Oxford English Dictionary And Aphra Behn’s ‘The Willing Mistress’

I’ve been saying in previous posts that the first thing to do when reading a poem is to work out the speech situation, but I realize now I am an idiot. What is the first thing you do when you read something? Read the title of course. Please accept my apologies for being so dense.

Anyway, the title. Clearly ‘The Willing Mistress’ overtly states from the start the theme of the poem; female sexuality was not a myth in the 17th century but truly did exist. However, what I want to focus on is the word ‘mistress’ – this word has a lot of different and sometimes conflicting definitions.

If you open a dictionary you have lying around, you will get one, maybe two, meanings of the word. That is because the little dictionary sitting on your shelf (or even the very big dictionary you have sitting on your shelf) can in no way hold all of the millions of words and all of the many definitions of each word that make up the English language. It just can’t happen.

Thankfully, we have the privilege to live in the 21st century and have access to the beautiful invention that is the internet (I am assuming you have access to the internet, what with this being an internet blog…). So, go to Google and type in OED and ta-da! you will find you suddenly have too many definitions of a word to even comprehend, around 75% of which will not be applicable to the text you are reading. So what the hell do you do now?

Let’s use ‘The Willing Mistress’ as our example, specifically that word ‘Mistress’. Type it into the OED now. Already we have two options to chose from; in the context of the sentence ‘the willing mistress’, ‘mistress’ is clearly a noun and so we want the first option.

Now we’ve got that far, we obviously have a lot of entries. The simplest way to narrow this down is to see which definitions can fit in the context of our sentence and the poem in general (while ‘the willing childminder’ fits the sentence, I don’t really think it works in the context of the whole poem…). What you will notice, however, is that below each definition, the OED online includes a brief history of the usage of the word (with the appropriate definition) in literature. The main benefit of this, of course, is that we can see which meanings were around when the poem was written; it is no use trying to claim that Ahpra Behn meant ‘a woman who plays the dominant role in sadomasochistic sexual activity’ even if you could find a way to apply it to the text because that meaning of the word ‘mistress’ was not used until 1921, long after Behn wrote ‘The Willing Mistress’.

So what definitions fit the context and the date of the poem? ‘A woman having control or authority’, certainly, along with ‘a woman who has the power to control, use, or dispose of something at will’, ‘a female possessor or owner of something’ (her body, sexuality, virginity etc.), ‘a woman loved and courted by a man; a female sweetheart’ and of course ‘a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’.

As we can see some of these definitions (specifically the final two) may slightly contradict each other and so we would have to carefully analyze the rest of the poem in order to find which one (or ones) are most applicable. However, I hope this makes it clear that checking definitions for poems (especially those written a long time ago) is extremely important in revealing the meaning behind the poem.

Prosody: The Boring, Technical Bit

Poetry has a long history of an oral form of storytelling. News used to travel from village to village as a song performed by minstrels. These minstrels would often have a lot of fairly long stories to memorize and therefore they would employ as many tricks to help them remember as they could. One of these was the use of a regular rhythm, a now nearly intrinsic part of poetry.

Rhythm happens when there is a regular repetition of similar events which are separated from each other by recognizably different events – the two different events must alternate in other words. You can have a visual rhythm of ‘light on – light off – light on – light off’ or a physical rhythm of ‘left – right – left – right’ or, the thing more commonly associated with rhythm, sound; the call of ‘1 – 2 – 3 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 1 – 2 – 3’ is the rhythm drilled into the mind of anybody attempting to learn the waltz.

Rhythm is the fundamental carrier of our language; think how much your voice naturally undulates and changes pitch and volume as you speak. What you will probably notice is that this change in pitch and volume occurs between syllables. A syllable is a ‘vocal sound or set of sounds uttered with a single effort of articulation and forming a word or element of a word’ (definition from The Oxford English Dictionary). It is helpful to note that in order to be ‘uttered with a single effort of articulation’, a syllable can only contain a single vowel sound. The syllable is the basic element of rhythm; stressed syllables occur when we give slightly more ‘weight’ to one syllable than another by slightly increasing the duration of the sound or, as previously noted, making it louder or giving it a slightly higher pitch. Stress patterns in speech can be affected by how important a word is in a sentence but they are produced at roughly regular intervals of time. Most of the time this is done unconsciously; when studying rhythm for a prolonged period of time, especially stressed and unstressed syllables, it is surprising how easy it is to forget just how you actually talk normally.

We already know that one of the major ways in which poetry shapes the rhythms of language is by arranging rhythmic sequences of words into regular, measured lines. This is in order to form what is known as ‘meter‘ (‘meter’ actually comes from the Greek word for ‘measure’ – we are measuring the pattern of stressed syllables). We can analyze a poems meter by counting the total number of syllables per line and then counting the number of stresses per line and finding out what is called ‘the metrical foot‘. A metrical foot is a basic unit of stressed and/or unstressed syllables. They are:

1. Iamb: unstressed – stressed. For example, when you say ‘New York’, ‘New’ is usually unstressed followed by a slight emphasis on the stressed ‘York’.
2. Trochee: stressed – unstressed. The opposite of the iamb, an example of a trochee would be ‘London’. The first syllable – ‘Lon’ – is stressed, while ‘don’ is unstressed.
3. Anapaest: unstressed – unstressed – stressed. For those lovely long three syllable words and phrases, we have an anapaest when it is the final syllable that is stressed. In ‘Tennessee’ we have three syllables (Ten-nes-see), with the emphasis at the end.
4. Dactyl: stressed – unstressed – unstressed. ‘Leningrad’ is a nice example of a dactyl, with only ‘Len’ being stressed.
5. Spondee: stressed – stressed. A much more uncommon metrical foot in the English language, a spondee is a pair of stressed syllables.
6. Pyrrich: unstressed – unstressed. The opposite of the spondee, and again very uncommon in English, the pyrrich is a pair of unstressed syllables.

Metrical feet may not be perfectly regular throughout a poem; people do speak slightly differently when they have different accents and so they may emphasize slightly different syllables. It is finding the metrical foot that is used throughout the majority of the poem that is important (note that there may be not regular rhythm; this is called free verse and it is something I will cover in a later post).

Once you have determined the metrical foot, you need to pay attention to the line length in regards to how many feet there are. The names for the different length lines are as follows:

1. Monometer – one foot.
2. Dimeter – two feet.
3. Trimeter – three feet.
4. Tetrameter – four feet.
5. Pentameter – five feet.
6. Hexameter – six feet.
7. Heptameter – seven feet.
8. Octameter – eight feet.

Note that line length is specifically determined by how many feet there are, not their actual length. A dactylic tetrameter will look longer than an iambic tetrameter because is will contain more syllables (because dactyls are made up of three, while iambs only contain two), but both will be called tetrameter if there are four feet.

Just as I said with the metrical feet, however, line length can slightly alter throughout a poem. If a poem is made up of lines 10 syllables long but one line has only 9, this does not mean the poem cannot be iambic pentameter (five iambs per line). In this case we would say that the poem was iambic pentameter, but that the line with only 9 syllables was catalectic. This simply means that the line contains one syllable less than the rest of them in the poem. If the line contained 11 syllables, it would be hypercatalectic – containing one extra syllable.