Hypermetry–too many syllables in a line of lyric poetry causing displacement of a syllable into the following line; think of it as hyphenation in the middle of a word between two lines–occurs in ancient Aeolic meters like the Sapphic strophe. The figure grabs the reader’s attention because it erases the expected pause between lines. In this post, I’m going to give an example from Horace’s Odes, and then show the same technique in Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” from which Dylan’s metrical sophistication will be clear.

First, Horace

Horace’s Odes 1.2, addressed to the Emperor Augustus, is a poem about the the disasters Rome has suffered in the late first century B.C. The poet wonders which god he should pray to in order to end them. (The answer, as it turns out, is Augustus.) Here are the fourth and fifth strophes:

Vidimus flavom Tiberim retortis
litore Etrusco violenter undis
ire deiectum monumenta regis               15
     templaque Vestae,

Iliae dum se nimium querenti
iactat ultorem, vagus et sinistra
labitur ripa Iove non probante
     uxorius amnis.                                       20

In James Michie’s translation:

We watched the Tiber's tawny water, wrenched back
Hard from the Tuscan side, go raging forward
To Vesta's temple and King Numa's palace,
    Threatening their overthrow.

Wild, love-lorn river god! He saw himself as
Avenger of his long-lamenting Ilia,
And trespassed left across his banks, thus crossing
    Jupiter's wishes too.

Michie’s translation preserves Horace’s ideas, but not their order. A more literal translation of the second strophe would say something like:

...while [the Tiber] for Ilia much lamenting
Boasts himself avenger, and, wandering, glides
Over the left bank, though Jove does not approve--
    The overly solicitous river.
 

The words in bold are an example of hypermetry: probante has one too many syllables, and so the vowel “e” at the end elides (vanishes into) the vowel “u” at the beginning of the next line. The words would thus be pronounced Iove non probantuxorius amnis.

When hypermetry occurs, often some special effect is desired. Here, the way that the words “overflow” their line reflects the river in flood overflowing its banks.

Now, Dylan

Now I want to look at a similar phenomenon in Dylan’s “Hurricane.” Here is the end of the seventh verse:

“We want to put his a** in stir
We want to pin this triple murder on him
He ain’t no Gentleman Jim”

We quickly realize that something is off in the way the lyrics are printed. “Stir” needs a rhyme, which seems to be supplied by the first syllable of “murder.” Yet the first syllable of a polysyllabic word can’t end a line and thus “make” the rhyme; so the line continues, and its final word, “him,” is needed to rhyme with “Jim” in the following line. That would not be scanned, to borrow from Prince Hamlet.

I suggest that what we have here, obscured by the way Dylan has chosen to print the lyrics, is not three lines, but four, and they actually look like this:

We want to put his a** in stir
We want to pin this triple mur-
Der on him
He ain’t no Gentleman Jim”

Now, that scans, or at least scans better. The first two lines are a rhyming couplet of iambic tetrameter. The last couplet is more difficult: “He ain’t no Gentleman Jim” is iambic trimeter, but the new “line” above it only has three syllables. But if you listen to the way Dylan sings it–for it’s a song–“-der” and “on” are both lengthened, almost like quantitative one-syllable substitutions for iambs. This is the kind of thing that happens in Latin verse, where, e.g., one long syllable can substitute for two shorts in the dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic. Perhaps a memory from Dylan’s days in the Hibbing High Latin Club, massaged into English accentual verse?^[1]

In any case, once you realize it in one verse (I used the one where I first noticed it), you see it in others. The first verse’s

For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

Becomes

For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one 
Time he could-a been
The champion of the world

Verse 3’s

In Paterson that’s just the way things go
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
’Less you wanna draw the heat

Becomes

In Paterson that’s just the way things go
If you’re black you might as well not show 
Up on the street
’Less you wanna draw the heat

The end of verse 5 repeats the end of verse 1. Then, Verse 6:

“You think you’d like to play ball with the law?”
“Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw runnin’ that night?”
“Don’t forget that you are white”

This becomes:

“You think you’d like to play ball with the law?”
“Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw 
"Runnin’ that night?”
“Don’t forget that you are white”

Verse 8:

And ride a horse along a trail
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse

This becomes:

And ride a horse along a trail
But then they took him to the jail-
House
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse

Verse 9:

And though they could not produce the gun
The D.A. said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed

This is really:

And though they could not produce the gun
The D.A. said he was the one 
Who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed

Verse 10:

To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game

This can be reformatted as:

To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed 
To live in a land
Where justice is a game

The end of verse 11 repeats the end of verse 1 again. As you can see, they don’t all work in exactly the same way. Occasionally, the final two lines do not rhyme. But, as I hope you also see, the scheme of metrics and rhymes in the lyrics of “Hurricane” is in general very complex in a way that recalls the virtuosity of Horace. The Horatian lyric ode is, of course, a very different animal from a rock song. But Dylan’s verbal dexterity demonstrates that, whatever we make of differences in genre, he belongs in the company of poets like Horace.

Some people scoffed or looked on in bemusement when Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When one has paid attention to Dylan’s poetics, the most important conclusion one draw about such scoffing and bemusement is: Those people were wrong.^[2]