Today’s Totally Random
Lines
So I have. Farewell
The
hopes of court! My hopes in heaven do dwell.
Cardinal Wolsey
King Henry the Eighth Act III, Scene ii, Line 459
Good sir, have patience. That’s the preceding line by Cromwell that the
Cardinal is responding to. He’s had patience, he says, but apparently he’s out
of hope.
Okay, I listened to the latter part of this scene. As
you can see by the line number, it’s not a very short scene. The first part of
the scene is the king losing favour with Wolsey and the realization by Wolsey
and everyone else that his days in the court are numbered. Then he’s left
alone to muse about his downfall until his protégé Cromwell shows up. The scene
ends with these two talking and the Cardinal pretty much saying goodbye to
Cromwell. Today’s Totally Random Line is the rhyming couplet that is the end of
this long scene.
Question: why didn't he use heav'n in that last line to take out a syllable and make it a perfect line of iambic pentameter? Yup, there I go again, questioning the art of Will. Atta boy, Pete. Atta boy.
2 comments:
There's scarcely a difference between "heaven" and "heav'n". You're basically saying the same amount of syllables.
Since you take out the second vowel sound, you're able to slur it into one long syllable.
Imagine that you start with the word hen (chicken). Then you sneak a v in there, hevn. What have you got? not hev-en. You've got one slurpy syllable, with two consonants jammed up against each other. Almost like the name dan and the word darn. Both are one syllable words, though darn is admittedly a much cleaner word than hevn. The name Darren (like heaven) on the other hand, is two syllables.
Makes sense? A li'l bit? (get it: li'l, not little. Hah!)
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