The Bard I am not

The grass across the bridge looked long and sweet. Three goats did stand and stare across the way. So easy it would be to cross the bridge, except that underneath it lived a troll. 

The littlest Billy goat:

"I'll go and try my luck to reach the shore. Wait here and see if I can get across. My stomach urges me to go across."

Trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot.

The Troll:

"Who goes across my bridge at lightening speed? I'll eat you ere you gain the farther shore. You'll rue the day you tried to trickster me. I'll roar and eat you till you are no more!"

The littlest Billy goat:

"Behold and look upon small, thin frame. One mouthful would I make for such as you. Hold to you patience, send me on my way. My brother comes and he is more to chew."

_________

I'll spare you from having to slog through the rest of the story. I'm sure you all know how it ends. But really, I know you are all thinking, "What in the world...?" 

Besides the fact that I rather enjoying having my reader's wonder what random thing they will find on my blog this time, there was actually a purpose to this little fairytale exercise. We are beginning a unit on Shakespeare in my Creative Writing class and last week we learned about iambic pentameter. (That would be lines of poetry that have ten syllables and the emphasis goes da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH da-DUH.) Last semester we had played around a lot with The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Everyone's homework for this week was to use iambic pentameter to retell the story, deciding on how much and where they would use the poetic meter. Rhyming was entirely optional.

A couple of my own children are in the class and this particular assignment has sent them a wee bit over the edge. I wanted to try it myself for a few reasons. One, I always think teachers should try what they are asking their students to do. Two, I wanted to see if it was worth the amount of drama I was seeing. And three, doing the exercise myself always gives me insight as to how to help and explain something. (I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be very few actual examples in class on Thursday, so I want to be prepared to help them all figure out where they got stuck.)

What did I learn? Writing in iambic to isn't actually that difficult once you've written a few lines of it. I stopped even having to count feet (syllables) after the introduction.  The other thing I learned is that unless the writing is particularly well done (which this is not because I spent all of ten minutes on it), reading the entire story in iambic pentameter would be... tiresome. You'll admit there is more than a little repetition in it which is what helps it be a good fairy tale, but not so much as a poem. (It was also useful from a creative writing point of view because there are plenty of chances to make the story more unique, which is what we did last semester.) 

So we'll chalk the whole thing up as an interesting exercise but not destined to create fine literature.