Poetry Metres — poetry trail

[Andrew]

And now that you have it in the context of Nahum Tate as explained below, you can see why I will add the Chandos pub to the trail.
(The trail is diffuse not linear)

The Mystery of Forest Place

Every so often I might pause the telling of this story to reflect. My thoughts now are dwelt on the phrase spoken by King Lear: “Nothing will come of nothing”. It is spoken in anger to his daughter Cordelia because she has refused to be sycophantic like her two sisters. If I have understood it correctly this is a portent from Lear unaware that he is forecasting his own demise. As a piece of theatre, the playwright is warning us that we are about to see a tragedy unfold. But undeniably the uni…

The 1st Duke of Chandos commissioned Handel to write sacred choral anthems, now called Chandos Anthems. Handel needed suitably metred lyrics to set the Psalms to music. And so Handel opted for the Tate and Brady “New Version” of the Psalms (1696) primarily because it transformed prose into poetry, making it far more suitable for the musical structures of the Baroque era.

And it is this emphasis on metre which makes this association with the metre of poetry through Handel and Chandos so divinely apposite.