Poetry 101 : Let's Break it Down

Meter and Modern English

1. English words are divided into syllables.

2. Syllables in English have a “natural” accent[SUP]1[/SUP], a pattern of stress indicated in a dictionary entry. When we alter the inflection of spoken words because of meaning in a given sentence, we are using rhetorical accent; when the stress pattern of a word in a line of poetry is determined by meter, we are using metrical accent. If the metrical accent alters the natural word accent, we end up with wrenched accent.

3. In metrical or “measured” English verse, each line of the poem can be divided into feet, and each foot into light (or weak) and heavy stresses. Together these create the overall metrical pattern of the line and poem.

4. The process of analyzing a line and dividing it into metrical feet, and the feet into smaller units of stress, is called scansion.

5. A line is described in terms first by the pattern of its feet, then the number of feet.

6. Five iambic feet create an iambic pentameter line. This is the single most common metrical line in English.

[SUP]1[/SUP]Accent refers to syllable stress; when we speak of a “southern accent” or “British accent,” we are more accurately referring to dialect.

Kinds of Poetic feet in English poetry

Kinds of Feet Stress Pattern
1. iamb light followed by heavy — X
2. trochee heavy followed by light X —
3. spondee[SUP]2[/SUP] two equal heavy stresses X X
4. dactyl heavy followed by two light stresses X — —
5. anapest two light followed by a heavy stress — — X

[SUP]2[/SUP]Keats is fond of using a spondee at the end of a line that is largely written in another meter.

Kinds of Lines in English Poetry

1. A one-foot line is called monometer
2. A two-foot line is called dimeter
3. A three-foot line is called trimeter
4. A four-foot line is called tetrameter
5. A five-foot line is called pentameter
6. A six-foot line is called hexameter[SUP]3[/SUP]
7. A seven-foot line is called heptameter (rare)
8. An eight-foot line is called octameter (rare)


[SUP]3[/SUP]A hexameter line that is six units or “feet” of pentameter, that is, a line of pure iambic hexameter, is also called an alexandrine. Sonnet poets in particular like to sneak these in.

Terms for English Meter and Verse

Terms for Meter and Verse
(* terms are crucial)

A Line of text is a Verse

A group of spatially set-off Verses is a Stanza

Lines in which a clause or sentence runs across two or more lines of verse are *enjambed; enjambment is the opposite of *end-stopped lines. An example of enjambment:


If music be the food of love, play on!
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken and so die . . .

(Twelfth Night Opening lines)

Lines often have a natural pause, a *caesura, like pauses in ordinary human speech, pause that is not “counted” in scansion as a syllable. The pause tends to be created by the syntax of the sentence, and is often marked by punctuation. In scansion, a caesura is indicated by a double bar || to mark the pause.

Rhyme


*End Rhymes (The most common sort in English) occur at the end of a line. In notating rhyme patterns, the pattern as denoted by using a different letter for each rhyme as it occurs, so that all lines that have the same pattern of rhyme share the same letter, is called a rhyme scheme.

*Heroic Couplet is two lines of iambic pentameter verse that rhyme; this is usually used in longer poems. A couplet could, technically, be any pair of lines, but it is usually used to refer to two successive lines of verse that rhyme, like the last two lines of a Shakespearean sonnet.

*Blank Verse refers to lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic drama, including Shakespeare’s metered plays.

Internal Rhymes occur within a verse-line. Example: Fleet and Sweet in the same line.

Masculine Rhymes, rhymes of a single stressed syllable are most common. Example: still / hill; love / dove.

Feminine Rhymes use a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. Example: ending / bending. These are sometimes called double rhymes.

Triple Rhymes are rhymes that involve three syllables. Example: comparison / garrison.

Some of the language regarding rhyme is almost never used these days, but you ought to be at least vaguely familiar with it.

this is very reminiscent of my TEACH THE IDIOT thread. I'm going to be bookmarking this and reading along. I know nothing.

Great post, kid. Thanks Medievalist. Awesome. Both of you.

I would love it if Di or Scott would explain Formalism as they interpret it. I've been researching it so I can contribute to Di's workshop. It has been a long slog after long workdays. I'm starting to catch on, but the descriptions I am getting from websites just don't match. Not with what Di and Scott are doing--but with competing websites.

I think my brain is going to explode. Maybe not a bad thing.




Mike

Honestly, if you want to learn metrical stuff, you have to read poetry aloud, or at least silently, to yourself. Also, remember different people will read the same poem differently; that doesn't make it "wrong." The idea is to match your scansion to the way you actually say the words when you read aloud.

This website is in some ways a much better explanation than the teaching handouts I'm posting here--my handouts were meant to go along with me actually talking with and reading with students.

These are some good books about meter, rhyme, and scansion:

Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. New York: Longman, 1982. This is a more advanced discussion of meter, intended for those with a serious interest.

Attridge, Derek. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Revised edition. New York: Random House, 1979.

Hollander, John. Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse. Third Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

moblues said:

I would love it if Di or Scott would explain Formalism as they interpret it. I've been researching it so I can contribute to Di's workshop. It has been a long slog after long workdays. I'm starting to catch on, but the descriptions I am getting from websites just don't match. Not with what Di and Scott are doing--but with competing websites.

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There are two similar sounding things here; Formalism in terms of criticism, and Formal poetry--both of which are a "return" to more traditional approaches--sort of a response to Modernism and Post Modernism.

Things like meter, rhyme, and verse structure (sonnet, villanele, etc. etc. ) are back in vogue.

Yes...I always read it out loud to myself. That's about the only thing I ever did to try to comprehend poetry better. When I try to study anything about it my mind just blanks...but reading it out loud is something I have always done. Great advice, Medi.

Recite these works in an audible way

For a simple study of poetry meter, two good examples are Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.
In those particular American classics, eight syllables make up four feet in each line of tetrameter. Although both pieces use tetrameter, each one employs a different type of foot.

Frost uses the popular iambic foot -- two syllables stressed like the Morse Code letter A (dit-dah).

"Whose woods / these are / I think / I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

Longfellow uses its opposite, the trochaic foot -- two syllables stressed like the letter N (dah-dit).

"As un/to the / bow the / cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other!"

Those guys were good.

kdnxdr said:

"Wrenched" is saying the accent, or meter, does not work?

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Wrenched is about rhyme, not meter, though it can affect meter.

Meh. I wouldn't say wrenched= "doesn't work." I'd use it as a descriptive term, rather than a value judgment. My basic assumption is that writers know what they're doing, until proven otherwise.

I'd ask why the rhyme is wrenched, why the poet chose that word/rhyme?

There's a poem by John Donne called "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star," where he has this bit:

Teach me to hear mermaids singing ,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind (ll. 5-9).

Wind = wind; the motion of air, as in "a wind in the door". In Donne's day, in Britain, wind for air was pronounced the way the verb for what we do to an analog watch, in turning the stem, and actually rhymed with "find."

Wind is frequently perceived as a "wrenched" rhyme today, because a lot of people don't realize that the language changed; the words all rhymed when Donne wrote the poem.

Generally, when poets do something, whether or not the poet is consciously aware of making a decision, I'd say it likely merits a closer look.

kdnxdr said:

"each line of the poem can be divided into feet, and each foot into light (or weak) and heavy stresses."

So, is the natural pattern allternating the light and heavy stresses as a norm?

I feel like I'm trying to learn to dance with two left feet.

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Look up some random words in a dictionary; if you've got a printed one, just open it up. In the pronunciation key part you'll see words have stress--and the emphasis or stress can even change the way the word sounds.

Normally, we say "SYL la ble

And if we emphasize the second syllable of "syllable," the word sounds odd:

syl LA ble

And yes, there's a tendency in English for verse to naturally fall into iambs, weak strong, patterns--it's because of the way words are made, actually.

And you'll notice that there's a tendency for verbs to bear heavy stress in English poetry.

One of the easiest ways to practice scanning is to read a sonnet out loud, and try to mark the syllables you stress naturally when you read the sonnet.

Then you go back and see what patterns, if any, you observe.

In some ways, the "differences," the departure from the pattern, are most interesting; it's a sign to go look at what else the poet is doing in that line.

Sonnets tend to be "14 lines of iambic pentameter," except you'll find in the middle of the line, a few "feet" that aren't iambic, or, say with Sidney and Shakespeare, entire lines of Alexandrines, or iambic hexameter; six iambs in a line.

My Daughter and Apple Pie -Raymond Carver

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
out of the oven. A little steam rises
from the slits on top. Sugar and spice -
cinnamon - burned into the crust.
But she's wearing these dark glasses
in the kitchen at ten o'clock
in the morning - everything nice -
as she watches me break off
a piece, bring it to my mouth,
and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,
in winter. I fork the pie in
and tell myself to stay out of it.
She says she loves him. No way
Could it be worse.

Theodore Roethke:


"Was nature kind? The heart's core tractable?
All waters waver, and all fires fail.
Leaves, leaves, lean forth and tell me what I am;
This single tree that turns to purest flame.
I am a man, a man at intervals.
Pacing a room, a room with dead white walls;
I feel the autumn fail - all that slow fire
denied in me, who has denied desire."

T.S. Eliot, from The Wasteland:

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

Just a few

more about metered poetry

kdnxdr said:

"each line of the poem can be divided into feet, and each foot into light (or weak) and heavy stresses."

So, is the natural pattern allternating the light and heavy stresses as a norm?

I feel like I'm trying to learn to dance with two left feet.

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Kid, not necessarily. Alternating stress (or accent) on syllables applies only to iambic and to trochaic, two types of feet containing two syllables.

Other two-syllable foot types have the same accent on both syllables. Using my informal Morse Code ID method, spondee equates to M (dah-dah) and pyrrhic is I (dit-dit). There are other foot types and they have three syllables: dactyl = D (dah-dit-dit) and anapest = U (dit-dit-dah).

There may be even more foot types, I dunno. Regarding the Morse Code characters, that archaic means is now nearly obsolete, but anyone familiar with it can relate all this.

Remember that the pattern for meter is a specific number of uniform feet making up a line of verse. Although there are valid exceptions, that firm guideline is the proper concern of the poem maker. The chosen words of the writer-poet will correctly fit into that template. For the reader-reciter, those words will roll smoothly right off the tongue -- no sweat, no strain, no pain.

kdnxdr said:

To be honest Duke, this statement : "For the reader-reciter, those words will roll smoothly right off the tongue -- no sweat, no strain, no pain." helped more than anything.

When this type of information isn't in your normal routine of the day, it's "Greek"; you know what I mean?

So, the "no sweat, no strain, no pain" comment helped "bring it down"; you know what I mean?

kid

PS: I'm a bit "under the weather"...so please excuse - you know what I mean?

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You bet I do. I'm really glad you started this thread because I'm oriented to this kind of stuff more than free verse. I admire much of the free verse in AW and the skills of free verse poets, but I am a real novice with it. I'm also very pleased to read all the info that Medievalist gave us today.

Kid, I'm wishing you health, wealth, and happiness -- but mostly good health right now.

kdnxdr said:

My brain focused on the word scansion and I feel that I need to get so simplistic to understand exactly how these different mechanics function.
I realize I just need to practise, practise, practise reading and then maybe doing some kind of lessons where I write how the stress patterns of different poems?

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Clap the beat as you read. Works wonders.

kdnxdr said:

I realize I just need to practice, practice, practice reading and then maybe doing some kind of lessons where I write how the stress patterns of different poems?

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Just read a lot; mark the words or syllables you emphasize. Sonnets are an easy place to start since they're going to be mostly lines of iambic pentameter, and when the poet departs--say half a line is iambic, and the second half isn't--figure out why and what. Sometimes an entire line will be different, a line of hexameter, for instance.

The public library will probably have:

Hollander, John. Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse. Third Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

kdnxdr said:

Thank you!

I'll look for that book.

And, practise my clapping. Seriously.

kid

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Some people find tapping with a pencil works better for them, using it as a sort of ersatz drumstick. I'm not sure why it works better for some, but it does.