Poetic Meter

In poetry, meter (metre in British English) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order. The study of meters and forms of versification is known as prosody. (Within linguistics, "prosody" is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetical meter but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal, which vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)

Poetic meter is measured in metrical feet. The most common types of metrical foot in English verse are the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, and the anapest. Along with rhyme scheme, meter is important in establishing a poem's mood and determining its poetic style. Meter is measured in units called "feet." The number of feet in each line dictates the meter of the poem.

A "foot" describes the basic unit of rhythm that a poem is built upon. In classical poetry, the foot was defined by how long it took to pronounce a syllable. This is known as quantitative meter. English is an accentual language, so English language meter is based on emphasis rather than length (accentual meter).

Metrical feet are usually two to four syllables long, with different arrangements of the stressed and unstressed syllables. The most common metrical feet in English language poetry are the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, and the anapest. Both the iamb and the trochee are disyllabic feet. The dactyl and the anapest are trisyllabic.

The iamb is the most common metrical foot in English verse. It is comprised of two syllables, the first unaccented and the second accented. The word "without" is an iamb.

The trochee is an iamb reversed. It has two syllables, but this time the first one is stressed and the second one is unstressed. The word "golden" is a trochee.

The dactyl has three syllables arranged as an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. The word "energy" is an example of a dactyl.

Anapests are dactyls in reverse (in fact, another name for the anapest is the antidactylus). Therefore, an anapest is two unstressed syllables followed by a long one. The word "volunteer" illustrates the stress pattern of an anapest.

These feet can be combined and arranged in any number of ways. Metrical feet may or may not conveniently fall at the beginning of a word or line; frequently a single foot contains many words, or one word may be composed of many feet (for example, the word "agoraphobia" contains two dactyls).


The poetic feet in classical meter -

Disyllables -

¯ = long syllable, ˘ = short syllable (macron and breve notation)

˘ ˘          pyrrhus, or dibrach

˘ ¯          iamb

¯ ˘          trochee, or choree (or choreus)

¯ ¯          spondee

Trisyllables -

˘ ˘ ˘          tribrach

¯ ˘ ˘          dactyl

˘ ¯ ˘          amphibrach

˘ ˘ ¯          anapest, or antidactylus

˘ ¯ ¯          bacchius

¯ ¯ ˘          antibacchius

¯ ˘ ¯          cretic, or amphimacer

¯ ¯ ¯          molossus

Tetrasyllables -

˘ ˘ ˘ ˘          tetrabrach, or proceleusmatic
         
¯ ˘ ˘ ˘          primus paeon

˘ ¯ ˘ ˘          secundus paeon

˘ ˘ ¯ ˘          tertius paeon

˘ ˘ ˘ ¯          quartus paeon
         
¯ ¯ ˘ ˘          major ionic, or double trochee

˘ ˘ ¯ ¯          minor ionic, or double iamb

¯ ˘ ¯ ˘          ditrochee

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯          diiamb
         
¯ ˘ ˘ ¯          choriamb

˘ ¯ ¯ ˘          antispast
         
˘ ¯ ¯ ¯          first epitrite

¯ ˘ ¯ ¯          second epitrite

¯ ¯ ˘ ¯          third epitrite

¯ ¯ ¯ ˘          fourth epitrite
         
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯          dispondee

Lines of verse are composed by stringing metrical feet together. Trimeter is composed of three metrical feet per line, tetrameter of four, pentameter of five, and so on.

Trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter are by far the most popular meters in English language verse. Hexameter (also known as Alexandrine verse when written in iambs) is most commonly found in French poetry. Lines composed with seven or more feet are not very common, although Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" is an example of a famous poem composed in trochaic octameter.

The following lines are all composed in iambs:

Iambic trimeter: "Go, soul, the body's guest/Upon a thankless errand..." - The Lie by Sir Walter Raleigh

Iambic tetrameter: "Still to be neat, still to be drest/As you were going to a feast..." from Epicoene by Ben Jonson

Iambic pentameter: "Thus is his cheek a map of days outworn..." - Sonnet 68 by William Shakespeare

Iambic hexameter: "As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fitt..." - from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

To determine the meter of a poem, first look at where the stresses fall in each line. Based on the stresses, the dominant rhythm of the poem can be established as iambic, trochaic, dactylic, or anapestic, or so on. Count the number of syllables in each line to determine the number of feet per line.

If there is one foot, it's called monometer; two feet, dimeter; three is trimeter; four is tetrameter; five is pentameter; six is hexameter, seven is heptameter and eight is octameter.

The meter of much poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on particular patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of meter in English-language poetry is called qualitative meter, with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in iambic pentameter, typically every even-numbered syllable). Many Romance languages use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable (e.g. the last) needs to be fixed. The meter of the old Germanic poetry of languages such as Old Norse and Old English was radically different, but still was based on stress patterns.

Many classical languages, however, use a different scheme known as quantitative meter, where patterns are based on syllable weight rather than stress. In dactylic hexameter of Classical Latin and Classical Greek, for example, each of the six feet making up the line was either a dactyl (long-short-short) or spondee (long-long), where a long syllable was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the meter. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative meter, such as Sanskrit and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew).

Scansion

There are three kinds of scansion: the graphic, the musical and the acoustic. Since the most commonly and most easily used is graphic, we will use it in our discussion. For a discussion of the others, I refer you to Fussell, page 18. To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan a poem.



Scanison Symbols

Syllables can either be accented, meaning they are naturally given more emphasis when spoken, or unaccented, meaning they receive less emphasis when spoken. A poetic foot is a unit of accented and unaccented syllables that is repeated or used in sequence with others to form the meter. A caesura is a long pause in the middle of a line of poetry.

To show an example of these symbols, let's look at a poem written with the less common, the accentual-syllabic meter, in mind. Here are three scanned lines from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Autumn Idleness":



You can then see, when comparing the reading of the poem to the scansion marks, how they compare. These lines are taken from a sonnet and thus somewhat predictably written in iambic pentameter. They thus have five accents per line and their syllable counts are 10/10/10. The term iambic pentameter often comes up in discussions of Shakespeare or any sonneteer, but the meaning of the term is often mistaken or simply overlooked. Defining iambic pentameter helps us break down two important parts of meter: poetic feet and line length.

Can you scan these poem excerpts?

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
--Emily Dickinson

Bats have webby wings that fold up;
Bats from ceilings hang down rolled up;
Bats when flying undismayed are;
Bats are careful; bats use radar;
--Frank Jacobs, “The Bat”

You know that it would be untrue,
You know that I would be a liar,
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.
Come on, baby, light my fire.
Try to set the night on fire.
--Jim Morrison, “Light My Fire