Guide to Poetic Meter

Before we get into all this . . .

If you take nothing else away from this section, take this advice/caution:

scansion, i.e. the practice of identifying stress patterns in a line of poetry, is as much art as it is science.

Prosody–“the study of measurable structures of sound in language and in poetry” (Greene 1117)–is complicated business that draws on thousands of years of practice in literature, linguistics, as well as material and textual production. As such, we as readers do not concern ourselves with meter so we can “get it right.” We concern ourselves with meter so that we can more deeply understand the poem and the poet’s artistry and modes of communication.

In other words: scansion is not a test. It’s a tool.

What is meter?

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, 4th edition:

“Meter is the measure of sound pattering in verse, occurring when a rhythm is repeated throughout a passage of language with such regularity that a base unit (such as a foot) becomes a norm and governs poetic composition. Meter is an idealized pattern, a cultural construct understood as artistic shaping of the sound pattern of a language. All languages possess the makings of metrical systems. Metrical verse works the basic properties of a given language to a more highly regularized level” (italicized emphasis mine, 872).

What is scansion?

“To scan” a poem we read through each line, analyzing the patterns of stress/unstressed syllables, from which we determine the type and number of metrical feet. We also look for pauses in the line, particularly casesuras.

A “scansion” is a marked up text with the stresses indicated by symbols, generally a breve (looks like a half moon) for unstressed/weak syllables and an accent mark (′) for stressed/strong syllables. Casesuras are indicated with two slashed lines (//).

What is a foot?

Generally in studying English poetry, we rely on a binary system; that is, we look only for patterns of strong/stressed syllables and weak/unstressed syllables.^[1] A foot is a recurring pattern of stressed/unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

There are four primary metrical feet in English:

• iambic (noun – “iamb”): an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
• trochaic (noun = “trochee”): one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. “Most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable–in the technical term, such lines are catalectic” (Abrams 169).
• anapestic (noun = “anapest”): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.
• dactylic (noun is “dactyl”): one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllable.

Two other feet occur in English as variants of the primary four: the spondaic (“spondee”), which is two syllables with equal strong stresses and the pyrrhic (“pyrrhic”), which is a foot made up of two syllables with equally light stress.

So what is “the meter” of a poem?

“The meter” is indicated by the type of metrical foot and the number of feet per line. The metrical lines are named as follows:

1. monometer: one foot
2. dimeter: two feet
3. trimeter: three feet
4. tetrameter: four feet
5. pentameter: five feet
6. hexameter: six feet
7. heptameter: seven feet
8. octameter: eight feet

So, a verse line with five iambs (“The cur | few tolls  | the knell | of part | ing day”^[2]) is  line of iambic pentameter = “iambic” indicating what kind of metrical foot we have, and “pentameter” indicating how many metrical feet we have per line.

So what does looking at meter do for us as readers? What do we gain from it?

Examining meter lets us see how a poet uses sound consciously and deliberately within lines of poetry to create particular effects. If we pay attention to meter, we begin to see how poets structure and manipulate sound for various effects. Sometimes these effects reinforce the poem’s subject; sometimes they work in opposition to it. Sometimes these effects show us how a poet is working within a particular poetic tradition; sometimes these effects show us how a poet is trying to blow a traditional expectation to smithereens.

M. H. Abrams reminds us that there is “considerable dispute about the most valid or useful way to analyze and classify English meters” (168). And despite what we may have been taught at some point, we can “distinguish a number of degrees of syllabic stress in English speech” (Abrams 168). At the end of the day, though, the “most common and generally useful fashion of analyzing classifying the standard English meters is ‘binary’. That is, we distinguish only two categories–strong stress and weak stress–and group the syllables into metric feet according to the patterning of these two degrees” (Abrams 168).

For our purposes in class, we will follow the standard pattern in examining meter, looking at what Abrams describes above: strong and weak stress, sometimes referred to as “stressed” and “unstressed” syllables.

When we are looking at a line of poetry, please remember: we are always looking for where the stresses naturally fall in the words/lines. We are not looking to impose unnatural sounds on the line.

For example, if we look at the opening line of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” we find a wonderful example of a “fifteener”: a fifteen-syllable line of poetry. In the case of “Locksley Hall,” the poem is written in trochaic octameter: “trochaic” indicating the type of poetic foot in the line, and “octameter” telling us how many poetic feet the line contains.

TO BE CONTINUED

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th ed. Thompson/ Wadsworth, 2005.

Greene, Roland, and Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2012.