Meter
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The bible of most poets today regarding meter and sound is a book
by Paul Fussell called Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Although
some of Fussell’s ideas are a bit outdated (namely, he doesn’t
deal with the visual elements of a poem), his approach is complete,
concise and useful. Fussell defines meter as "what results
when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened,
organized, and regulated so that [repetition] emerges from the relative
phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance." (4-5) To "meter"
something, then, is to "measure" it (the word meter
itself is derived from the Greek for measure), and there
are four common ways to view meter.
- Syllabic: A general counting of syllables per line.
- Accentual: A counting of accents only per line. Syllables
may vary between accents.
- Accentual-syllabic: A counting of syllables and accents.
Syllables may not vary between accents.
- Quantitative: Measures the duration of words.
Of the ways of looking at meter, the most common in English are
those that are accentual. English, being of Germanic origin, is
a predominantly accentual language. This means that its natural
rhythms are not found naturally from syllable to syllable, but rather
from one accent to the next. There may be two or three syllables
between accents. For this reason most English language poets opt
to look at their own meter as accentual or accentual-syllabic.
The former is the more common; adherence to the latter often leads
an English language poet toward self-conscious verse, as their predictable
rhythms are counter to natural English speech.
To get a bearing on what these rhythms look and sound like, let’s
start with a method for writing out the rhythms of a poem. This
technique is called scansion, and is important because it
puts visual markers onto an otherwise entirely heard phenomenon.
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"The nature
of music is that you must hear all the digressions." From "The
Blue Swan" by Diane Wakowski |
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.
- ~ = an unaccented syllable
- ` = an accented syllable
- /= a break between poetic feet
- _= a caesura, or metrical pause
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. The accented syllables are marked by ‘ and
the non-accented with ö. The symbol / shows the break between the feet
of the poem, and _ shows a caesura in the line.
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.
Poetic Feet
There are two parts to the term iambic pentameter. The first part
refers to the type of poetic foot being used predominantly in the
line. A poetic foot is a basic repeated sequence of meter comprised of
two or more accented or unaccented syllables. In the case of an iambic
foot, the sequence is ö ‘, or "unaccented, accented".
There are other types of poetic feet commonly found in English language
poetry.
The primary feet are referred to using these terms (an example word from
Fussell’s examples is given next to them):
- Iambic: destroy
- Anapestic: intervene
- Trochaic: topsy
- Dactylic: merrily
The substitutive feet (feet not used as primary, instead used to supplement
and vary a primary foot) are referred to using these terms:
- Spondaic: hum drum
- Pyrrhic: the sea/ son of/ mists
The second part of defining iambic pentameter has to do with line
length.
Line Length
The poetic foot then shows the placement of accented and unaccented
syllables. But the second part of the term, pentameter, shows the
number of feet per line. In the case of pentameter, there are basically
five feet per line.
The types of line lengths are as follows:
- One foot: Monometer
- Two feet: Dimeter
- Three feet: Trimeter
- Four feet: Tetrameter
- Five feet: Pentameter
- Six feet: Hexameter
- Seven feet: Heptameter
- Eight feet: Octameter
Rarely is a line of a poem longer than eight feet seen in English language
poetry.
Line length and poetic feet are most easily seen in more formal verse.
The example above from D.G. Rossetti is pretty obviously iambic pentameter.
And Rossetti uses an accentual-syllabic meter to flesh out his
poem with quite a bit of success. What most free verse poets find more
useful than this strict form is accentual meter, where the accents only
are counted in the line (although when scanned, the syllables are still
marked off...it is just that their number is not of as much import.)
Take this free-verse example from James Merrill:
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(Merrill 3)
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Things to note about this poem:
There is no any "set" meter in this poem, but the meter clearly
plays a key role in its effectiveness. In particular it is worth noting
the line that stands alone (line 7). Notice that Merrill moves toward
iambic pentameter in line 6 and then sustains it through line 7. Here
there is an inversion from the typical set-meter/variation sequence that
is found in a lot of more formal poetry. Here the variation comes in the
move into set meter, rather than varying from a set meter.
Just like establishing a visual pattern in a poem, establishing a meter
creates expectations in your reader. Consequently, as with pattern, to
vary that meter is to create emphasis. Some will say that your ear should
be the first judge on these matters rather than your eye (looking at the
scanned poem). There is probably some truth to this. Many poets will tell
you that you should always read a poem out loud several times every time
you get a draft done. If it doesn’t sound good every time, there
might be something that isn’t working. This is where scanning the
poem might come in handy; dissecting the lines and sculpting them until
they sound better.
Handout written by Sean Conrey
HTML markup by Erin Karper
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