Meter, Rhythm, & Cadence

[Tzara]

For some time, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a thread about meter and rhythm in poetry. I’ve kept putting if off because I couldn’t think of how to structure it in a way that encouraged discussion.

I’m sorry to say that I still haven’t thought of a good way to do that, so what you’re gonna get is me pontificating about the topic with the sincere hope that people will manage to turn this into a discussion despite me.

It’s probably going to start out looking like a lecture (with homework, sorry) but it’s all really only my opinions about the topic. It's not like I have a PhD in the subject, or even that I have watched a lot of PoetryTV. I am probably wrong. Usually, I am. Please offer your own opinions, which are likely to be both better developed and more coherent than mine.

And always, always, feel free to whack me upside the head if I’m being stupid. Well, when I’m being stupid. Which will be, like, often.

Whew.

Anyway. Let’s get started—meter.

My experience is that when we’re talking about meter, we are talking about a very specific and formal and (mostly) restrictive pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. The number of stressed syllables determines the “number” of the meter—whether lines are trimeter (three beats per line), tetrameter (four), pentameter (five), or something else. In a pentametric line (yeah, I like big words, even when they are neologisms), you have five beats, or emphasized syllables. Think of Shakespeare:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
​

When you look at how that line is pronounced, paying attention to the stressed and unstressed syllables, you end up with this, at least if you read it the way I do (unstressed in lower case, stressed in upper case):

but SOFT, what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?
​

Five stressed syllables, so pentameter. (That’s actually oversimplifying things, but we’ll leave that for now.)

The other component of meter is the metrical foot. A pentametric line is composed of five metrical feet, however they are defined. (There is, of course, some loosey gooseiness about this, but it’s so confusing that it’s a never you no mind kind of thing.)

The metrical foot is the basis of meter. English has several common metrical feet: the iamb (unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable, as in “attempt”), the trochee (other way around, as in “apple”), the anapest (unstressed, unstressed, stressed), the dactyl (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), the spondee (stressed, stressed) and the pyrrhic (unstressed, unstressed). Probably others. Those are all my books wanted to talk about.

To make a poetic line, you combine the foot with the meter. So iambic pentameter is a line of five units of unstressed followed by stressed syllables:

da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH

But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?
​

This gets more complicated, as you might imagine, with more sophisticated schemes.

I am not, unfortunately, sophisticated, so what I want to start out with as discussion is two poems, or, actually, parts of two poems: the beginning lines of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

All I would ask you guys to do (I stupidly feel like I assigning homework here—you of course do not need to do this) is read these two examples. Read them, as much as you can, simply as rhythm. React to them simply as rhythm—though I do want you to pay some attention to the words. Just not too much attention.

Anyway, here’s the samples:

(from) "Trees"
by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
​

Sorry. Only a fragment, because I want to introduce the semi-isomorphic equivalent:

(from) "Kubla Khan"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
​

Well, yeah. Five lines versus four. I have a reason for that, which we'll talk about later.

Both of these segments are, to my ear, iambic tetrameter (the first four lines of Coleridge only, of course): That is, lines composed of four iambs—i THINK that I shall NEVer SEE, and so on.

So to the comment thingie, where I abjectly whine for other people's comment. Read these two excerpts and think about them primarily from the standpoint of rhythm. What’s different, if anything, about them? Tell me about it. Tell me about whatever, for that matter (keeping on writerly topic, of course).

There absolutely are no wrong answers. It’s an exercise, folks. The only rule I insist on is that you be civil with your fellow authors. No insulting language, please, though feel free to disagree.

Chat, please.

Chat. Please.

Please?

 

[champagne1982]

I hear these kind of like songs with musical time signatures.

The first in 4/4 time: STRONG weak Medium weak - I think That I shall NEV er See

Khubla Khan in 3/4 time: STRONG weak weak - (REST rest)in XA na du DID khu bla KHAN a sta TELY plea sure DOME de cree

Both poems are in fact in iambic feet but when read as a package with content playing a greater factor than the rules of language allow; apart from such consideration, the musicality comes through. Quite strongly to my ear, anyway.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

I had to think hard about this, since to a certain extent I know I'm supposed to like one better than the other. So I tried to pretend I didn't know that, and just listen to the excerpts without bias.

But I still liked the sound of the Coleridge passage better, and I think part of my preference for one over the other has to do with the pure sound of the lines. There's something bouncy, and a little shrill, about the vowel sounds in the Oates passage. The vowels are bright: think, never, see, lovely, tree. For the most part the mouth is tense when it's forming those words. By contrast, Coleridge is using more open a's and long u's: Xanadu, Kubla Khan, pleasure, dome. There are more liquid consonants. Esthetically, that's just more appealing to me: more roll, less bounce.

But you asked about rhythm. What's happening here with the rhythm (i dunno, maybe, I dunno) is that in the Oates piece is that the iambs are more often ending with something that stops the line or seems like a hard beat (think, against, sweet, I) rather than a liquid movement.

And there are more r's in Coleridge's piece. I like r's.

shit, I dunno. I'll probably fail the quiz. Is there a quiz? When's the midterm?

*casually tosses an apple on the desk on the way out, crossing fingers*

bj

 

[Tzara]

...There's something bouncy, and a little shrill, about the vowel sounds in the Oates passage....

Oates?

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Oates?

Feh. Kilmer. You know what I meant.

This was the post you had to focus on, to the detriment of a naked parka festival with cheese and jacuzzis and strip monopoly?

bj

 

[Tzara]

As I said earlier, this was not a test, and there is not a "correct" answer. Since we all have different accents and read poems differently, it is quite possible that you don't hear any difference between the Kilmer and the Coleridge examples.

To respond to BJ's supposition that one of these examples is supposed to be "better" than the other, that was not my intent. I suppose that my choosing the Kilmer poem suggests that, but I might have easily have chosen an example from Wordsworth (e.g., "She Was a Phantom of Delight") instead, which to my ear exhibits the same quality I'm trying to get at in the Kilmer fragment.

As I indicated before, both fragments (ignoring the fifth line from "Kubla Khan") are, the way I hear them, in well-formed iambic tetrameter. By "well-formed," I mean each line is composed of four iambic feet—there are no extraneous syllables and no "short" (missing syllable) lines. This assumes you hear the word "poem" in the Kilmer as a two-syllable trochaic word: PO•em. The common accent in my part of the USA is to pronounce the word as a single syllable—POME—which is probably why I usually recall the line as "A poem as lovely as a tree," which makes the line properly iambic for that pronunciation.

Assuming you hear/pronounce the word the proper way, the Kilmer fragment (indeed, the entire poem) has an extremely uniform meter, which the only vocal pause (again, as I hear it) falling at the end of each line. Indeed, the majority of the lines in the entire poem are end-stopped with punctuation. The result is a kind of motoric (or, perhaps, monotonous) rhythm, which is what I think Champie is getting at with her likening it to a 4/4 time signature:

da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH (pause)
da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH (pause)
and so on...​

My point is that in the fragment (indeed, in the entire poem) there is no variation in this rhythm—no significant enjambment to "hurry" the reader across a line break (an effect Angie has mentioned in the past to help make metrical verse sound less forced), nor any caesura (internal break in the line) to muck with the rhythm.

An example of caesura is in the line from Romeo and Juliet that I used as my original example:

But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?​

which most people would read as

but SOFT (pause) what LIGHT from YONder WINdow BREAKS​

When writing in a fixed meter, the use of a technique like this helps make the language sound less stilted and robotic and, hence, more natural. That effect is basically what I hear in Coleridge (you may not, of course).

When I read the lines in the Coleridge fragment, I hear (whether I read them aloud or silently) distinct, though very short, pauses in lines one and three and just the hint of one in line two. Line four is the only one that sounds straightforward to me. I won't call these true caesurae, but they're quite noticable to me:

in XANa DU (hesitation) did KUBla KHAN (hesitation)
a STATEly PLEASure DOME (microhesitation) deCREE (hesitation)
where ALPH, (hesitation) the SACred RIVer, (hesitation) RAN (hesitation)
through CAVerns MEAsureLESS to MAN (hesitation)​

Again, this may just be how I read this—you may hear a different rhythm—but it's what makes the Coleridge fragment less monotonous and more natural for me than the Kilmer example.

Now let me say something about BJ's suggestion that "one is better than the other."

I won't pretend to think these poems are of equal quality. I think the Coleridge is much more sophisticated both metrically and thematically than the Kilmer. You may, of course, feel otherwise. But I do think that Kilmer's use of a plain and simple metrical technique fits the thematic content of his poem very well. "Trees" is a poem written from a simple and pious viewpoint. It wouldn't work as well if it weren't written with very simple and straightforward techniques. So whatever I might think of the poem itself, I don't think the problem is due to a rigid metrical structure.

OK—enough from me for now. Even I sometimes get tired of listening to me bloviate on about things I know very little about. Like I said, I don't really know how to encourage discussion on this general topic, so if anyone else has a good idea on how to do it, go right ahead.

Thanks for being patient. Or for putting me on Ignore, as the case may be.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

I hear you get five extra points for making reference to enjambment.

The thing that I notice about meter is that there isn't necessarily a way to judge it concretely, nor to write it "well" unless it's already at least a potential talent. Maybe it's a bit like musical skill that way: all the training in the world won't help if it's just not in you to be able to carry a tune, but natural talent can always be improved with technical skill.

The main problem with a lot of the "I just wrote my first poem" sorts of submissions is that they're in meter, which isn't inherently wrong, obviously, but can get annoying if it's a) TOO regular, or b) inattentive and therefore in constant violation of the form.

Too regular, and what I would consider not working hard enough, would be an example like:

I want to stand out in the rain
I want for you to feel my pain.

It's just too easy. It doesn't really communicate an image, and there's no real complexity to it. I noticed that in the KILMER passage there were no words more than two syllables, and very few of those. To me, there's a feel of not trying very hard in that. By contrast, Coleridge is routinely using three-syllable, or hyphenated words like pleasure-dome, that make the line flow along better. But your point about the fact that Kilmer is going for piety, inspiration and a hymn-like quality is well taken. As that, it's "good."

The other way to write really bad meter is to be inattentive:

I want to stand out in the pouring rain
I want for everyone to feel and understand the way I am in pain.

If you're going to use the tool, use it right. Or break the rules with intent; have a reason for doing so.

meh. just my meaningless two scents, to keep it going.

bj

 

[PandoraGlitters]

I agree with Bijou that metrical ability is a kind of musicality. However, it is different from actual musicality. When I began writing poems, they sounded like songs. When I began reading poems, the poems I wrote began to sound like poems.

While most anyone can sing in one sense, very few people would call themselves singers. One's early metrical attempts are not so dissimilar from singing and doing so while posting here is singing in public. Is having an exposure to a rich variety of formal poetry the equivalent of voice training? How important is formal poetry in the development of a poet?

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Anyway, here’s the samples:

(from) "Trees"
by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
​

Sorry. Only a fragment, because I want to introduce the semi-isomorphic equivalent:

(from) "Kubla Khan"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
​

Well, yeah. Five lines versus four. I have a reason for that, which we'll talk about later.

The difference is that in the Coleridge, the diction is multisyllabic, ambiguating (is that a word?) the strength of the some of the stresses. The stressed syllable of the multisyllabic forms a kind of a strong beat which successive strong beats seem to echo (as with dome and less).

 

[unpredictablebijou]

I agree with Bijou that metrical ability is a kind of musicality. However, it is different from actual musicality. When I began writing poems, they sounded like songs. When I began reading poems, the poems I wrote began to sound like poems.

While most anyone can sing in one sense, very few people would call themselves singers. One's early metrical attempts are not so dissimilar from singing and doing so while posting here is singing in public. Is having an exposure to a rich variety of formal poetry the equivalent of voice training? How important is formal poetry in the development of a poet?

That's a really good post, and good questions.

My opinion is that playing with form is like playing your scales and practicing your arpeggios. It doesn't necessarily mean that the practice itself is going to generate anything really worthwhile, but it's important to stay limber and form, rhyme and meter make the brain stretch.

I really struggle with form, but I think it's important to continue to play with every possible kind of line and rhythm and word game, just as even professional vocalists or musicians continue to work on their chops.

It's always nice when one can generate a "good" form poem, but even if nothing comes out of it but bad hash, it's still a way to limber up.

And yeah, I'd say that exposure to the variety of choices there are in both form and free poetry is just as important as learning to read music and listening to every genre is to the education of a musician. A jazz musician may never play opera or hymns or trance, but listening to those forms will influence and inform the skills, making the jazz higher quality.

bj

 

[Tzara]

I hear you get five extra points for making reference to enjambment.

No, not really. I will, though, buy you a drink and try to look down your blouse.

The thing that I notice about meter is that there isn't necessarily a way to judge it concretely, nor to write it "well" unless it's already at least a potential talent. Maybe it's a bit like musical skill that way: all the training in the world won't help if it's just not in you to be able to carry a tune, but natural talent can always be improved with technical skill.

The main problem with a lot of the "I just wrote my first poem" sorts of submissions is that they're in meter, which isn't inherently wrong, obviously, but can get annoying if it's a) TOO regular, or b) inattentive and therefore in constant violation of the form.

Too regular, and what I would consider not working hard enough, would be an example like:

I want to stand out in the rain
I want for you to feel my pain.

It's just too easy. It doesn't really communicate an image, and there's no real complexity to it. I noticed that in the KILMER passage there were no words more than two syllables, and very few of those. To me, there's a feel of not trying very hard in that. By contrast, Coleridge is routinely using three-syllable, or hyphenated words like pleasure-dome, that make the line flow along better. But your point about the fact that Kilmer is going for piety, inspiration and a hymn-like quality is well taken. As that, it's "good."

You are, like, writing my text here, babe. Basically what I was going to say. Well, except that Coleridge was stoned at the time (on "two grains of opium, taken to check a dysentery"), which might have made him more inventive, poetically. Or explains why "Kubla Khan" is a "fragment" and not a completed poem.)

(Ahem.) No, I am certainly not advocating drug use. Just pointing out what Sam said.

And, yes, you further complete sentences I have not yet even begun to speak:

The other way to write really bad meter is to be inattentive:

I want to stand out in the pouring rain
I want for everyone to feel and understand the way I am in pain.

If you're going to use the tool, use it right. Or break the rules with intent; have a reason for doing so.

Yep, that's the other common problem. But, you know, we all start somewhere.

I'm getting a bit off-topic here, but as BJ points out, one of the biggest problems with novice poets is that they try to write metrical, rhymed poetry. And that's really, really hard to do well. So these novice types are almost always, despite what they have to say, despite what their literary talent is, subject to failure.

That is to say: They're bad.

Either forced regular rhyme-and-meter wise or rhymed but erratic, metrically.

There is no good and easy way out of that, of course. You simply have to write and work your way through it. One gets better by writing a lot and by thinking about what one has written.

(And reading any even mildly competent criticism one has managed to attract.)

This whole thing does not so much make you a bad writer as an inexperienced one.

Practice. Experiment. Even Yeats and Shakespeare were bad at one time. They just destroyed the bad stuff.

Though not everyone agrees even about that.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

The thing about practicing is that it's just that: practice. Not every session is going to generate something brilliant. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't play your scales, over and over.

Reminds me of something my grandfather told me. He leaned conspiratorially toward me one day and said, "Want to know the secret to always taking good photographs?"

Fished in, I said, oh yes, tell me, grandpa.

"Throw away the bad ones," he said, and slapped me on the ass.

Grandpa was a caution.

Sorry if I was premature on the next section of your lecture. I just get all excited.

*adjusts neckline*

bj

 

[Tzara]

I know. I've been in absentia. Sorry.

So here. Two versions:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.​

Compare that with this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
To end in sunless sea.​

So. Is one better? Why?

I have an opinion, of course, but I'm interested in yours.

 

[champagne2008]

The first because the second sort of fritters off and fizzles out to nothing whereas the hard beat, Down spikes the line into interest and then it seems to pass it into expectation rather than conclusion.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

First, the ideas are different. "Down to" gives a sense of motion; there may be something beyond that sea, or something further to say about it. "To end" implies just that; there is an end to the motion of the eye. Now we're done with the journey, as it were.

Second, the sound and feel are different. "Down to" is an open 'o' sound, a rolling motion, and puts the emphasis on the first syllable of the line so that it flows along. "To end" has tighter vowels in it and seems less lush, and it speeds up the reading of the line, since we're likely to read it more quickly when the second syllable is the one emphasized.

Maybe. I think.

bj

 

[Tzara]

Well, you both are on track with my way of thinking about it, which isn't "right," of course—just how I read the poem.

What these two versions have in common is that they both terminate the last line "early." If you look at the first lines,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man​

they're all in iambic tetrameter. STC could have dropped in another Ia4 line, like

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
To empty into sunless sea.​

Now, forget my dopey word choice. I am not Coleridge, even in a mask on Halloween. But I think if you look at the rhythm of that version, it's kind of boring:

da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH
da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH....​

Yes, he introduces some nuance as I talked about earlier, but basically they march ahead in iambic tetrameter.

The change he introduces is that short last line, in trimeter.

What that does is bring the routine tetrameter march to a rather abrupt halt, but it also reflects, I think, what the image in the poem is at that point: a river emptying into a sea—its flow chopped as it reaches its destination.

But there's more, of course.

"Kubla Khan," at least this first part of it, is one of the first bits of poetry I ever memorized. What I've always loved about it is its rhythm, which seems distinctive, almost jazzy, to me—and it's all about that last line.

That line is trimeter, as I said, which chops the rhythm of the poem. But it's also non-iambic, at least as Coleridge wrote it. If you look at my rewritten version:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
To end in sunless sea.​

You get the "chop" effect of cutting the line short, but that's all you get (assuming, of course, you hear/read this as iambic: to END in SUNless SEA).

That's good, of course, as it emphasizes the river terminating abruptly into the sea, but since the meter stays the same (i.e., iambic), that's the only effect you get.

But, when you look at what Coleridge actually wrote

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.​

you join rhythm to meaning. The stress pattern (as I read it), DAH dah dah DAH dah DAH, with that inverted first iamb makes it a "downhill" pattern. The rhythm of the poem sounds like a stream running downhill, down and up and over rocks, to drop suddenly into a larger body of water.

I mean, like genius. The words, the image, and the rhythm of the piece come together to reinforce the whole.

Well, as I read it anyway. Sorry. I'm just some guy, you know.

Anyway, the next thing I want to talk about is this poem by the late Mike Ford, which I think is both quite funny and very interesting rhythmically, especially the refrain.

But, later. I have to go sit in a corner and rock my head against the wall.

 

[darkmaas]

bbump

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

bbump

Short on rhythm, lacking meter but has a certain cadence......

 

[Liar]

Short on rhythm, lacking meter but has a certain cadence......

it's iambic unimeter

b-BUMP

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

it's iambic unimeter

b-BUMP

alterately - ba-da-bump. or does that make it iambic duometer?

(my head hurts)

 

[darkmaas]

Re: bbump

Sorry to disappoint but it's merely Canadian spelling.

Actually lit. refuses posts with fewer than 5 letters. I spent a while considering what to do. I rejected a transparent letter as too devious and a longer post as a waste of pixels. Ultimately I decided to simply repeat a letter. I considered "buump" but thought that double vowels a bit too precious. "bummp" has a nice look about it but it seems to empasize the "bum" and this is the clean side of the forum. "bumpp" just seemed wrong on so many levels so .... bbump it is.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Will we be discussing pandemic catheter?

I think Byron used that meter occasionally. And Poe.

bj

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Do they catheterize pandas????

 

[UnderYourSpell]

*shocked*

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

*shocked*

not half as much as the panda!