On Meter

[Tzara]

What is meter? While not so difficult to define as poetry (Hirsch, in A Poet's Glossary, quotes some twenty-five different descriptions of what poetry is from as many poets), it isn't all that straightforward. It has something to do with rhythm in verse, particularly a regularized or repetitive rhythm, but what defines that rhythm varies, particularly between different languages. Paul Fussell, in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, divides meter into four distinct types: syllabic, accentual, quantitative, and accentual-syllabic.

Syllabic meter is based, as one would guess, on the number of syllables in a line. Most people are familiar with this idea through Japanese poetry, where forms like the haiku and tanka specify a particular syllabic pattern to the lines of the form (i.e. the 5-7-5 of haiku or the 5-7-5-7-7 of tanka). Japanese is not a language where stress is prominent—Hirch labels it "syllable-timed" as opposed to German and English which are "accent-timed"—so it is perhaps logical that rhythm in Japanese is defined by the number of distinct syllables per line. (Note that using the term "syllable" in respect to Japanese is a inaccurate simplification. What is really specified are the number of morae or on—I'm a little confused about the distinction—which sometimes are the same as what we would call a syllable and sometimes are not. See this article on Japanese prosody and/or this one on Japanese phonology for more information.)

Some Romance languages (French comes particularly to mind) typically use syllabic meter. Though stress may be present, it "functions as a device of embellishment or rhetorical emphasis rather than as a criterion of the basic metrical skeleton of the line" (Fussell 7). So if you look at the original versions of forms derived from French, you usually find them defined as having syllabic meters; the triolet, for example, originated as having octosyllabic lines as opposed to the iambic tetrameter of the usual English triolet.

This isn't to say that no English language poems are written in syllabics, just that they are far less common than the usual accentual-syllabic meter. Marianne Moore is perhaps the best known poet to compose syllabic verse, often where a particular pattern of syllables would be repeated stanza by stanza, as in this famous example:

The Fish

wade
through black jade.

Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;

opening and shutting itself like​

an
injured fan.

The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide

there for the submerged shafts of the​

sun,
split like spun

glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—

in and out, illuminating​

the
turquoise sea

of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge

of the cliff; whereupon the stars,​

pink
rice-grains, ink-

bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine

toadstools, slide each on the other.​

All
external

marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—

all the physical features of​

ac-
cident—lack

of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand

out on it; the chasm-side is​

dead.
Repeated

evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive

its youth. The sea grows old in it.​

Another example would be Richard Wilbur's "Thyme Flowering Among Rocks," which uses the familiar 5-7-5 syllable structure as its stanzaic metrical form, giving the poem something of an "Asian sensibility" to resonate with the theme.

Of course, if you're interested in trying your hand at writing in syllabic meter, the simplest form would be to just write your poem using the same number of syllables per line.

 

[Tzara]

Accentual meter is kind of the opposite of syllabic meter. Where in syllabics stress doesn't matter except as a kind of embellishment of the line, in accentual verse stress is the only thing that matters. The meter of the line is determined wholly by the number of stressed syllables—unstressed syllables are not counted at all.

Dana Gioia, in his excellent essay about accentual verse (which I have cribbed from unmercifully for this post) begins his discussion by looking at a nursery rhyme:

Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.​

Here, each line has four strong stresses, but the lines all vary in both the number of syllables and the pattern of where the stressed syllables fall. Marking the basic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables, we get

Star light, star bright,
First star I see to·night,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish to·night.​

To interpret this in terms of accentual-syllabic verse, in the first line all syllables are stressed (i.e. form two spondees). The second line is a spondee followed by two iambs. The third line is pure iambic tetrameter and the fourth trochaic tetrameter with catalexis. In other words, they're all over the map.

This accentual structure is characteristic of many nursery rhymes, for example this one:

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full;
One for the mas·ter,
And one for the dame,
And one for the lit·tle boy
Who lives down the lane.​

Here, all the lines have two stresses, while the number of syllables range from three to seven.

All of this suggests, as one might expect, that in English accentual verse is a very old form of meter. Hirsch states that in fact "English poetry began in a pure accentual meter" (376), citing Piers Plowman and Beowulf as examples. In particular, early poetry in English featured what was called alliterative verse—lines containing four strong stresses separated into two halves by a medial caesura (pause), with usually three alliterative words between the two halves, as in these two lines from Beowulf

Oft Scyld Scefing || sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, || meodosetla ofteah,​

where || denotes the caesura, the bold type indicates the stressed syllables, and the italics show the alliteration (all kinda sorta as I don't read Old English).

Accentual verse gradually gave way (Hirsch dates this to the sixteenth century) to accentual-syllabic verse, which is what most English-speaking people nowadays would mean by "meter." As with syllabic verse, however, accentual verse is still employed at times by modern poets, either for specific artistic reasons or simply as a preferred rhythmic style. For example, W.H. Auden's long poem The Age of Anxiety utilizes alliterative verse. Gioia quotes this excerpt as an example:

Now the news. || Night raids on
Five cities. || Fires started.
Pressure applied || by pincer movement
In threatening thrust. || Third Division
Enlarges beachhead. || Lucky charm
Saves sniper. || Sabotage hinted
In steel-mill stoppage. || Strong point held
By fanatical Nazis. || Canal crossed...​

Note how the caesurae are generally created by punctuation, usually a period. Also some lines (e.g. "Five cities. Fires started.") employ a variation of the usual three alliterations, in this line having two pairs of alliterations (the "fi" of "five" and "fire" and the "s" sound of "cities" and "started".)

Dana Gioia, unsurprisingly, has himself written accentual verse, as in this example. "Nosferatu's Serenade" which is based on a strong four beat per line structure.

I also want to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose idiosyncratic "sprung rhythm" is basically a form of accentual verse (the Wikipedia article on sprung rhythm talks about how Hopkins' meter has some more restrictions than simple accentual verse). My favorite Hopkins poem, "Pied Beauty" features four-beat lines, as does this one, also in sprung rhythm, by R.S. Gwynn.

As with syllabics if you want to try writing accentual verse, it's probably best to start simply. Say a short poem of four-beat lines, or even something like a nursery rhyme.