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.

 

[Waeponwifestre]

A while back I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with alliterative verse and I found a site I’d like to recommend if anyone is interested in the topic!

https://alliteration.net/

They’ve got a great guide on writing it as well as a selection of resources, poetry and other cool stuff.

 

[Tzara]

Quantitative meter is the characteristic metrical system of the classical meter of ancient Greek and Latin poetry (and, apparently, of modern Italian). Quantitative meter is based on the length or duration of a line and the elements of a line, specifically the length of individual syllables.

Syllables are considered to be either "long" or "short," with the duration of a long syllable being twice that of a short syllable. I think this is largely due to the type of vowel sound, where something like "bane" would be long and "bun" would be short (reflecting how the "long 'a'" and the short schwa affect the length of the word as pronounced).

Classical meter groups these syllables into different patterns or "feet," including such familiar groupings as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic feet (though these are, as mentioned above, based on duration instead of stress). But the classical meters include substantially more metrical patterns than English prosody normally recognizes, including choriambic, anacretonic, and Aeolic meters. The Wikipedia article on Greek and Latin meter lists a number of these, for those interested.

While there have been sporadic attempts to write poetry in quantitative meter in English, from Edmund Spenser in the 1500s to the present day, the practice has never caught on, probably because as Paul Fussell writes, "[t]he English language is simply so heavily accented by nature that no other of its characteristics but accent seems to furnish a basis for meter" (Poetic Meter and Poetic Form 14).

As such, I don't really have any good examples to post of quantitative meter in English. Spenser's "Iambicum Trimetrum" is often cited as an attempt to write quantitative meter in English (specifically, and confusingly, described as "iambic trimeter (i.e. hexameter)" [Fussell 13]), though what I hear are the stresses rather than the syllable durations.

I did try constructing a line in classical dactylic hexameter, for what it's worth:

rain·wat·er / pools on the / long green / fields of rice / cool·ing in / e·ven·ing​

and even included a substitution of a spondee in the third position (spondee=2 long syllables, which durationally is the same as a dactyl, which is a long and two short, where two shorts=one long). I don't find this convincing, though it was kind of interesting as an exercise.

Most English language poetry modelled on classical forms follows the general pattern of the classical line, but substitutes stress patterns for the classical duration pattern. Tennyson's "Milton" for example, is written in stress-based alcaics, a particular classical form originating with its eponymous author Alcaeus (roughly 625-580 BCE) and employed extensively in the Odes of Horace.

Good luck with this meter should you attempt it. I'd be interested in what anyone manages to come up with.

 

[Tzara]

Accentual-syllabic meter is a kind of combination of accentual verse and quantitative verse in that it is based on stress like accentual verse but "packages" particular multisyllable patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables into something akin to the various feet of quantitative poetry. In other words, it adapts the terminology of quantitative verse to a repetitive pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as metrical feet. A particular metrical foot is repeated a certain number of times to form a line. For example, look at this line from Romeo and Juliet:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?​

If we mark the strong stresses in the line, we get this:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?​

Notice the pattern: an unstressed syllable is always followed by a stressed syllable, and that two-syllable pattern occurs five times in the line:

But, soft! / what light / through yon / der win / dow breaks?​

That two-syllable pattern of unstressed followed by stressed (dah DUM) is called an iamb or an iambic foot. There are five iambs in the line, so in accentual-syllabic terms the line is in iambic pentameter.

Note that the iambs do not necessarily line up with the word boundaries. Both "yonder" and "window" split their syllables between successive feet. Note also that the first foot includes punctuation (both the comma and the exclamation mark) that, when the line is pronounced, would generate a brief pause or caesura in sound, but that this is not considered in looking at the line's meter, unlike it was in alliterative verse (see the previous post on accentual verse).

As one might expect, an iambic line can be formed from a different number of iambs, as is this one, from Joyce Kilmer's "Trees":

I think / that I / shall nev / er see​

Since there are four iambs in the line, this is an example of iambic tetrameter. Although technically a line can be written with any number of feet, pentameter and tetrameter are the most common in English, though monometer (one foot per line), dimeter (two feet per line), trimeter (three feet per line), and hexameter (six feet per line) also appear to varying degrees. Metrical verse in English with more than six feet in a line is quite rare, though by no means prohibited.

To go back to the line from Romeo and Juliet, let's look at the next line of the play, with the stresses marked:

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.​

So far so good, but what do we do with "Juliet"? Do we mark the syllables as "Ju·liet" or as "Ju·li·et"? The former kind of slurs the vowels together in a kind of diphthong, the latter kind of sounds overly precise and clipped. Which pronunciation is chosen affects how the line is broken into feet:

It is / the east, / and Ju / liet is / the sun.
It is / the east, / and Ju / li·et is / the sun.​

Actually, either is acceptable, though I suspect the former is usually preferred. The latter turns the fourth foot into an anapest, a trisyllabic foot of the form dah dah DUM. The anapestic foot then is a substitution, or a kind of variation or riff, in the line which still maintains its essentially iambic nature.

Sometimes, the poet "forces" a particular pronunciation on us, as does the second line of "Trees," for example:

A poem lovely as a tree​

I grew up pronouncing the word "poem" as if it were spelled "pome," i.e. as a single-syllable. If you mark the stresses and feet in Kilmer's line, though, you see he intended the word to be pronounced as two syllables "po·em"

A po / em love / ly as / a tree.​

to make it pure iambic tetrameter. Since the iambic feel of the poem is so strong, I tended to remember the line slightly altered

A poem / as love / ly as / a tree.​

inserting the first "as" to replace the unstressed syllable missing because of my monosyllabic pronunciation of "poem".

One last comment on the regularity of the metrical line: don't depend on a line in, say, iambic pentameter to be straightforwardly iambic. Consider probably the most famous line of iambic pentameter ever written:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:​

If we mark the stresses and feet in this line, we get the following:

To be, / or not / to be, / that is / the ques·tion:​

Things start out OK, with the first three feet straightforwardly iambic, but in the fourth foot the stress is backward (DUM dah instead of dah DUM) and in the last foot, there is a trailing unstressed syllable tacked onto the iamb.

Well, we've seen something like the fourth foot already, in the trisyllabic pronunciation of "Juliet" which could be considered an variation or substitution of an alternate foot for the iamb. It's the same here—the poet replaced an iamb with a trochee (a foot with the stress DUM dah). But unlike the "Ju·liet/Ju·li·et" situation, which was simply one of pronunciation, here the poet has substituted the trochee for an iamb for emphasis: "To be, or not to be, THAT is the question".

The concluding foot, with its unstressed syllable stuck on the end, is an example of a "feminine ending" (as opposed to a "masculine ending" which ends on a stressed syllable). The employment of a feminine ending perhaps reflects the poet's attempt to segue from the bold question he is addressing to a more considered and thoughtful analysis. (Or something like that.)

I have not yet talked much about the different kinds of feet, or stress patterns, in accentual-syllabic poetry, specifically the iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, and various other, less frequently used feet like the amphibrach, spondee, pyrrhic, etc. My intent is to treat each of these in separate posts, to follow.


Apologies if all this is tiresome. I know I'm on kind of a nerd rant about the subject.

 

[42BelowsBack]

This Thread is supurb.

 

[Tzara]

Iambic meter, particularly iambic pentameter, is the dominant metrical form in English language poetry, at least since the sixteenth century and according to some authorities much earlier (Hirsch cites Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in the late fourteenth century, as establishing iambic pentameter as a primary metrical line [A Poet's Glossary 379]). Here's the first four lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, rendered in Middle English. I will not attempt to mark the stressed syllables, but I think it's fairly clear there are five stresses per line, with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;​

The previous post covered several aspects of iambic verse, but to review:

• An iambic foot consists of a two syllable combination, where the first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable stressed (or, more accurately, the first syllable is relatively lightly stressed and the second syllable relatively strongly stressed. Think of the sequence dah-DUM).
• A line consisting predominantly of one or more iambic feet, within the context of a poem in which the lines consist of similarly predominant iambic feet, is in iambic meter.
• The number of feet in the line determines whether the line is iambic tetrameter (four iambs), iambic pentameter (five iambs), and so on (i.e. dimeter, trimeter, etc.). Pentameter and tetrameter are by far the most common in English.
• There are occasional deviations from the purely iambic line due to such things as substitutions (i.e. one of the iambs in a line is replaced by a different metrical foot, like a trochee or an anapest) and/or other stylistic manipulations, such as elision of a syllable, addition of an extra syllable, use of a feminine ending, etc.
• Not all lines in the poem may be of the same metrical length. (For example, common meter alternates iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter in four line stanzas.)

Let's look at an example of iambic verse that exhibits some of the variations. Here is Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice":

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.​

One of the first things one notices is that some of the lines are significantly shorter than others. If we mark the stresses and feet, we see that while most of the lines are in iambic tetrameter and some are in iambic dimeter:

Some say / the world / will end / in fire,
Some say / in ice.
From what / I’ve tast / ed of / de·sire
I hold / with those / who fav / or fire.
But if / it had / to per / ish twice,
I think / I know / e·nough / of hate
To say / that for / de·struct / tion ice
Is al /so great
And would / suf·fice.​

The other kind of weird thing about the poem is the third foot of line three, where the word "of" is marked as stressed. As a general rule, only significant words (or stressed syllables in multisyllabic words) are stressed. So why is "of" stressed?

This is an example of promotion, the raising of stress on a unstressed/lightly stressed syllable under certain circumstances. Timothy Steele puts it this way: "As linguists have observed, we 'promote' a light syllable—give it slightly greater emphasis than we would otherwise—when it is flanked, fore and aft, by other light syllables. When we speak a run of three light syllables, their intelligibility increases if we raise the middle one a bit" (All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing 8). Since in line three three normally unstressed syllables fall in a row ("ed of de") the "of" is promoted, which here aligns with the iambic character of the poem.

The complementary process of demotion also occurs, where a normally stressed syllable between two other stressed syllables can be slightly lowered in stress. Steele gives this example from Wallace Stevens poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle"

The mules / that an / gels ride / come slow / ly down​

where "come" in the fourth foot is slightly demoted as it is surrounded by "ride" and "slow" which are both stressed (as "come" would normally be, as well), with the result that the iambic pentameter is maintained without a substitution.

One of the more common alterations that involve the elision of syllables is the acephalic (i.e. headless, or as Steele calls it, clipped) line, where the first (unstressed) syllable of the line is missing. A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" includes a number of acephalic lines in its otherwise fairly straightforward iambic tetrameter. Here are the first two stanzas, the stress and feet marked:

The time / you won / your town / the race
We chaired / you through / the mar / ket-place;
Man / and boy / stood cheer / ing by,
And home / we brought / you shoul / der-high.

To·day, / the road / all run / ners come,
Shoul / der-high / we bring / you home,
And set / you at / your thres / hold down,
Towns / man of / a stil / ler town.​

As can be seen, line three of the first stanza and lines two and four of the second stanza are missing the initial unstressed syllable, leaving them with a foot of only s single, stressed syllable. This is fairly common in both iambic and anapestic verse, where the elided syllable would be expected to be unstressed. (Note also that the second foot of both lines three and four of the second stanza exhibit promotion of the normally lightly stressed words "at" and "of".)

In rather more unusual circumstances, elision can take place in the middle of a line, something Steele calls a "broken-backed" line and which Mary Oliver calls a "lame foot" (Rules for the Dance 24). Oliver cites this example from A Midsummer Night's Dream and marks the feet this way:

I know / a bank / where / the wild / thyme grows​

The initial unstressed syllable is missing from the third foot. As Oliver notes, "it would have to be a light syllable, as there can be, properly, no foot without a heavy stress" (which appears to ignore the pyrrhic foot, but OK). Note, also, that the final foot of the line contains two stressed syllables, a substitution foot known as a spondee.

Before I move on to trochaic meter, I want to talk about how substitutions and changes in line length can be used to reinforce imagery in the poem, using the opening of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as an example.

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.​

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.​

The poem begins in a straightforward iambic tetrameter, mentioning the subject, his pleasure-dome, and the river running through the grounds. But then the fifth line changes rather dramatically:

Down to / a sun / less sea.​

The meter is cut to trimeter and a trochaic substitution replaces the expected iambic first foot. These two changes reenforce the image of the river dropping down to the sea—the "downward" feel of the initial trochee moves the water to a lower level and the truncated line (i.e. the change from tetrameter to trimeter) echoes the sense that the river abruptly ends as a stream in joining the larger body of water.

The next two lines ("So twice five miles...") return to the original tetrameter, beginning to describe the grounds of the Khan's palace, and then shift from tetrameter to the more leisurely pentameter of the following lines, which gives a sense of expansion and the grandeur of the estate.

Or at least, I'd say something like that if I was writing an essay on "Kubla Khan."

Iambic pentameter is, as I'm sure everyone knows, by far the most common meter in English language poetry. Its alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables is considered to mimic the stress pattern of ordinary English conversation and speech. Iambic tetrameter is undoubtedly the second most common meter in English poetry. Curiously, Steele remarks that "the [iambic pentameter] line is the hardest of the common measures to read and write" (8).

I know. Not encouraging. But there it is.

 

[Tzara]

Trochaic meter is so named as it is based on the trochee, a two syllable metrical foot that reverses the stress order of the iamb, so that instead of the dah DUM of iambic meter, trochaic meter features a DUM dah sound. Accordingly, as iambic meter is considered to be a "rising" rhythm, trochaic meter is a "descending" one, often used to invoke urgency, or gloom, or (as in Poe) the macabre. While, like iambic meter, trochaic meter can be composed with any number of feet (dimeter, trimeter, etc.), it is most often composed in tetrameter, as in this example from Macbeth:

​

Double, double toil and trouble;​

Fire burn and caldron bubble.​

Fillet of a fenny snake,​

In the caldron boil and bake;​

Eye of newt and toe of frog,​

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,​

Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,​

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,​

For a charm of powerful trouble,​

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.​

​

Double, double toil and trouble;​

Fire burn and caldron bubble.​

Cool it with a baboon's blood,​

Then the charm is firm and good.​

Here the basic feeling is of a chant, a rather menacing one, with the strong downbeat established by the meter:

​

Dou·ble, / dou·ble / toil and / trou·ble;​

Fi·re / burn and / cal·dron / bub·ble.​

OK, but what's with this marking "fire" as two syllables? I didn't treat it that way in Frost's "Fire and Ice," so what's going on?

Here's where we get into another tricky situation with meter—sometimes the same word gets treated differently depending on its metrical context. "Fire" usually gets treated as a single syllable (as in the Frost poem), but here it is kinda treated as if it has two syllables, at least sonically. "Fire" is an example of a tripthong, a kind of blended vowel that combines three more or less distinct vowel sounds as a single vowel (similarly, diphthongs blend two different vowel sounds as one). This gives it a kind of flexibility of pronunciation, depending on how one sounds the vowel(s). In the context of this passage, "fire" is sounded more like "fi·er" which maintains the consistency of the trochaic meter.

The next two lines include more variations from straightforward trochaic tetrameter:

​

Fil·let / of a / fen·ny / snake,​

In the / cal·dron / boil and / bake;​

First off, "of" in the second foot is promoted from unstressed to stressed (as the middle of the three unstressed syllables "let of a"). "In" beginning the fourth line is also stressed, as best as I can tell simply to keep the meter consistent. (This seems to be fairly common in trochaic verse when a relatively weaker word happens to be the first syllable of the first foot of a line.) And both lines end on a foot consisting of a single stressed syllable.

This elision of a trailing unstressed syllable is called catalexis. It is the trochaic/dactylic complement of the iambic/anapestic concept of an acephalous line (where a leading unstressed syllable is elided). Catalectic lines are quite common in trochaic verse., particularly when the verse is end-rhymed. As Steele puts it "poets composing in trochaics have mostly eschewed rhyme... or have cut the last unaccented element from the line, so as to be able to rhyme firmly on a single syllable" (224).

One of the best-known poems of length composed in trochaic meter is Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha." Here is the well-known start of section 23 of the poem:

​

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,​

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,​

At the doorway of his wigwam,​

In the pleasant Summer morning,​

Hiawatha stood and waited.​

All the air was full of freshness,​

All the earth was bright and joyous,​

And before him, through the sunshine,​

Westward toward the neighboring forest​

Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,​

Passed the bees, the honey-makers,​

Burning, singing in the sunshine.​

The poem has a pretty consistent trochaic beat, to my mind to the point of monotony. (The line "Westward toward the neighboring forest" stumbles a bit, but you just motor on through it.) Note that none of these lines is catalectic, but neither do they attempt to rhyme, as Steele pointed out. The general feeling evoked by the rhythm for me is that of a steady drumbeat (DUM dah, DUM dah, DUM dah, DUM dah), where Longfellow may be trying to suggest a tale told at a native ceremony of some kind.

Here's a poem in trochaic meter by Shelley ("Music, when Soft Voices Die") that illustrates a couple more quirks:

​

Music, when soft voices die,​

Vibrates in the memory;​

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,​

Live within the sense they quicken.​

​

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,​

Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;​

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,​

Love itself shall slumber on.​

I want to look at both stanzas, here with stress and feet marked:

​

Mu·sic, / when soft / voi·ces / die,​

Vi·brates / in the / mem·or / y;​

O·dours, / when sweet / vio·lets / sick·en,​

Live with / in the / sense they / quick·en.​

​

Rose leaves, / when the / rose is / dead,​

Are heap'd for / the be / lov·èd's / bed;​

And so thy / thoughts, when / thou art / gone,​

Love it / self shall / slum·ber / on.​

[/indent]

Besides things like the usual promotions, note that while the first two lines are catalectic and rhymed, the third and fourth lines, which are fully trochaic (i.e. acatalectic), rhyme as well. This is where one might rightly yelp something like "But Dr. Steele said rhymed trochaic verse was catalectic and if it wasn't catalectic, it wouldn't rhyme."

Well, yeah. Sorta. What he actually said was something about how, with the exception of feminine rhymes (which the rhymes in lines three and four are) which are normally extrasyllabic (meaning they extend beyond the normal metrical convention, which these do not), finding rhymes where the ending syllable is unaccented is problematic. So these lines are a bit unusual in trochaic verse.

The more interesting thing about this poem is lines two and three of the second stanza. The first foot of each line is here marked as being three syllables instead of two, with the first syllable being unstressed. What the hell is this?

Oh, just another variation. This one is called anacrusis, which Mary Oliver defines as "an overabundance of syllables occur[ing] at the very beginning of a line" (26). Like catalexis, this is not uncommon in trochaic verse. For example Blake's "The Tyger" exhibits anacrusis as well:

​

Ty·ger / Ty·ger, / burn·ing / bright,​

In the / for·ests / of the / night;​

What im / mor·tal / hand or / eye,​

Could frame thy / fear·ful / sym·me / try?​

Finally, trochaic meter can be used to excellent effect in satirical verse. This one, by Henry Charles Beeching, is one of my favorites; the subject is the nineteeth century classical scholar Benjamin Jowett:

​

First come I, my name is Jowett.​

All there is to know I know it.​

I am Master of this College,​

What I don't know isn't knowledge.​

That's it for trochaic meter. On to the trisyllabics.

 

[Tzara]

Anapestic meter, unlike iambic and trochaic meters, is based on a trisyllabic foot. Like the iamb, it is considered a "rising" foot as it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (dah dah DUM). Hirsch states that "[t]he anapest was originally a Greek martial rhythm and often creates a galloping sense of action" (26), though he points out that "[t]he momentum of anapests has mostly been employed for comic or ironic effects in modern poetry" (27).

Anapestic meter is particularly familiar to many readers my age and younger from passages like this:

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

I sat there with Sally.
We sat there, we two.
And I said, "How I wish
We had something to do!"

Too wet to go out
And too cold to play ball.
So we sat in the house.
We did nothing at all.​

which is the beginning of The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. Anapestic meter is also familiar to most readers as it (or its related trisyllabic meter, the amphibrachic) is the basic rhythm of the limerick. Take, for example, this one about the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves, by the film critic Ezra Haber Glenn:

De Sica shoots Rome neo-real,
The poor have been dealt a raw deal.
A bike is required
Or Ricci gets fired:
All men must eventually steal.​

Marking stresses and feet, we get

De Si / ca shoots Rome / ne·o-real,
The poor / have been dealt / a raw deal.
A bike / is re·quired
Or Ric / ci gets fired:
All men / must e·vent / ual·ly steal.​

As is not uncommon with anapestic meter, the first unstressed syllable of the first foot is elided (i.e. the line is acephalous), but the anapestic rhythm is maintained through the rest of the poem. (Several of the lines from The Cat in the Hat exhibit this as well.)

Anapestic meter is also the basic rhythm of Robert Frost's "Blueberries," as can be seen in its last stanza (here I've marked only the feet, with the stresses and syllables implied):

"We sha'n't / have the place / to ourselves / to enjoy—
Not like / ly, when all / the young Lor / ens deploy.
They'll be / there to-mor / row, or e / ven to-night.
They won't / be too friend / ly—they may / be polite—
To peo / ple they look / on as hav / ing no right
To pick / where they're pick / ing. But we / won't complain.
You ought / to have seen / how it looked / in the rain,
The fruit / mixed with wa / ter in lay / ers of leaves,
Like two / kinds of jew / els, a vi / sion for thieves."​

In this example, the meter bestows the poem with a kind of folksy rhythm, reinforcing the similarly folksy narrative being related. The lines are all stripped of the initial unstressed syllable, but this is hardly noticeable, given the consistency of meter.

I mentioned at the start of this post that Hirsch states that anapestic meter was "originally a Greek martial rhythm and often creates a galloping sense of action" though the examples I've shown so far have been either comic or folksy. So here's a "martial" use of the meter, in Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" (stress and feet only marked in the first two lines as a sample):

The As·syr / ian came down / like the wolf / on the fold,
And his co / horts were gleam / ing in pur / ple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!​

Unfortunately for some poems, anapestic meter isn't always the most sanguine fit. Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro mention "Robert Browning's 'Saul,' a narrative poem of some length... [where] the rhythm does not fit the subject: the movement of the verse has a certain lightness and lilting quality, while the thought and feeling proposed are meditative and sober" (The Prosody Handbook 41-2).

Beum and Shapiro go on to cite an even more egregious mismatch of theme and meter in the largely anapestic "The Three Fishers" of Charles Kingsley. Here is part of the final stanza:

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;​

where the tale of the death of the fishermen is marred by the meter, which regrettably "makes one almost want to sway with good spirits."

Next, the inverse of the anapest—the dactyl.

 

[Tzara]

Dactylic meter is a trisyllabic meter that reverses the stress pattern of anapestic meter. Where anapestic meter is a rising meter of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (dah dah DUM), dactylic meter is a falling meter consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (DUM dah dah). Beum and Shapiro describe it as having "a tendency to produce an elegiac tone, mournful, wistful, or world-weary" (43). Yet, curiously, the dactyl also serves as the base meter for a particular light verse form, the double dactyl.

The double dactyl form was invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in the 50s and, like its (largely) anapestic fellow form the limerick is typically written with a kind of clever humor. Here is an example by John Hollander:

Higgledy piggledy,
Benjamin Harrison,
Twenty-third president
Was, and, as such,

Served between Clevelands and
Save for this trivial
Idiosyncrasy,
Didn't do much.​

Characteristic of the form are the use of a nonsense phrase as the first line, a person's name as the second line, and a single word as the third line of the second stanza, with the requirement that all three are composed of two dactyls. Here's the poem with stress and feet marked:

Hig·gle·dy / pig·gle·dy,
Ben·ja·min / Har·ri·son,
Twen·ty-third / pres·i·dent
Was, and, as / such,

Served be·tween / Cleve·lands and
Save for this / triv·i·al
Id·i·o / syn·cra·sy,
Did·n't do / much.​

The poem is consistently dactylic with the ending lines of each stanza being doubly catalectic (i.e. both unstressed syllables elided) or, if one prefers, consisting of a single stressed syllable.

Perhaps more typical of the meter is Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which employs the meter to emphasize a kind of galloping thrust to the poem, appropriate to its subject:

I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.​

“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.​

II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.​

Theirs not to make reply,​

Theirs not to reason why,​

Theirs but to do and die.​

Into the valley of Death​

Rode the six hundred.​

III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;​

Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.​

IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while

All the world wondered.​

Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke

Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.​

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;​

Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.​

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.​

Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!​

As with Hollander's poem, the meter is consistently dactylic, though a number of the lines are catalectic, removing the last unstressed syllable, as can be seen in this famous passage:

Can·non to / right of them,
Can·non to / left of them,
Can·non be / hind them

Vol·leyed and / thun·dered;​

The first two lines are perfect dactylic dimeter; the last two are dactylic dimeter with catalexis.

Another well-known example of dactylic meter is Longfellow's "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie," which is composed in dactylic hexameter, perhaps to invoke associations with classic Greek poetry and its dactylic hexameter line. Here Longfellow varies the meter from a strictly dactylic one more than he varied the trochaic beat of "Hiawatha." Here are the first two lines, marked:

This is the / for·est prim / e·val. The / mur·mur·ing / pines and the / hem·locks,
Beard·ed with / moss, and in / gar·ments / green, in·dis / tinct in the / twi·light,​

As you can see, both lines elide the final unstressed syllable, and the second line substitutes a trochee in the third foot (assuming I've done the scansion correctly). The result is a long line with some metrical variation to keep it from being monotonous over the lengthy poem.

Whitman's "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking" employs a highly varied meter that is often dactylic along with considerable use of anaphora (one of Whitman's frequently used devices, the repetition of words at the start of multiple lines). Here's the first three lines of the poem with the stress and feet marked (as I scan them, of course);

Out of the / crad·le / end·less·ly / rock·ing,
Out of the / mock·ing-bird’s / throat, the / mus·i·cal / shut·tle,
Out of the / Ninth-month / mid·night...​

After this, which mixes dactyls and trochees, the poem at times gets even more metrically varied, so much so that I have no idea quite how to scan it. As such, it may drift into free verse or phrasal rhythms, as Whitman was always very free with the rhythmic elements of his poetry.

My last example is Thomas Hardy's "The Voice," written as a kind of elegy to his late wife Emma. In this poem, the dactylic meter supports, as in the Beum and Shapiro quotation earlier, "a tendency to produce an elegiac tone, mournful, wistful, or world-weary" though the poem varies metrically in its later stanzas. Here is the first stanza, marked:

Wo·man much / missed, how you / call to me, / call to me,
Say·ing that / now you are / not as you / were
When you had / changed from the / one who was / all to me,
But as at / first, when our / day was / fair.​

That covers the four basic metrical lines in English: the iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic. While there are occasional experiments with other metrical feet (e.g. the choriamb), most prosodists consider either consider variant feet as used only in substitutions (the spondee and the pyrrhic, particularly) or, as with amphibrachic meter, see them as variants of one of the dominant meters.

I happen to like the amphibrach (a trisyllabic foot of unstressed/stressed/unstressed syllables, dah DUM dah) and will talk about it some in the next post, but it is probably true that it is rarely used in poems (well, at least poems other than limericks). Following that, I'll discuss spondees and pyrrhics.

Happy April Fool's Day tomorrow.​