Thursday, June 11, 2020

Field Guide to Meter in English-Language Verse

Meter in English verse is a difficult subject. As I've blogged before, English meter is a hybrid of pure syllable-count meter, inherited from Romance-language verse traditions, and accentual meter, drawn from Germanic verse traditions. Thus, we English-writing poets are stuck with having to count syllables and control the stress pattern. Lucky us.

Explanations and classifications of meter that I've seen tend to be less than intuitive. One of the issues is that it's easy to lose track of meter in the middle of a line, when using traditional scansion techniques. Another is that even strict rules of meter allow for some exceptions. But the allowed exceptions can completely destroy the sense of the definition, without destroying the metrical sense of the line itself. Examples include allowing an extra unstressed syllable at the end of an iambic line, to accommodate a two-syllable rhyme; or skipping a syllable at the start.

You can find plenty of technical definitions of meter online, including Wikipedia. The below is more of a field guide to common meters than a scientific taxonomy.


Notes:

This assumes a consistent meter throughout the line. It will not help you with mixed meters, or meters that by design have changing stress/nonstress patterns, such as sapphics.

Promotion: Technically, a word can have one and only one stressed syllable. However, in normally spoken English, there is a strong tendency for stressed and unstressed syllables to alternate, and a string of three or more unstressed syllables feels uneasy. Hence, in a word with four or more syllables, it's likely that besides "the" stressed syllable, one or more other syllables will be spoken with a noticeable stress. This can even happen in a three-syllable word, such as "consequence." If "consequence" occurs at the end of a line with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, the "quence" will frequently be read as a stress.

Most of the suggested scansion methods I've seen start analysis from the first syllable. In my experience, the last syllable of a line has much more impact on the listener, and therefore leaves a stronger impression of the overall rhythm.

"Marching" and "swinging" are my own terminology. and my attempt to capture what I consider a crucial distinction among meters. Many people of my acquaintance either genuinely can't tell the difference between iambic and trochaic lines, or feel that the placement of one syllable is a silly and trivial way to try to understand rhythm. But almost everyone feels a strong difference between the alternation of stress and unstress in iambic/trochaic and the "dah-dit-dit-dah-dit-dit" of the swinging family.

Argue that this family could just as easily be represented "dit-dit-dah" (repeat) or "dit-dah-dit" (repeat)? That's exactly the point. To me, the defining characteristic of a meter is the rhythm experienced in the middle of the line, less so at the end of the line, and not at all at the beginning. So it doesn't matter where you start your scansion.

The flowchart makes this clearer:



Feet
The simplest way to think about "feet" is that the number of feet equals the number of stressed syllables, including promoted syllables as above. Five = pent, as in iambic pentameter. Four = tetrameter. Six = hexameter. Longer or shorter meters are pretty rare in English.

One type of foot not covered here is the spondee. A spondee consists of two back-to-back stressed syllables. Spondees are rare, and emphatic, in spoken English. Correctly speaking, a line made up entirely of spondees would be termed "spondaic"-- but it hardly seems possible to construct such a line in English, any longer than "Hey! Ho!"

I tend to think of the spondee less as a meter and more as a structure that can be featured within a line of any meter. There are several ways to scan this line...

“No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (consistently iambic)
No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (turning the first foot into a spondee instead of an iamb)
“No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (turning the second pair of syllables into a trochee, and creating a spondee in "Pa, I" In this case, the spondee straddles the last syllable of the first foot and the first syllable of the second foot.)

If reading aloud, you get to pick. The second reading here seems the most natural to me. Which sounds good to you? Oh, in case you want to read the rest of that poem-- here.

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

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