Meters and Feet

Get Well Versed on the Subject of Poetic Composition

I feel that there is no need to comment further on March. March is ending. Its time is short. March knows what it did. March departs in ignominy. Did March Madness even happen this year? Or did we skip it due to COVID? This is perhaps the first March of the last decade or two that I haven’t had to hear about March Madness. A blessing in disguise. Every cloud.

Today’s article is not an argument in favor of the metric system (superior in every way) over the imperial system (completely terrible, the worst). I shan’t write that article because I needn’t. The conclusion I would take is self-evident. We don’t have to do everything the way Great Britain does. Many are the omitted extraneous “u”s of the independent American people. 

Some time ago, I was talking with one of my readers and the subject of poetry came up. I always say I don’t know anything about poetry and that is simultaneously a true statement and also not true at all. 

When I read a novel, I can usually tell both whether I liked it or not and whether it was actually good in any way (or not). Two separate things. I like lots of terrible books, and there are lots of excellent books I do not like. In the middle, I suppose, a handful of “good” books that I do like, including Possession or The Handmaid’s Tale. I am not good at knowing whether poetry is good or not. When I read a poem I can tell if I like it or not, but I can’t determine whether it has any actual merit.

I am the actual worst person to tell you anything meaningful about a poem. As it happens, though, I know an awful lot about the mechanics of constructing poems because my mentor in college was high-key obsessed with the topic.

When you get a degree in English, people make a lot of jokes about what you’ll do with that degree and how you’ll turn it into a meaningful career. Or people ask if you want to be a writer. Not everybody who gets an English degree wants to be a writer. I think most of the people I knew didn’t. 

The neat thing about getting that degree is you spend most of the time learning how to read things carefully, analyze them, and them organize the information you learned from your reading into a format that can be consumed by someone else—overall, a skill that you can use for just about anything.

The most useful courses I took were in linguistics. The least useful information I learned in college was anything having to do with poetry. I thought I would never use this information for anything but now I have a chance, at long last—it’s been like twenty years—to share it.

Before I get started, I would love to hear from anyone who is familiar with “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I think it’s probably one of the most recognizable poems in American English, along with “The New Colossus” and “The Raven” and maybe also “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I’m not sure if that last one is actually recognizable or if I just think it’s recognizable because I recognize it. I like “The Red Wheelbarrow” because it’s short. By the time you realize somebody suckered you into reading a poem, the ordeal is already over.

But yeah, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” if you know it—what do you think that person is doing out there in the woods at night? I think it’s about an early twentieth-century serial killer, but that’s just me. A lot of people seem to think it’s about Santa Claus. They’ve got places to go and people to kill, or possibly gifts to deliver. One of those two things for sure.

Anyway, I was talking with my friend about the component pieces of a poem, which is one of the things I thought we learned about in elementary school but—like the phonetic alphabet—oops not really. So I put together a really quick crash course in poem mechanics, just for you, so when you like a poem for no particular reason—as I often do—and then someone asks you what you liked about it you can say “oh, the prosody of course” and they won’t ask you any more questions, which is definitely what you want in that particular situation.

For what it’s worth, you can learn a lot about constructing powerful sentences for your prose by studying the composition of poetry. 

The Monsters and the Prosodists

You can break all of literature down into three main forms: prose (novels, short stories, novellas); verse (poems of all kinds); and drama (plays, operas, screenplays). Infuriatingly, the term verse refers both to the whole wide world of poetry collectively and it also refers to one metric line of a poem. A group of lines together is called a stanza. In songs and dramatic poetry (like the ancient Greek poetic dramas), a verse is a group of lines that is separated by a repeating chorus. This is all very confusing. A verse in a poem is one line and lines grouped together are a stanza, but if you put your poem to music now it’s a song and the stanza is now a verse. Oh but when it’s a unit of your poem in free verse then it’s not a stanza anymore, now it’s a strophe.

I don’t know who made up these rules; they’re all over the place.

Further confusing matters is the term prosody, which seems like it should refer to prose but actually means the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. The three main technical elements of a poem are its prosody (as mentioned above), its sound patterns (including the rhyme scheme), and its form (what makes a sonnet, for instance, different from a haiku). There’s other stuff, like poetic diction, but that gets into the meaning of the words and I’m only going over technical aspects today because it’s already a huge topic, and I never know what anything means anyway. Nothing in poetry is about what it seems like it’s about, except maybe “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which is why I like it (and also it’s short).

Meter and Rhythm

One of the first things people want to talk about when they’re talking about a poem is what type of metrical rhythm it has. We all know that Shakespeare wrote almost exclusively in iambic pentameter but, listen, have you heard the good word about dactylic hexameter? Because that one is way better.

A foot, in a poem, is one unit of accented and unaccented syllables. When you’re speaking, when words are coming out of your mouth, you’re putting more stress on some syllables than others and that makes up the rhythm of your speech. If I shout down the hall “Hey babe! Come here!” as I do like fifty times a day, I’m probably stressing the syllables like this:

hey BABE come HERE

In that example, “hey babe” is an iamb—an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. You see five of those in a row in any example of iambic pentameter:

shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY?

English has five feet that we use in speaking, the iamb being one of the most common. They are:

• Iamb—an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable (for instance, the word “tonight”)

• Trochee—an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable (for instance, the word “quiet”)

• Dactyl—an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables (for instance, the word “fabulous”)

• Anapest—two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable (for instance, the word “comprehend”)

• Spondee—two accented syllables (for instance, the word “armchair”) 

There’s also the pyrrhic foot, which is two unaccented syllables, but we don’t use it much in English. We usually attach two unstressed syllables in a row to another foot instead of leaving it hanging on its own. If you’re trying to imagine a pyrrhic foot in context, consider:

this FOOD is un beLIEVE able

That’s an iamb (“this food”) followed by a pyrrhic foot (“is un—) and then another iamb (“—believ—”) and then another pyrrhic foot (“—able”).

Those are all the feet there are. Try to say a different kind of foot. I’ll wait.

The number of feet in a line of verse determines the meter. A line of verse with five iambs is iambic pentameter. Dactylic hexameter (also known as Homeric verse) is a line with six dactyls. Tetrameter, four feet. Trimeter, three feet. Dimeter, two feet. Super easy. 

Iambic feet are most common in English verse because they’re most common in English speech. I’m told that the reason for this is how the speech pattern follows the rhythm of walking. I don’t know if that’s actually true. Apparently, the Romantic era poets liked to walk around the English countryside while composing their verses. Apparently, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote some of the works that are attributed to her brother. We should just consider ourselves lucky that Percy didn’t take credit for Frankenstein.

That’s feet, and how they fit into meters, the elements that make up prosody. If you’ve ever diagrammed a sentence, there’s a similar thing you can do for poetry to represent the prosody in a graphical way. That’s called scansion and I learned it in college and then I never thought about it ever again for one single second until now.

Rhyme Without Reason

After meter and rhythm, the next thing that usually is examined in poetry is the sound pattern of the language. When I say sound pattern I include rhyme, but I also mean the other types of sound repetition that poets use to make cool-sounding lines, like alliteration and consonance.

Rhyme comes in a lot of forms. We mostly think of rhyme as when the syllable at the end of a line of verse has an identical or similar sound as the syllable at the end of another line. There’s also internal rhyme, which is when a poet uses a repeating sound at predictable intervals within lines, as opposed to at the end of lines. 

Alliteration, or using the same letter or letter sound to begin multiple words or to begin multiple lines is also a major component of sound patterning. Assonance (repeating the same vowel sound within a word or line) and consonance (repeating the same or a similar consonant sound within a word or line) round out the stable of sound modulating techniques.

Beowulf famously employs internal rhyme and alliteration in the original Anglo Saxon, and the modern Seamus Heaney translation (perhaps not so modern anymore, I’m afraid) was celebrated for keeping the spirit of that rhyme scheme instead of forcing the poem into a more literal translation. Homer’s epics rely heavily on assonance in the original Greek. I mention these in particular to point out that not everybody throughout history—not even everybody we think of as being formative in the English language literary tradition (all the old dead white dudes)—used sound patterns poetically in the way we consider them to be poetic today. 

But when we talk about rhyme scheme, we usually are talking about the sounds at the end of a line of poetry. Rhyme scheme is written out by assigning letters as A, B, C, and so on to specific sounds at the end of a line. So if the first line ends with the word “headline,” then I’d assign the letter “A” to the sound “—ine” and then every time I come to that same sound at the end of a new line, that new line gets an “A” as well. For example:

A Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

B Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

A Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

B And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

That’s an ABAB rhyme scheme, also known as “traditional rhyme.” Some other common schemes are the limerick form seen in many of Edward Lear’s poems (AABBA) or the terza rima (ABA BCB CDC) from Dante’s Inferno.

Final Form

The last piece of the puzzle is the poetic form. A specific metric pattern combined with a specific rhyme scheme constitutes formal verse. For instance, a ballad (in English) is traditionally written in quatrains (stanzas of four lines each) following a pattern of one line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Through the Looking-Glass is an example of the ballad form and follows an ABCBDB rhyme scheme.

There are tons of specific poem types you know or have probably heard of that fall under the broad heading of formal verse—the sonnet, the pastoral, the elegy, the ode, the haiku, the ghazal. You don’t have to know all of them. There’s not going to be a test (probably). Outside of formal verse, there are two more types of form you should know how to distinguish if you’re discussing poetry in English: Blank verse and free verse. 

Blank verse refers to poetry that does not rhyme but does follow a discernible meter. Blank verse that follows iambic pentameter is one of the most common forms in modern English poetry (meaning, from Shakespeare till today). Several of Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse, as is Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”

Free verse refers to poetry that does not rhyme and does not follow a specific meter. Great examples of free verse include “Harlem” by Langston Hughes and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, both of which are excellent and which I highly recommend, because they are short, unlike the Shelf Life you read just now.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s long-form, non-poetic explanation of how poetry works mechanically. Next time someone asks you why you liked or didn’t like a poem, you can give them a detailed answer with a bunch of technical poem jargon if you want to. Or you can just do the thing I do where I shrug and say “I don’t know, I just like it.” You don’t have to tell anybody why you like something. You don’t have to have a reason.

I hope you’re looking forward to a brand new month ahead. February and March are the dreariest and I am sick to death of having to wear sleeves. Sleeves are the worst. Spring is the best. Now is the winter of our . . . winter.  I hope you’ll be back on April Fool’s Thursday for more Shelf Life to come. Keep warm just a little while longer.

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