rhythm: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
meter: the number of feet in a line.
scansion: Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables.
scansion: Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables.
Thus, when we describe the rhythm of a poem, we “scan” the poem and mark the stresses (/) and absences of stress (^) and count the number of feet.
In English, the major feet are:
iamb | (^/) | ||||||||
^ | / ^ | / | ^ | / ^ | / | ^ / ^ | / | ^ | / |
The | falling | out | of | faithful | friends, | renewing | is | of | love |
trochee | (/^) | ||||||||
/ ^ | / ^ | / | ^ | / ^ | |||||
Double, | double | toil | and | trouble | |||||
anapest | (^^/) | ||||||||
^ | ^ | / ^ | ^ | / | ^ | ^ / | |||
I | am | monarch | of | all | I | survey | |||
dactyl | (/^^) | ||||||||
/ | ^ | ^ | / ^^ | ||||||
Take | her | up | tenderly | ||||||
spondee | (//) | ||||||||
pyrrhic | (^^) |
Iambic and anapestic meters are called rising meters because their movement rises from unstressed syllable to stressed; trochaic and dactylic meters are called falling. In the twentieth century, the bouncing meters--anapestic and dactylic--have been used more often for comic verse than for serious poetry.
Spondee and pyrrhic are called feet, even though they contain only one kind of stressed syllable. They are never used as the sole meter of a poem; if they were, it would be like the steady impact of nails being hammered into a board--no pleasure to hear or dance to. But inserted now and then, they can lend emphasis and variety to a meter, as Yeats well knew when he broke up the predominantly iambic rhythm of “Who Goes With Fergus?” with the line,
^ | ^ | / | / | ^ | ^ | / | / |
And | the | white | breast | of | the | dim | sea, |
A frequently heard metrical description is iambic pentameter: a line of five iambs. This is a meter especially familiar because it occurs in all blank verse (such as Shakespeare’s plays), heroic couplets, and sonnets.
Pentameter is one name for the number of feet in a line. The commonly used names for line lengths are:
monometer | one foot | pentameter | five feet | |||||||||
dimeter | two feet | hexameter | six feet | |||||||||
trimeter | three feet | heptameter | seven feet | |||||||||
tetrameter | four feet | octameter | eight feet |
The scansion of this quatrain from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 shows the following accents and divisions into feet (note the following words were split: behold, yellow, upon, against, ruin'd):
^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ||||||
That | time | | of | year | | thou | mayst | | in | me | | be | hold | | ||||||
^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ||||||
When | yel | | low | leaves, | | or | none, | | or | few, | | do | hang | | ||||||
^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ||||||
Up | on | | those | boughs | | which | shake | | a | gainst | | the | cold, | | | |||||
^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ^ | / | ||||||
Bare | ru | | in'd | choirs | | where | late | | the | sweet | birds | sang | |
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