Scansion Practice
Try scanning these poems and see if you can make comments about how the meter enhances the meaning of
the poem in any way. (Answers and suggestions are on the next page.)
1.
The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
2.
--Emily Dickinson
Bats have webby wings that fold up;
Bats from ceilings hang down rolled up;
Bats when flying undismayed are;
Bats are careful; bats use radar;
3.
--Frank Jacobs, “The Bat”
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
--Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”
Answers:
1. The Emily Dickinson poem is iambic.
The meter is alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. In line three, however,
the iambic
tetrameter has a leftover syllable – perhaps to highlight the fullness of the ripened
berry, to denote the harvest time.
2. "The Bat" is trochaic tetrameter. Since the iambic foot is the most commonly used rhythm in
the English language, it is fitting that this verse contains the opposite type: trochaic foot. It
works with the verse because it is about bats who hang upside down; the trochaic foot is a
backward, reverse, or “upside
down” version of the iambic foot.
3. Lines one through four of the excerpt from Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is alternating anapestic
tetrameter and trimeter. Lines five and six are anapestic tetrameter.
Lines seven is anapestic trimenter, but line eight has two anapestic trimeter feet and on iambic
foot.
Perhaps the alteration of the meter in the last line helps the final two short lines sound more
like the ocean’s
tide or waves crashing rhythmically against the sepulcher?