Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry
English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x)
syllables. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. Each unit of
rhythm is called a "foot" of poetry.
The meters with two-syllable feet are
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IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold
TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers
SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
Meters with three-syllable feet are
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ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still
DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the
hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)
Each line of a poem contains a certain number of feet of iambs, trochees, spondees,
dactyls or anapests. A line of one foot is a monometer, 2 feet is a dimeter, and so on.
The number of syllables in a line varies therefore according to the meter.
Examples:
iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables)
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That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold
trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)
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Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers
anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables)
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And the sound | of a voice | that is still
dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl)
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This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks
Metre is from the Greek word for measuring; at its most basic, metre is a system of
describing what we can measure about the audible features of a poem. The systems that
have been used in history to structure metres are: the number of syllables (syllabic); the
duration of syllables (quantitative); the number of stressed syllables, or accents
(accentual); and combinations of the above. English is not a language that works easily
in quantitative metre (although this has not stopped people trying), and it has developed
an accentual-syllabic metre for its formal verse. This means that, in a formal poem, the
poet will be counting the syllables, the stresses, and keeping them to a pattern.
To describe the pattern, the stressed and unstressed syllables are gathered into groups
known as feet, and the number of feet to a line gives a name thus:
1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
7 feet: heptameter
8 feet: octameter
Lines of less than 3 or more than 6 feet are rare in formal poems.
Like the rhythm in a piece of music, the metre is an underlying structure. Poets often
slip in extra feet, or remove them, or change stress patterns around to prevent
monotony. (Sometimes a poem seems to be exploring how far a line can be pushed
without losing all connection with the underlying metre.) This means that the discovery
of a foot other than an iamb in the middle of what is otherwise iambic, say, does not
stop the poem from being iambic; rather the attention ends up lingering at that point, so
the word on the different foot ends up more powerful as it has the attention longer
Scansion is the process of marking the stresses in a poem, and working out the metre
from the distribution of stresses. The verb is to scan.
What free verse claims to be free from is the constraints of regular metre and fixed
forms. This makes the poem free to find its own shape according to what the poet - or
the poem - wants to say, but still allows him or her to use rhyme, alliteration, rhythms or
cadences (etc) to achieve the effects that s/he feels are appropriate. There is an implicit
constraint, however, to resist a regular metre in free verse - a run of a regular metre will
stand out awkwardly in an otherwise free poem.
Sometimes known as vers libre, free verse has a long pedigree and is very common in
contemporary poetry. Yet there are still voices that claim poetry is only poetry when it
is formal verse.
Form, in poetry, can be understood as the physical structure of the poem: the length of
the lines, their rhythms, their system of rhymes and repetition. In this sense, it is
normally reserved for the type of poem where these features have been shaped into a
pattern, especially a familiar pattern.
Another sense of "form" is to refer to these familiar patterns - these can be simple and
open-ended forms, such as blank verse, or can be a complex system of rhymes, rhythms
and repeated lines within a fixed number of lines, as a sonnet or villanelle is.
An acrostic poem is one that uses the first letters of each line to spell out a word or
phrase. More uncommonly, you can find a word or phrase through the centre of a poem
(when it is called a mesostich) or at the end of the lines (which makes it a telestich). If
the poem is written so that the first letters and last letters both write out a message, it is
known as a double acrostic.
A cento is a poem consisting only of lines from other poems. This, from the Italian
word for patchwork, is almost a technique rather than a form, especially as it can be of
any length, and any metre, and need not rhyme; however, as the finished poem is
referred to as a cento, just as a sonnet is called a sonnet, it is a form.
A clerihew, named after its inventor, is a four-line poem rhymed aabb; its first line is
the name of the subject of the poem, it often breaks into two sentences at the end of the
second line, and the rhythm tends to be entertainingly irregular.
A double-dactyl is a poem normally reserved for nonsense verse, 8 lines, all consisting
of two dactyls (hence the name). Line 1 is a nonsense word (such as "higgledypiggledy"), line 2 is someone's name, line 6 is a single six-syllable word, and lines 4 and
8 rhyme.
An ottava rima is a stanza form often used for longer poems, most famously in Byron's
'Don Juan', consisting of eight lines, usually in iambic pentameter, rhymed abababcc.
A pantoum can be of any length; it is a poem of four-line stanzas, in which the second
and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third of the next. The last stanza's
second and fourth lines can be the first and third of the first stanza, either reversed or
not, which locks the poem into a circle of repetitions or, as the poet Marilyn Hacker
says, "until it ends up with its tail in its mouth".
A spenserian stanza is an 8 lines of iambic pentameter, followed by 1 iambic
hexameter (or alexandrine); rhyme scheme ababbcbccc. This is the stanza invented by
Spenser in The Faerie Queene.
A terza rima is a poem in which each stanza is rhymed aba, with the inner rhyme from
one stanza providing the outer rhymes for either the previous or subsequent stanza: aba
bcb cdc... or aba cac dcd.... The form can end in a single-line stanza, a couplet, or by
referring back to the as-yet-unused rhyme from the first stanza.
Stress is the emphasis that falls on certain syllables and not others; the arrangement of
stresses within a poem is the foundation of poetic rhythm. The process of working out
which syllables in a poem are stressed is known as scansion; once a metrical poem has
been scanned, it should be possible to see the metre.