Prof. Gruesz
A LITTLE FAKE BOOK
ON PROSODY
There is healthy disagreement about the degree to which the formal aspects of a
poem determine its meaning. “Form” refers both to visual aspects—the shape of lines,
the way they play with white space—and to acoustic ones: the way the words sound
when read aloud together. Some critics divide poems into “closed form”(what you
probably think of as “traditional” stanzas and metrical arrangements) and “open form”
(free verse, calligrams and other typographical experiments, digital/multimedia poetry,
etc.). The play between ear and eye, and the relative importance of each, differs from
one poem to the next, while performance and kinetic movement can add yet another
dimension of meaning. To read most poems written before roughly 1920—when open
forms took on greater prestige than closed—you’ll need to know about the traditional
line, stanza, and metrical forms described here. But even in many “open form” poems,
the trace or ghost of older forms remains, and some poets periodically revive them
(note, for instance, the popularity of the “New Formalism” in some circles of the U.S.
poetry scene today).
GENERAL READING PRACTICES FOR POEMS. Assume, first, that you will need to
read the poem through several times to get a basic understanding of what it may be
trying to say. If the normal word order of a sentence is inverted in a poetic line,
paraphrase or diagram it. Are there
speaker: a fictive “I,”like a narrator in a
parts of speech left out? Are
work of fiction; not the same as the author
grammatical rules and normal word
himself or herself (although they may
order (syntax) violated in a phrase
strongly resemble each other, as in
or sentence? Is a dependent clause
Whitman’s case)
ambiguous– could it refer to two
different subjects (and if so, how might the ambiguity lead you to different
conclusions)? On a broader scale, what kinds of issues does the poem seem to be
addressing? Is there a crisis of belief or emotion? Who is speaking, and to whom? Do
the pronouns shift—say, from “I” to “we”? What else changes -- in setting, voice, or
tone-- over the course of the poem? What relationships between terms, concepts, or
images are established(for instance: the cluster of economic terms in Dickinson’s “This
was a Poet”)? Are there binary terms that work in opposition to each other, and if so,
do they establish a back-and-forth dialectic?
Imagery and metaphorical language are language’s primary ways of suggesting that
which it does not choose to make perfectly explicit. Visual and aural images may set
the scene for a poetic statement, or they may radiate some symbolic significance. All
images are not necessarily symbolic, nor is there a “master key” of universally accepted
symbols that every reader agrees upon. The image makes sense in its context, as part of
a sum effect; it is not a simple riddle to be “decoded” in only one way. Circle, or try to
map out, the different images in the poem; look for contrasts, inversions, or repetitions
among them.
Common misstep in analysis: “The poet uses the color red, which is a symbol of blood
and death.” Well, maybe, but only if there are other significant contextual clues that support
the idea that the poem is worrying about death—e.g., “the red-beaked vulture tore at his
rotting prize.” If, on the other hand, the poem is simply describing a red dress that a woman
is wearing, this discovery of “symbolic” meaning is much more of a stretch.
As we use language, we are continually
In metaphor, the thing being spoken of is
comparing one thing to another;
the tenor; the thing to which it's being
speaking of something in terms of
compared is the vehicle. E.g. “the sea of
another thing it resembles. This is
life”: life=tenor, sea=vehicle.
metaphor (from Greek meta+ferein, to
carry across). If that comparison is explicit– “my love is like a red, red rose”; “he was as
thick as a brick”-- the figure of speech is a simile. An extended metaphor is called a
conceit (Whitman’s conceit in “The Sleepers” is that he watches and sleeps beside every
person on the globe: “I go from bedside to bedside...I descend my western course.”) A
particularly extravagant or humorous metaphor may be labelled catachresis. E.g.,
Whitman’s “I find I incorporate gneiss” (gneiss is a kind of rock formation) : the
metaphor of becoming the land seems overblown here, perhaps perilously close to
riduculous.
Metonymy (“substitution”) also involves making one thing stand for another, but in
this case the comparison is one of common association rather than “poetic” effort: for
instance, using “sweat” to mean “hard work” (“the sweat of our brow”), “blood” for
self-sacrifice (“Yankee blood has been spilled”), “heart” for feeling (“You have no
heart”), etc. Synechdoche is a kind of metonymy that represents the part through the
whole, or the whole through the part: “the White House announced” to mean “the
President said,” “bread” to mean food in general (“Give us this day our daily bread”).
RHETORICAL SCHEMES. Unlike metaphor and metonymy, which may continously
change the impression of meaning you get from the poem, rhetorical schemes are just
names for the patterns into which language naturally falls– and which writers often
consciously choose to heighten.
• Parallelism repeats a certain part of speech, thereby putting a set of phrases in
balance; it often suggests that the things are of equal importance or value. Take
note of what part of speech is being repeated.
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time . . . the dead sleep for their time,
•
Anaphora is a particular form of parallelism, in which the repeated part of speech is
in the initial position of the line.
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery...
•
Antithesis also uses grammatical parallelism, but opposes rather than equates the
terms. (Whitman often introduces antitheses in order to claim they’re really the
same.)
•
Chiasmus (“criss-cross”) repeats a set of parallel terms in inverse order (A:B::B:A).
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.
One of the great nation, the nation of many nations
[A]
[B]
[B]
[A]
HEARING METRICAL PATTERNS: A primer on scansion
Before Whitman, most English poetry was written in “accentual-syllabic” form: a
combination of counted syllables and stresses (accents) in any given line. Scansion is a
technique for annotating the sounds of poetry according to stressed and unstressed
syllables—somewhat like musical notation. It applies to both open- and closed-form
poetry. You could annotate the Declaration of Independence using these scansion tools.
It’s not perfect, and some critics have argued that the whole idea of stressed/unstressed
syllables is a gross (even elitist) oversimplification of the way people actually speak. It’s
an important critique—but again, since earlier poets took meter so seriously, many of
their aims and arguments will be completely opaque to you without understanding
how they determined meter.
Scanning a poem means that you note where the stressed (/) and non-stressed (‘)
syllables fall, and mark them accordingly:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself
[“celebrate” might also be read _ _ _ ]1
You’ll notice the tendency here toward two-beat clusters: in English, we tend to run
one-syllable words together, and divide longer words into more readily stressed units.
An iamb is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one (- /, as in “unless”); a
trochee is the reverse (/-, as in “greater”). Most two-beat clusters you come across in
English will be iambic. Each cluster, whether two-beat or three-beat, is called a “foot.”
Lines of poetry are classified according to the number of feet they have, and the kind of
foot that prevails. Thus, iambic pentameter is a line with five iambs; it is the most
common line in English. To count the number of feet, draw a long slash between the twor three-beat clusters. Trimeter (3-foot), tetrameter (4-foot), and hexameter (6-foot) lines are
also relatively common. Other line lengths exist, but they are less common, as in Poe’s
“The Raven,” which is full of relentlessly regular, trochaic octameter lines:
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
As this example suggests, regular metrical substitution is necessary to keep a line from
getting excessively sing-songy and annoying. Thus, a poem does not have to keep
strictly to its “assigned” meter; indeed, it needs substitutions. Meter refers to an ideal
pattern, from which we expect there to be frequent deviations. Often, these
deviations deliberatly call attention to a particular word or idea, and are therefore
important. One of the advantages of scanning a poem is that you can see the deviations
more clearly. The trochaic substitution is frequently used in iambic lines, often at the
beginning:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore
1 Stress is relative; this is not an exact science. Notice the way that a rhythmic pattern can take over your
normal way of pronouncing stressed syllables: if you’re reading lines of iambic pentameter, you will
unconsciously start stressing words to make them fit the meter, like this one, which I’m tempted to make
perfectly iambic. Some have called this “the tyranny of meter.” It’s no small irony that Whitman, the
pioneer of free verse, begins “Song of Myself” with an iambic pentameter line!
Each of these first two lines of Poe’s “To Helen” begins with a trochaic substitution; the
poem goes on in perfect iambic tetrameter lines until the pattern ruptures again with
the two key lines that end the second stanza: “To the glory that was Greece / And the
grandeur that was Rome.” Despite these substitutions, the overall pattern of the poem is
principally iambic.
This line contains one of those sinkholes you can easily fall into when you start
scanning: the word “Nicean,” which I’ve given an accent mark to indicate its middle
stress. You’ll often see accent marks where the poet means you to pronounce a normally
one-syllable word with two syllables in order to fit the meter (“callèd,” pronounced
CALL-ed, not CALLD). More often, the poet expects you to know the general
exceptions: “The” is often elided, or run into the next word, rather than counting as its
own beat (so you’d say “ThTERnal” where the text states “The eternal”). Words ending
in –er or –en are often implicitly shortened (“O’er” for “over”—this may or may not be
indicated with punctuation).
There is a whole range of acceptable substitutions to the basic skeleton of meter.2 A
double-stressed foot is a spondee (//, as in “yo-yo”) [adj. “spondaic”], and as you can
imagine, it aggressively calls attention to itself. There are three-beat feet as well, but it
is much rarer for these to characterize the entire line (although there are some
formidable exceptions, as in Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” written in dactylic hexameter).
Generally, they substitute for the “normal” iamb or trochee. These are called the
anapest (- -/), as in “unabashed”) and the dactyl (/- -, as in “comedy”). And poets
working in meter often allowed themselves omitted syllables as well, usually leaving
out the expected unstressed beat at the end of a line (see the end of the line from “The
Raven” on the previous page). Likewise, it was both permissible and common to add an
extra unstressed beat at the end of a line, to permit end-words like “question” (an extra
syllable at the end of an iambic pentameter line is a hendecasyllable).
Obscure metrical terms (to dazzle your friends
with): Two unstressed syllables are called pyrrhic
(though many prosodists argue that a foot without a
stress is no foot at all). An amphibrach goes - / Good examples are rare, though the name of my
former place of employment, The College of William
and Mary, is one. The amphimacer (/ - /) is
dubious, but “That’s the dope!” might be one– if you
said it in such an enthusiastic and rapid manner that
the three syllables just had to go together.
Even in free verse and prose, you
can use this notation to identify
underlying rhythms. However,
the “skeleton” of an open-form
poem is not the metrical pattern,
but the look of the line itself. We
notice unusual deviations in the
poem’s appearance on the page as
well as its aural stresses. A very
short line in the midst of many
long ones is attention-getting, just as the swerve away from a parallel structure is.
(Whitman’s catalogues are perfect examples: when, after the long, parallel lists, we hear
“But they are not the Me myself,” we wake from the almost hypnotic trance he’s put us
in, and pay attention). Our attention is also drawn to where the line breaks, and the
overall cadence (musicality; the combination of sounded phrases) of the poem.
2 As those of you who have taken poetry courses dealing with earlier periods know, conventions of
“acceptable” substitution change over time, as verse forms come in and out of fashion. To read such
poems well, you need to have an idea about the metrical preferences and controversies of the time. The
As the 19th century wore on, poets got tired of working with the same metrical forms, and experimented
with what might have once been considered outlandish and weirdstanzas (see “The Raven”).
A line of poetry (whether in accentual-syllabic meter or in free verse) is considered to
have an end-stop if it pauses at the end, with a comma, period, or natural stop. It is
enjambed if, instead, it pushes on to the next line without a breath. A caesura is a pause
(often marked by a comma, period, semicolon, etc.; sometimes a natural breath-pause)
in the middle of a line.
A line of unrhymed iambic pentameter is
called blank verse. Most of Shakespeare’s
When you read a poem, look at the
plays are in blank verse.
words in the beginning- and endposition of lines in close proximity
A line of iambic hexameter (rhymed or not) is
to each other, and see whether they
an alexandrine.
may connect. The relationship of
lines to each other often meaningful,
too: read against each other, certain lines might contain contrasting ideas, or repeat and
reinforce a larger theme.
Two lines grouped together, whether they rhyme or simply form a natural
sentence/phrase, are generally read as a couplet. Three lines comprise a tercet; four, a
quatrain. A closed (or ‘heroic’) couplet consists of two end-stopped lines (the first line
does not extend into the next); open couplets, in contrast, are enjambed.
The organization of units greater than the line is also important. The stanza
encompasses as many lines as the poet clusters together without a blank space between.
As in music, a refrain in poetry is any line repeated in between various stanzas. But eye
and ear both come into play when you look at a stanza: to some readers, part of the
delight of a closed-form poem is the neatly composed picture it makes against the blank
page—the feeling of “arranged life.” The traditional stanza units described on the next
page are most meaningful for describing metrical or closed-form verse, but free-verse
writers often use them knowingly as well.
Rhyme is, obviously, another way to tie words and concepts together in a poem, either
in a relationship of similarity or difference. End rhymes are positioned on the ends of
lines that are linked in a rhyming pattern; internal rhyme echoes within one line.
Rhyme is marked (usually on the margins of the page) by assigning a letter to each
common sound: ABAB (for a typical hymn), ABAC (if the last line introduces a different
rhyming sound), and so on through the alphabet as you annotate the poem.
Rhyme isn’t just a formula for completing some blueprint of a verse scheme: when well
used, it helps structure the whole experience of reading a poem. If you know a rhyme
is coming, the poem (or a line of thought within the poem) won’t feel finished until it
does. A surprising rhyme can upset your previous understanding of what was
happening in the poem, or it can change the tone– making the poem suddenly funny or
ironic. Alliteration (the same sound beginning different words), consonance (the
repetition of consonants at any location in the word), assonance (the repetition of vowel
sounds), and onomatopoeia (the imitation of natural sounds) are related strategies for
enhancing the musicality of the poem.
True rhyme must have a common final sound (true/blue). Off, slant,
or near rhymes are close but not ‘perfect’ rhymes (even/Heaven);
some poets, like Dickinson, prefer them. Sight rhyme is self-evident:
love/ prove. Macaronic rhyme rhymes two words from different
languages (lesson/essen).
COMMON METRICAL FORMS
Beyond the units of foot, line, and stanza, there are a number of well-known verse
forms of designated length. You might see these as rigid, constricting forms from which
Whitman had to “free” himself and other writers, but you can also think of them as
formal challenges– and as a way of entering into dialogue with everyone who has
written before in that form. When you discover that a poem is written in one of these
structures, then, think about its relation to tradition: one can work within a given verse
tradition in order to undermine it (e.g., Poe’s “Silence,” a sonnet with an extra line).
The meter most common to Old English, according to linguists, had four-foot, wellaccented lines. The rhymed tetrameter quatrain is perhaps the most basic stanza form in
the language, with any number of rhyme patterns: abab, abba, and xaxa (where x=an
unrhymed line) are the most common. Traditional ballad stanza alternates tetrameter
lines with trimeters (see Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith”) in quatrains: 4-3-4-3
stanzas, which can repeat as long as the balladeer can stand it. The same pattern can
also be called common meter, and is frequently found in hymns (and in Dickinson’s
poetry). Many other hymns are written in all-tetrameter quatrains, 4-4-4-4: long meter
(usually rhymed abab) or in all-trimeter ones: short meter, 3-3-3-3. Most popular songs
are written in some form of tetrameter line. The blues form, generally in tetrameter,
repeats a statement twice, with slight variation, followed by a resolution.
Why, given the staying power and popularity of tetrameter forms, did Englishlanguage writing turn toward the pentameter line? One theory is that this was poetry’s
way of getting free of music. The five-beat line evades the sing-songiness and the
forward-moving narrative quality of these folk meters, which are so symmetrical (4
beats x 4 lines). By comparison, a pentameter line seems asymmetrical, and many poets
found it more appropriate for reflective thought.
Pentameter lines, like tetrameters, tend to be organized in quatrains: the elegaic
quatrain (rhymed abab) is one. But there are exceptions to this norm, too: one famous
example is terza rima, a complex interweaving of interlocked iambic-pentameter
triplets, rhymed aba bcb cdc ede fef , etc. Rhyme royal is a 7-line iambic pentameter
stanza, rhymed ababbcc. Ottava rima is a similar 8-line stanza (abababcc). The
Spenserian stanza has 9 lines, abab bcbc c, and ends with an alexandrine (6-beat line) for
variation and summation.
Then there’s the sonnet, perhaps the most prestigious lyrical form in Western literary
history: it’s comprised of 14 lines of iambic pentameter. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided
into the first 8 lines (the octave, abba abba) and the next 6 (sestet cde cde). A
Shakespearean sonnet is divided into 4 quatrains and a couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There
have been many variations upon each pattern over time. And poets have invented
many other verse forms that can be adapted to suit most any line length, from trimeter
to hexameter. The villanelle weaves together six aba aba aba triplets, with many of the
rhymes coming from the same word of slightly varying refrains. The sestina is an
incredibly complicated six-line stanza in which the same words are repeated in a
different order at the end of each line.
For further reference, see: John Hollander, Rhyme's reason : a guide to English verse (Yale University Press,
1989); Mary Oliver, A poetry handbook (San Diego : Harcourt Brace, 1994); Richard Bradford, A linguistic
history of English poetry (London: Routledge, 1993).
NOW THAT I’VE SCANNED IT,
WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?
OK, you’ve taken your bitter pill and learned all this specialized vocabulary. You’re
fully equipped to dazzle (?) your friends with your ability to ferret out a pyhrric
subsitution. You’ve taken the poem at hand line-by-line and divided it into feet, noted
the overall meter and pertinent substitutions, and marked out the overall rhyme scheme
and stanza arrangement. You feel a bit as if you’ve done an autopsy on a poem that
was, alas, living when you first found it. What next? What on earth does it matter?
Scansion, like any kind of close analysis of language, is not an end in itself. Rather, it
is a tool to help you see concretely patterns and deviations from patterns you may not
be able to perceive otherwise. Those patterns don’t necessarily contain a “hidden
meaning,” but they (and their absence) point a reader directly toward some elements
more powerfully than others. Finding concrete evidence in the formal arrangement of
the poem that some words or images are emphasized more than others, or that a
traditional form is invoked and rejected, will give you far more authority to make
claims about the meaning and direction of the poem. It’s much better-quality evidence
than idle speculation about the author’s emotional state, or unfounded generalizations
about a vague feeling you (might) associate with a sound or “symbol.”
On the final page is a checklist to use when you do a reading of a poem. With practice,
you’ll be able to do it in a matter of minutes. Not every formal observation you make
will ultimately matter. But some will. So do that dissecting, discover the patient’s
unique identity, and watch it come to life again.
Common misstep in analysis: many people feel obliged, in writing about poetry, to
characterize the “feeling” of certain sounds: the repeated “sss” feel lazy, the long “Os” feel
mournful, and so forth. As with our discussion of symbolism, however, these impressions are
only convincing if there is a larger context of meaning within the rest of the poem to justify
them. If the words themselves don’t support that impresion logically, you’re opening yourself to
the accusation of being excessively subjective (you may hear the “w” sound as happy, but I
don’t). Beware, then, of making too much of sound patterns. On the same note, beware of
generalizing about the emotional responses of all readers. Attention to the reading
experience is a good thing, but remember that your experience may not be the same as
everyone’s.
A CHECKLIST OF FORMAL PROPERTIES
First, get at the “ideal” or skeletal structure underlying the poem. Then find the
exceptions: the ways in which it’s special.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
How many lines? How many stanzas? What’s the basic end-rhyme scheme? If this
overall form fits into one of the traditional verse forms, such as the sonnet, what is it
and what historical associations does it have? If it almost fits one of those patterns,
where does it “miss” (so you can pay special attention to that part)?
What is the overall metrical pattern of the line (iambic pentameter, trochaic
hexameter, etc.)? Where are the metrical substitutions? Pay special attention to the
exceptions to the overall pattern, and the words/phrases that jump out there.
Which lines fall together in natural groupings (couplets within a stanza, for
example—the two shortest/longest lines— the first and last lines of each stanza and
of the poem as a whole)? Do any concepts come together when you put together
these pairings; and are they parallel or contradictory concepts?
Find the points where a thought stops: either an end-stopped line, or a caesura in the
middle of a line. Did a thought get interrupted before being completed? If
something is signalled formally as a turning point, chances are it will indicate a
deeper kind of turning point in the poem.
Turn back to the questions on p. 1 under “General reading practices for poems,” and
make notes about the implied speaker and listener, the clusters of metaphors, the
general rhetorical strategies, and the way all of these may change from the
beginning of the poem to the end.
Aside from the end rhymes, are there internal echoes or repetitions of sounds? What
terms are thus linked together aurally?
What is asymmetrical in the poem? Is there a rhyme word that’s expected, but doesn’t
arrive? If there’s an earlier pattern of three adjectives together, for instance, and the
poem ends with a phrase with two adjectives, you’re expecting that third. What’s
suggested by its absence?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consider this: Because “closed form” poems
are so “artful,” so deliberately “arranged,” you may not see at first what’s not
there—what’s been left out. But something has been. Look for it.