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To Next LessonMeter Lesson 1: Intro & Stress
Introduction:
There are a lot of terms that describe the rhythm of poetry. This lesson will explain them using sounds to demonstrate the rhythms described, and will contain a quiz to test your understanding of these terms.
First of all, the word meter is used to describe the type of rhythm in a poem, especially one which has a regularly repeating rhythm. For example, iambic pentameter is a type of meter. If you don't know what iambic pentameter is specifically yet, don't worry, that's what this lesson is about.
Stress:
The smallest unit of rhythm is the foot. A foot consists of one, two, or three syllables, and there is a name for each possible rhythm you can have in a foot. The rhythms are defined by where the stresses fall. The stress on a syllable is how strongly that syllable is emphasized. In English, each word has a fixed stress pattern. (In French, the stresses on syllables in words depend where the word is placed in the sentence, so French poetry doesn't have the metrical system described in this lesson.)
The specific quality of the sound of a syllable that makes it stressed or unstressed is hard to define. It is a combination of the intonation (pitch), volume, vowel sound, and the actual rhythm. The word "present" is a case where the vowel sound changes according to stress: The first 'e' in pre'sent is prounounced "ee" and the first 'e' in present' is pronounced "eh." There is, however, no hard and fast rule defining how the vowel is pronounced in stressed and unstressed syllables, except that the schwa sound (the third 'e' in "resented" which is sort of an "uh" sound) is used only in unstressed syllables. For the rhythm, there is usally a pause after a stressed syllable, so crocodile is pronounced "croc [pause] odile." The stressed syllables are also pronounced louder.
The stress patterns of words are usually defined in terms of primary and secondary stresses. These stresses are marked by apostrophes in dictionaries after the stressed syllable, with one apostrophe for a primary stress and two for a secondary stress (if a distinction is being made between primary and secondary stresses; often people just care which syllables are stressed at all) or poossibly with boldface or italics. Just to make things confusing, the stresses in poery are usually marked with slashes and little u-shaped marks above the syllable, with a slash indicating a stressed syllable and a little u indicating an unstressed syllable. I will use the apostrophes because they are easier to type, but in books about poetry you will see the other notation used.
Words of two or more syllables have some stressed syllables (emphasized syllables) and some unstressed syllables, and some of the stressed syllables are pronounced more strongly than others. The most strongly-stressed stresed syllable is the primary stressed syllable of the word, and all the others are secondary stresses. In practice (for instance for the purposes of making meter in poetry) it doesn't matter which stress is primary and which is secondary except as an aesthetic value in how the poetry sounds. Poetic meters are defined simply by which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed.
The easiest way to determine the stress pattern of a word is to tap out its rhythm. You will hear the timing and volume differences that tell you where the stress lies. You have to practice a little to get so that you can hear which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed.
This is all very theoretical and dry, so let me gove some examples. The easiest to understand are in cases where you get two different meanings depending on the stress. The word "present" is an example. When the wprd means a gift, it is written as pre' sent in a dictionary which means that the first syllable is stressed: you pronounce it PRE sent. When the word is the verb meaning to give a presentation, it is pre sent', with the apostrophe indicating that the stress in on the second syllable, i.e. preSENT.
Here are some other examples of words with their stresses marked. Click in the "hear word" to hear the word pronounced aloud, and in the "hear rhythm column to hear it tapped out.
The next lesson will show how stresses are arranged in metrical feet, which are the building blocks of meter in poetry.