Meter: Metrical Feet

There are five different kinds of metrical feet, corresponding to the five ways you can arrange the stresses on one, two, or three syllables. Poems written in meter repeat these feet over and over again to give a regular rhythm, often with the same number of feet on each line, or else a pattern where the first line of the stanza has a certain number of feet, the second line has another number, and so on, with each stanza the same. To write a poem in meter, you have to choose words that have stresses arranged in the pattern you chose. As we saw in the last lesson, every word in English has the stresses arranged in a fixed way. You can pronounce a word with the stress on the wrong syllable, but it sounds funny. When you write a poem that has a mistake in meter, you are forcing the reader either to break the meter (not have the stresses according to the pattern you are trying to follow) or pronounce the word with the stress on the wrong syllable.

To use a meter, write words that repeat one kind of foot over and over again. The name of the meter is determined by the kind of foot you use and the number of feet you put on each line. Poems written using a pattern of repeating metrical feet are said to be metrical. Poems which don't have a fixed meter are called free verse. Blank verse is a special name for poems which are in iambic pentameter (see below) but don't rhyme.

The first part of the name of a meter tells what kind of metrical foot it uses. The name of a meter starts with either "iambic", "trochaic", "anapestic", or "dactylic." The second part of the name of the meter tells how many feet you have on each line. For example lines with one foot are in monometer (rarely used term, you usually don't talk about meter with poems with less than four syllables on a line), poems with two feet are in dimeter, poems with three feet on a line are in trimeter, and so on. Here are the names for the various numbers of syllables:

Rhyming poems in meter usually rhyme either in couplets (each pair of two lines rhyme, and then the next pair rhymes but with different sounds; in other words the pattern of rhymes is aa bb cc dd ....) or alternating lines rhyme, but more complicated rhyme schemes are common as well. It is almost required to use meter when you use rhymes at the ends of your lines. The rhymes sound wrong otherwise. If you want to use rhyme but not use full meter, make the rhyming words have the same stresses, with the first rhyming syllable stressed.

is an example of rhymes in free verse with the rhymes correctly stressed (even though it is terrible poetry!), but

has the stresses wrong on the rhyming syllables. For example to make the last two lines sound as if they really rhyme, you would have to pronounce "stupid" as "stu PID" instead of "STU pid."

More typically, lines which rhyme are the same length and (usually) have the same rhythm. For example here is a well-known beginning of a Robert Frost poem:

The meter of the Robert Frost poem is iambic tetratmeter, which means a poem made up of repeating iambs, with four iambs on each line.

In modern poetry, there are sometimes rhymes without the stress pattern matching, especially when the rhyming words are in the middle of the lines instead of at the end (this is called internal rhyme). Internal rhyme is a more subtle effect than end-rhyming and makes for more unique sounding poetry than metered and rhymed poems. Use meter and end-rhyme when you want a poem to sound formal, elevated, traditional, or classy, and use free verse with no rhymes or internal rhymes when you are striving for a more original, modern, and quirky poem.

The most common meter in English-language poetry is iambic pentameter. "Iambic" means that the feet are all iambs, and "pentameter" means you have five feet on each line. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter because it is supposedly the closest to normal spoken English. It is the meter used in Shakespeare, in Milton, and in most poems by the Victorians such as Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson.

Poems vary as to how strictly they follow the meter. Some poets, such as Milton, followed the meter they chose exactly, so that every syllable had either a strong stress or no stress, and they always alternated in the right pattern. This leads to poetry that sounds very rhythmic and song-like. Other poets, such as Shakespeare, introduced variations in the meter. That meant that they added an occasional syllable, usually either an extra unstressed syallable after another unstressed syllable, or an extra stressed syllable after the last (unstressed) syllable in the line. For example, the famous line from Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question" has an extra syllable at the end of the line.

You'll notice that even this example is not completely in strict meter. For example, the line that starts with "Either" would, according to the meter, have the stress on the second syllable of "either," but the word "eother" is normally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. This is not a mistake in the poem-- completely strict meter sounds like a jingle rather than good poetry so poets normally vary the meter a little. But Milton sticks to it pretty tightly. It is usual for variations in meter to occur at the beginning or ends of lines, and to be used for emphasis. For example, the word "either" receives extra impact because the first syllable is stressed when we expect an unstressed syllable. Poems with many syllables with the stress on the wrong syllable do sometimes sound as if they have mistakes in them, especially if the incorrect stresses seem to be there by accident and not because the poet is emphasizing something. So when you write poems in meter, you should try to put the stresses on the correct syllables except in places where you want the sounds of the words to be especially noticed. An extra stress on a word like "a" or "the" almost always sounds wrong, as do words placed spo that they would have to be mispronounced to receive the stresses the meter would normally dictate. It is a difficult matter to vary the meter while not soudning like you are making mistakes, and it takes practice and judgment to get it right.

Here is an example of a poem with much looser iambic pentameter meter:

You can tell that Berryman's sonnet is not in strict meter by listening to the two ways I read the poem. Read in the sing-song style, with the stresses placed where the meter dictated, the poem sounds totally wrong. There are even extra syllables in some lines so that there is no way to read the poem according to the meter. Whne I tried to do it, the poem no longer sounded like it made any sense and many words had to be mispronounced. In the Milton poem, the sing song reading did not distort the rhythm of individual words, and it sound almost correct, except for the lack of emphaiss on phrases which should be emphaiszed and emotional effects. In a poem in strict meter, you can read it either way, although the better reading is the one in which you pay attention to the meaning more than the meter. A poem in very loose meter can only be read according to the meaning; the rhythmic reading doesn't work at all.

You may wonder why we even think of Berryman's poem as being in iambic pentameter when so many of the stresses are in the wrong place. The reason is that readers familiar with the conventions of traditional poetry will recognize the poem as a sonnet (a 14-line poem in iambic pentameter), both by the fact that the lines have 10 syllables and some of them are in the iambic rhythm, and by the fact that the poem has 14 lines and is divided into an eight-line section and a six-line section, which is one of the typical ways to break up sonnets. Also, it is a love poem and many sonnets are love poems. Since sonnets are in iambic pentameter by tradition, most readers who know a lot about poetry will see Berryman's poem as a loose version of iambic pentameter and not as free verse.

Go To Next Lesson

Number of Syllables	Name
1	monometer
2	dimeter
3	trimeter
4	tetrameter
5	pentameter
6	hexameter
7	heptameter
8	octameter
9	nonameter
10	decameter