Meter Lesson 3: Other Meters

Meters which are not iambic sound less natural and more like special effects. This page gives two examples.

These examples show that the words we have to decribe meter are not really adequate to the task. In both of these examples, the poem does not really fit the definition of a foot repeating on every line the same number of times, and yet the poems are clearly in a fixed rhythm. The problem is that the words used to describe meter come from ancient Greek poetry, which had a very different structure and sound from modern English poetry. The terms used in analysis of poems are not very good ones, but they are the best we have unfortunately, and if you make up your own better terms, no one will understand what you are talking about, alas!

In the first example, the poem is officially in the meter trochaic tetrameter. This would normally mean that the lines have the pattern

DA da   DA da   DA da   DA da

but actually the last unstressed syllable is missing in each line. We still call this tetrameter (four feet) because each line has four stresses, and it is the stress which means that there is a metrical foot there, even though it is incomplete.

This second example is more of a song than a poem, but it illustrates triple meter. (Anapestic and dactylic meters are called triple meters because the feet have three syllables, whereas iambic and trochaic meters are duple meters.) The lines do not start with the beginning of the metrical foot; the whole pattern is instead shifted to the right one notch, so that each line has the pattern

da DA da da DA da da DA da da DA da

instead of

DA da da DA da da DA da da DA da da

as we would expect in dactylic meter. Nonetheless, the lines sound dactylic (you hear four dactyls when you read them, with an extra beat at the beginning and one missing from the end), rather than, say, three anapests with some extra stuff at both ends of each line. Actually, the lines would be better analyzed as repeating the stress pattern, "da DA da" four times, but that pattern is not a metrical foot which has a name, so in giving a name to the meter we are forced to call it dactylic with the pattern shifted.