Poetic Meter

One of the things that stresses (get it???) poets out is poetic meter. How do you determine it? How do you know when you have it right?

We’ll start from square one and see where we can get to with it. English has natural stresses. For one thing, multisyllabic words have different degrees of stress. Take “multisyllabic” as an example. The syllable with the strongest stress is the first one: “mult.” But since the word is a prefix along with another word, “syllabic,” we have a secondary stress on “lab” of “syllabic.”

Also, when we talk, we stress different words. For example, if we want to be sure someone understands our message (e.g., a truculent child), we may emphasize the important words of it: I want YOU to GO HOME and GO to your ROOM. RIGHT NOW! In fact, one of the problems when computers read text is that they read all the words with the same level of stress and that actually makes language hard to understand. So we emphasize the meaning of words with stress.

Poetic meter has something to do with stress. In fact, one thing it does is to label the number of stressed syllables in a line, using Greek numerical prefixes: di-meter, tri-meter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, etc. That’s 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 stresses, respectively.

Okay, that takes care of one of the big words you may have heard in relation to poetry. We’ll get to the others in a minute.

How do you determine the number of stresses in a line? Think about a line of music and that will help. We all like to dance to the beat of music, and song lyrics’ stress patterns are often arranged along the lines of music; that is, the stressed words are on beats, although there may be beats between words. How about that?

So let’s look at this using some songs we know. If you clap on the beats of Mary Had a Little Lamb, you would get:

MA-ry HAD a LIT-tle LAMB, its FLEECE was WHITE as SNOW. There are six stresses in that line, so it is some form of hexameter.

Now let’s take an old song, Beautiful Brown Eyes (I have always been fond of this one, since I have brown eyes):

BEAU-tiful BEAU-tiful BROWN EYES, i’ll NEV-er love BLUE an-y MORE. This is seven stresses, heptameter.

Now, the other aspect of poetic meter has to do with how many syllables are between the stresses and whether there is an unstressed syllable before or after a stressed one. It’s actually easy to remember these names and what they do-you can make the names “be” the stress patterns:

i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB, i-AMB

That’s five iambs in a line, which would be iambic pentameter (used in sonnets and also in Shakespeare’s plays). An iambic pentameter line would have ten syllables, beginning with an unstressed syllable, and in a pattern of unstress, STRESS. Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s first sonnet:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory:

Here’s another:

TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee, TRO-chee

A trochee is just the opposite of an iamb. So the above is a line of trochaic pentameter. The big words are just about ready to fly out of your mouth! Here’s an example of trochaic poetry, from Longfellow’s Hiawatha:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

But sometimes there are two unstressed syllables between the stressed ones, as in “BEAU-tiful.” Here are the two patterns for that:

DAC-tylic, DAC-tylic, DAC-tylic

ana-PEST, ana-PEST, ana-PEST

Here is an example of a dactylic poem:

The Charge of the Light Brigade

by

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

“Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was riding on a train and the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was anapestic:

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

That was his first book for children.

Finally, there’s SPONDEE, which is where two or more syllables in a row are stressed.

But the rubber meets the road slightly differently in real life. If you did a whole poem (or a whole play) in iambic pentameter, it would be sing-songy and boring. So, most poets mix it up a little. Here is a sample from Robert Frost’s great poem, Birches:

WHEN I see birches bend to left and right 

Across the line of straighter darker trees, 

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. 

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. 

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them

This poem begins with four lines of perfect iambic pentameter: when I see BIRCH-es BEND, etc. The sound of the poem is like birch trees bending from side to side. Then, in the fifth line, the iambs are disrupted by a line of trochees, the way an ice storm would disrupt the even movement of trees back and forth. Isn’t that cool!

How do you craft for this? Actually, don’t worry about it at first. Just put down the meaning you want the poem to have-the metaphors and all that. Then you can start to craft for sound, including meter. If you read your poem out loud, you will probably find two or three places where you have a regular meter, possibly iambic or trochaic. That’s because English is such a rhythmic language.

For example, in the above paragraph, “you read your poem out loud” is a series of iambs (okay, so I’m pronouncing “poem” as a single-syllable word-I cheated. Sue me). I could use those words as a starting point for a particular line “where you have a regular meter” is trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee (I’m starting with a stress on “where,” but you might read it differently from me. That’s okay). That’s a nice pattern because it has some regular aspects and is broken up just enough to be rhythmically interesting. If I want to turn those trochees into iambs, all I have to do is put an unstressed syllable in front-such as: “is where you have a regular meter.” By the way, I did not write the paragraph above with the intention of using these words as example-so you can see how prose can have a rhythm to it for a few words.

Now, poets don’t use one-syllable words all the time, so here is an example from my undying prose that demonstrates how that rhythm can be handled: “intention of using these words as example.” This is dactylic, with a beginning unstressed syllable (the “in” of intention) and the dactyls consist of multisyllabic words and single-syllable words.

How do you find the words you need in order to fill out a pattern? Well, meaning comes first, so use a thesaurus as you write. You may find a synonym for what you want to say that has a different stress pattern in it. Or you may find that it is okay to allow a pattern to be broken. Listen to it and do what sounds good to you. After all, the information above is interesting, and it might be useful, but you are writing YOUR poem.