Meter

11 Key excerpts on "Meter"

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  Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

  • Mick Short(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  metre. As we will see below, this level of rhythmic structuring is indicated by the fact that lines of poetry, unlike prose, do not extend out to the right-hand edge of the page. Because the possession of metre is one of the basic ways in which poetry can be distinguished from prose, it will be important to examine it in some detail. Some traditional treatments of metre have tended to assume that rhythm and metre are the same thing. But as we saw in 5.2, all language has rhythm, and so although metre is an extremely important aspect of poetic rhythm, it is not the only factor involved.

  The study of metre has had contrasting receptions by poets and students of poetry. Many of my students find metrics tedious to study. This is probably because metrical structure is the level of poetic organisation which is least directly connected with meaning, and because the study of metre is a complicated, and at times difficult, matter. Indeed, there are still a number of disagreements among experts on rhythm and metre about fairly basic aspects of their study. Poets, on the other hand, appear to find the study of poetic rhythm fascinating and central to their art. An indication of this is the number of well known poets who have written essays or longer works on the subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Bridges and T. S. Eliot, for example. D. H. Lawrence, though not an analyst of metre, eloquently captures its rhythmic regularity and his feeling for its importance in the following extract from a letter:

  I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre. (Letter to Edward Marsh, November 1913)

  Why is poetry metred? Firstly, metrication is one of the formal features which sets poetry off from other kinds of writing; and in earlier times particularly, when poetry was reserved for special subject matters like love and nature, metrication was a formal signal of importance. Even today, when the subject matters of poetry are much more various, writing a text in metred lines appears to say 'I have something significant to tell you'. But a more interesting reason is the one mentioned at the beginning of this section: the addition of a background metrical scheme to a text adds a new rhythmical dimension, not generally found in prose,2

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  Listening to Poetry

  An Introduction for Readers and Writers

  • Jeremy Trabue(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Chemeketa Press

    (Publisher)

  Meter means a regular pattern and identifiable structure of stress in a line of verse. Like “form,” it can be used multiple ways, both descriptively and prescriptively.

  A Brief History of English Meter

  The ideas about Meter and the terminology used are alien for most of us at first. However, understanding a little about the history of English and about rhythm’s evolving place in English-language poetry will help you understand how and why these terms are used and give you a context for what follows.

  The first thing to understand is that not all languages have a meaningful pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Japanese, for example, does not strictly or formally differentiate between stress levels in spoken syllables. To an English speaker, spoken Japanese may sound clipped, flat, or expressionless. Likewise, an English speaker learning Japanese must overcome the natural tendency to vary stresses in pronunciation. Native English speakers learning Japanese often sound bizarrely sing-song or chantlike to native Japanese speakers.

  On the other hand, in some languages, the role of stress is even stronger, and the rules governing stress are more regular. Stress is a central feature of German languages, which English inherited from its German roots. Stress patterns were the dominant organizing principle in Old English poetry, too, along with alliteration. A line of Old English poetry is primarily defined by the number of stressed syllables it contains, regardless of the total number of syllables.

  Modern English, born from Old English and Middle French, came into existence more or less during the Renaissance. This was a time when classical literature and philosophy were being rediscovered and exerting a dominant influence on almost every area of the cultures of Europe. The impact of classical poetry and literary study on modern English literary theory and practice was very strong.

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  CLEP® Analyzing & Interpreting Literature Book + Online

  • Editors of REA(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  Free verse has become associated with “modern” poetry, often adding to its so-called obscurity because without rhyme and rhythm, poets often resort to complicated syntactical patterns, repeated phrases, awkward cadences, and parallelism. Robert Frost preferred not to use it because, as he put it, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” suggesting that free verse is easier than rhymed and metrical. However, if you have ever tried writing such verse, you will know the problems. (Perhaps a good exercise after your learning about Meter is to write some “free” verse.) T.S. Eliot, who uses the form most effectively in “The Journey of the Magi,” claimed that no “vers” is “libre” for the poet who wanted to do a good job. Such a claim for the artistry and hard work behind a poem introduces perhaps the most difficult of the skills for a poet to practice and a reader to learn: Meter. This time the Greeks provide the meaning of the word from “metron,” meaning measure. Meter simply means the pattern or measure of stressed or accented words within a line of verse. When studying Meter a student should note where stresses fall on syllables — that is why reading aloud is so important, because it catches the natural rhythm of the speaking voice — and if an absence of stressed syllables occurs there is always an explanation why. We “expect” stressed and unstressed syllables because that is what we use in everyday speech. We may stress one syllable over another for a certain effect, often using the definite article “THE well known author…” or the preposition “Get OUT of here!” Usually, however, we use a rising and falling rhythm, known as iambic rhythm. A line of poetry that alternates stressed and unstressed syllables is said to have iambic Meter. A line of poetry with ten syllables of rising and falling stresses is known as iambic pentaMeter, best used by Shakespeare and Milton in their blank verse. The basic measuring unit in a line of poetry is called a foot

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  The Prosody Handbook

  A Guide to Poetic Form

  • Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  modify emotion at the same time as it seems to express it. Meter seems appropriate to emotional and imaginative expression not only because it suggests and stimulates feeling, but also because it makes the language in which it appears unlike the language (and experiences) of everyday. Meter introduces a note of the consciously planned, the symmetrical and artful, and thus makes our experience of reading verse an experience greatly different from our direct involvement in ordinary discourse and from our participation in an actual emotional situation. In other words, Meter can be a means of obtaining what is often called “aesthetic distance” or “psychic distance.”

  Considered in itself, a regular beat—whether it be a drum beat, a rhythmical stamping of feet, or an iambic pentaMeter—evokes and seems to express strong feeling. It unquestionably has connections with the primitive, the emotional, the instinctual, aspects of our nature. In verse, however, Meter does not exist independently, but in a context of words; it is conjoined with images and ideas, with a grammar and a rhetoric. And since the determinateness of the beat is “artificial”—a formality, an artifice, a quality not characteristic of ordinary discourse—Meter tends to remove poetic discourse from the realm of the ordinary. It creates an aura of distance and indirectness and yields all the pleasures that we derive from such a remove from the direct and the familiar. It satisfies our love of formality, ritual, detachment. Simultaneously, the note of urgency, the hint of the primitive or of intense response, is never quite lost. Metered poetry thus makes a simultaneous appeal to two distinct sides of the personality, and this no doubt is one reason for the continuing appeal of Meter from generation to generation and age to age. It is a paradigm of civilization: Bacchus dancing with Athena.

  Aesthetic distance is what softens the blow of calamity. It is what keeps us from completely accepting the calamities in King Lear as real-life calamities happening before our very eyes, so that we do not rush out of our seats to knock Cornwall down when he starts to stamp out poor old Gloucester’s eyes. In real life, sorrow makes us feel sorrowful; on the stage, or in a great lyric poem, the expression of joy or serenity or sublimity can bring tears. In a Shakespeare play we project ourselves imaginatively into the unfolding situation and its characters—but never completely forget that what we are seeing is an illusion, a re-creation, and not a real situation. What keeps us in this back-of-the-mind awareness? First of all, active memory, of course. And the marginal consciousness of the theatre and the rest of the audience. But there is something about a Shakespeare play itself that creates aesthetic distance. For one thing, our faint but never quite extinguished sense of the unreality, the impossibility, of such eloquence and synchrony for real people in a real situation. For another, all those aspects of the play that are deliberately symbolic and nonrepresentational, rather than realistic, such as condensed time, and the cutting out of the lags and redundancies and inexpressive locutions inevitable in everyday conversation and behavior. And for another, the Meter, the blank verse . Meter—even the normally loose Meter of dramatic blank verse—is just artificial (or studied or formal) enough to keep in the realm of poetry the relentless torture and suffering and defeat of the good in Lear.

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  Verse

  An Introduction to Prosody

  • Charles O. Hartman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  binary way: a syllable is stressed or not. Though the rhythm of a line like this one by William Wordsworth (1770–1850),

  A sight so touching in its majesty

  is quite complicated, as you can hear when you say the line aloud, nevertheless for metrical purposes we can begin by marking the syllables this way:

  x     /      /     /     x     x   x      /  x x A sight so touching in its majesty

  This isn’t yet a complete scansion, but it does capture the facts about stressed and slack syllables in the line that are basic to how it realizes the Meter.

  Feet

  The one mark of scansion that we saw earlier but haven’t yet discussed is the vertical line that divides feet. A foot is simply a small pattern of stresses and slacks. The abstract iambic pentaMeter we saw earlier –

  x  /   |   x  /   |   x  /   |   x  /   |   x   /

  – is clearly made up of five units that are the same, and it’s useful to have a name for this repeated unit. The traditional names have been around for so long that they’re in Greek. In iambic pentaMeter the unit repeated is the iamb – a slack followed by a stress.

  The Names of Meters

  The names of Meters combine an adjective denoting the dominant kind of foot – such as “iambic” – with a noun that signifies a number (also in Greek!) with “-Meter” added to it (because what we call a foot the Greeks sometimes called a “metron”). Here are all the nouns in use:

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  A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry

  • Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The ‘foot’ is actually the unit or span of stressed and unstressed syllables which is repeated to form a metrical pattern. This may or may not coincide with the measure, or unit of rhythm. In a regular iambic pentaMeter, the basic repeated pattern of syllables is the sequence × /, or the iambic foot:

  Here the measures, separated by vertical lines, are clearly distinguishable from the feet, marked by horizontal brackets. In a regular trochaic pentaMeter, on the other hand, the feet and measures coincide:

  However, it is a notorious failing of traditional prosody that the distinction between ‘rising rhythm’ (iambs, anapaests) and ‘falling rhythm’ (trochees, dactyls) cannot be reasonably drawn when both the initial and final syllable of a line are stressed, or when both are unstressed:

  Both these types of pattern, which are extremely common in English poetry, could be scanned equally well in terms of iambic or trochaic metre. Analysing into measures, we know there is only one way of distributing the bar-lines: namely, by placing one before each stressed syllable. But analysing into feet, we have to commit outselves arbitrarily in favour of iambs or trochees.

  The measure is therefore a more reliable concept than the foot in English prosody. The importance of the foot lies mainly in its historical position in the body of theory which poets through the centuries have learnt, and have more or less consciously applied in their poetry. This theoretical apparatus originated in a misapplication of classical metrics to the rhythm of English, and there is reason to feel that despite its longstanding hold over English versification, it has never become fully assimilated. When we turn away from the learned tradition, towards the ‘folk prosody’ of nursery rhymes and popular songs, the metrical foot becomes a patently unsuitable tool of analysis. Harvey Gross uses the example of Old Mother Hubbard in this connection12 :

  The important metrical fact about this rhyme is that it is written in three-time throughout, all measures internal to a line having three syllables. But operating with traditional feet, one would feel obliged to scan lines 1, 2, and 4 in terms of ‘falling rhythm’ (dactyls and trochees) and lines 3, 5, and 6 in terms of ‘rising rhythm’ (iambs and anapaests), and thus obscure the regularity of the pattern. Here, and in countless other cases, traditional scansion forces one to over-analyse, by introducing distinctions which are irrelevant to the metre.

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  Meter in English

  A Critical Engagement

  • David Baker(Author)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • University of Arkansas Press

    (Publisher)

  Wallace’s observations on syllabic verse are essential reading for students of prosody, but his boldly revisionist dictum banishing syllabics to the outer darkness needs some qualification. Meter merely means a measure. Any linguistic feature that both the writer and reader can accurately recognize and count can serve as the basis of a legitimate Meter. One can establish Meters by counting stresses, syllables, words, visual line lengths, and numerous other items. (The problem with quantities is not counting but recognizing them: native speakers of English cannot consistently and accurately apprehend them; if identifiable, they could be counted.) Syllable count is easy to recognize in English. Students learn it as Romans once learned quantities. Our dictionaries illustrate the syllabification of a word as a standard part of its pronunciation. Syllable count is, therefore, an available English Meter, and fine poems by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn, and others demonstrate the Meter’s viability.

  What Wallace’s analysis really suggests is something more specific—namely, that syllabics are not an auditory Meter in English. As he himself observes, “we do not hear the count of syllables.” A syllabic pattern of any complexity is impossible to follow by the ear alone, and the intricate syllabic stanza patterns devised by Moore and Thomas lie beyond the furthest potential of human hearing. Surely it is significant that so many of the best syllabic poems in English are rhymed; how else can an auditor recognize the line endings? In a vowel-centered language like French, an audience can accurately hear the syllabic length of a line. It is worth noting, however, that even the French have traditionally relied on rhyme to underscore their line endings; no other European language has traditionally considered end rhyme so indispensable. In English syllabic verse, end rhyme is usually the only sonic element one can consistently hear.

  Wallace later claims that “syllabics is a kind of free verse.” While this statement is wrong in the narrow sense, its deeper implications are correct. Syllabics cannot be strictly considered free verse because they are composed according to a regular pattern. In practice, however, syllabic poems usually sound unMetered. Like much free verse, the formal principle of syllabic verse is visual not auditory. A reader usually recognizes the syllabic pattern of a poem only by seeing it on the page. Syllabic Meters can effectively provide a poem (or stanza) with visual shape, but they give it no apprehensible auditory structure.

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  The Passion of Meter

  A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art

  • Brennan O'Donnell(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  Poems (1815), Wordsworth argues that some form of this bigotry exists in the readers of every age, and is a chief reason why original poets must create the taste by which they are appreciated. Composition in Meter will always imply, through association with other, more familiar poems, a relationship between a new poem and old poems; original creation will always fail in some degree to conform to the expectations produced through familiarity with old poems. The poet’s road takes him not around but through the “honourable bigotry” bred by familiarity.

  Passage contains an image

  2

  Metrical Tension and Varieties of Voice

  WORDSWORTH’S MeterS AND COLERIDGE ON Meter

  Wordsworth’s emphasis on the “pleasure arising from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude,” leaves ample room for—and even requires—a metrical practice exhibiting a wide variety of relationships among diction, syntax, and metrical form and verse pattern. Wordsworth was as much interested in the poem as a locus of active tensions between competing powers as he was in it as a locus amoenus characterized by achieved balance and harmonious unity of complementary elements. Wordsworth’s poem is a Garden of Adonis, not a Bowre of Bliss.

  The poet’s Meter and his selection of diction are distinct elements, yet are capable of being “exquisitely fitted” to one another. Meter functions as an external source both of fixed laws grounded in physicality and of passions produced by recollection of previously encountered works of art. It serves both as a force that, by resisting individual freedom and variation, makes such freedom and variation possible and as a standard against which the variation so produced may be recognized as significant. According to Wordsworth’s theory, metrical form may be subordinated to the “passion of the sense,” functioning primarily as an expressive reinforcement of the speaker’s passions and habits of association. But it need not be. In fact, Wordsworth’s discussion and practice suggest that he regarded such fitting as the exception to the rule—useful in the delineation of a particular frame of mind but not the exclusive aim of the poet’s art at all times. More often than not Meter participates in the creation of a complex sense of the poem as an “intertexture” of potentially opposing elements. The passion of Meter can and does provide a type of “interference” that heightens and improves the “coexist[ing]” pleasure produced by the passion (Prose

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  Coleridge's Experimental Poetics

  • J. Mays(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3

  Some sort of accommodation of Hartley’s third category had been reached in practice since the time of Chaucer. The later sixteenth century saw a resurgence of interest in Classical Meters; the eighteenth century settled into a compromise disturbed by only a few independent spirits (Samuel Say as theorist, Christopher Smart as practitioner) who, despite or because of their extreme originality, had little or no influence on their contemporaries. As the close of the century approached, many began to feel the time was ripe for readjustment. The matter was near to Coleridge’s heart because it brought more than technical values into fine focus, and constructing poems put such values to the test.

  Classical prosody is learned by rules determining the length of syllables (their quantity), the arrangement of short and long syllables in the construction of feet, the particular sequence of feet within the line, and permissible variations from the three interconnected sets of rules. As Renaissance rhetoricians well understood, the scheme makes up a mental structure that a practiced person can perceive as equivalent to patterns of sound but which are not actually so: they can only be heard in the mind’s ear.4 We discover the scansion when we read, we impress it on sequences of words when we write. The patterns can be naturalized so as to work a priori, but we experience them in verse as we understand the skeleton within the living moving body, responsible for the articulation of the parts but unseen. Stress Meter on the other hand works within the line in relation to an irregular number of syllables, that is, alongside unstressed syllables that are variable in the stress they carry (as are the stressed syllables, too). It comes out of the dark, unexpected, and dramatic; it is felt on the pulse and involves both reader and writer in another way. “This living hand, . . . See here it is— | I hold it towards you.”5 Metrists have described how Coleridge’s early poems in English conform pretty much to Classical (quantitative) norms of scansion, such as he would have been drilled in from early days, and how irregularities increase as various features of accentual (stress) scansion are allowed. The rhyming pentaMeters of “Absence: A Poem” (60 ) contain a significant number of such features (trisyllabic substitution, inversion, secondary accent, variations in the final foot of the line), there are headless lines in “The Songs of the Pixies” (64 ), and so on.6 It would appear that Coleridge was for a while not sure where such irregularities were leading him, but he appears to have discovered his direction by the time he wrote “The Eolian Harp” (115 ), the “favorite of my poems” (CL 1:295). In the early printed versions of this poem, in particular (PW

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  Write Out of the Classroom

  How to use the 'real' world to inspire and create amazing writing

  • Colin Macfarlane(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Poetry's sound patterning has always helped its creators and performers too. People can remember the gist of a story well enough to tell it, although rarely perfectly or in the same word order. A special quality of poetry is that, after gaining familiarity with a piece, one can remember it well enough to recite it from beginning to end, word for word. Its rhythm and sound echoes carry the performer along the lines while stressed beats continuously flag up new meanings, imagery and approaching words. At the completion of each line any end-rhyming used also helps alert the mind to what is coming next.

  Poetic Meter

  More ways in which meaning, description and rhythm are linked in poetry will become clear when we discover what basic building blocks of rhythmic patterns are possible.

  Traditionally, regular rhythmic patterns in English poetry are referred to as ‘Meter’. This is made up of units known as ‘feet’, which come in different types, nearly all of which contain one stressed beat and at least one unstressed one. The sound patterns they create work alongside effects caused by having specific numbers of ‘feet’ per line, or sometimes patterns in which the numbers of feet differ in equivalent lines in each stanza.

  We won't delve deeply into variations of Meter as this book is not about the finer details of prosody, but information is available online under search titles such as ‘Meter in English poetry’ and ‘rhythm, Meter and scansion’.

  The points raised below are designed to help students control poetry creation and can aid in solving problems as they write. Teachers must decide how much of this information to supply, depending on the age and ability of their groups.

  How many stressed beats to a line?

  I normally ask students what they guess might be the minimum and maximum numbers of stressed beats in a line of poetry. The actual answer is from one stressed beat up to about seven or eight, but the practical answer is usually between two and five (or six) per line in metrical poetry and from about one up to about six in free verse.

  To make things simpler from this point, when I simply mention ‘beats’ I will be referring to stressed beats rather than syllables.

  Because many words naturally contain two or more stressed beats, trying to write a poem with only one per line would create an impractical column of single or fractured words. So in poetry where each line contains the same number of beats, the minimum per line is usually two. Two-beat lines have an inbuilt ‘swing’ due to the proximity of the line breaks and the pauses these create. We'll look at ways to use these, and also three-beat lines, in the chapter on ‘minimalist poetry’.

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  A Companion to Modernist Poetry

  • David E. Chinitz, Gail McDonald, Gail McDonald, David E. Chinitz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848), to Tennyson's and Swinburne's experiments with alcaics and sapphics (Tennyson's “The Daisy” and others, and Swinburne's “Sapphics”). Even if one accepts that modernist poets made a more concerted effort to “break the pentaMeter” than their predecessors, it must be conceded that they were building on many decades of questioning and experimentation.

  While quantitative and accentual accounts of verse both count feet, another approach in English-language verse has been to concentrate on the number of stressed syllables in a line, and to treat the number of unstressed syllables as variable. The late nineteenth-century exemplar of this approach was Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), the posthumous publication of whose poems (in 1918) came too late to influence the first generation of modernists, but provided a later generation with a precedent for experimentation, as did Hopkins's letters (published in 1935 and 1938), and notebooks (1937). Though he created an idiosyncratic terminology and way of marking-up a text, Hopkins's idea of “sprung rhythm” was simple. As he wrote in 1878, “it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables” (107). He illustrated it by analyzing a children's rhyme. (I have followed the simple convention of marking stressed syllables with a forward-slash [/] and unstressed syllables with an “x”; this convention cannot distinguish between the heavily and the lightly stressed, but is sufficient for present purposes.)

  Although the number of syllables in each line varies (3, 5, 4, 5, 4, 5), there is a regular number of stresses in each; or rather, it is possible to perform the poem in such a way that it is given a regular number of stresses. The principle is as musical as that of metrical feet –indeed, Hopkins emphasized its musical credentials – but allows considerably more flexibility.

  One version of sprung rhythm that acquired particular cultural prestige in late nineteenth-century England was alliterative verse in models which are traceable to the ninth century and which continued into the fourteenth. The dominant model was a line of four stressed syllables in which the first three alliterated, and in which there was a significant break in the half line. It has been summarized in its crudest form as:

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