Metrical Foot

12 Key excerpts on "Metrical Foot"

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  eBook - ePub

  Routledge Revivals: Essays on Style and Language (1966)

  Linguistic and Critical Approaches to Literary Style

  • Roger Fowler, Roger Fowler(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What we hear in an iambic pentameter depends on one of the mass of relations within poetic form: that between two competing phonological structures. One is the metre: a skeleton with a few regularly proportioned and articulated parts. It is built up on the basis of one unit, the foot; five feet form a line; lines may be grouped into sets (‘couplets’, ‘stanzas’, etc.) by rhyme. These three units—foot, line and stanza—are identified by phonetic characteristics. The foot has a light followed by a heavy stress; within the line, all light and heavy stresses are equated, giving only two grades of stress. The line is marked off, not only by the number of feet, stresses and syllables it contains, but by certain terminal sound-features: perhaps by a pause, but more probably by a prolongation of its last vowel and/or voiced consonant; often by a change in the pitch of the voice. The stanza is identified by its rhyme-scheme and often by a fall in the pitch of the voice at the end. Some other minor conventions govern the form of the pentameter: for example, the light and heavy stresses of the first foot may be reversed (but not too often); the stresses of the second foot may not.

  This metrical skeleton has to be filled out by linguistic elements—grammatical and lexical units—which have their own expectations of phonological form: ‘prose rhythm’, the second of the structures I have referred to. English grammar, like English pentameter metre, has a scale of units of different ‘sizes’: morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, in ascending order of magnitude. These units of grammar have their own stress-patterns which—and this is the whole point of this essay—may or may not correspond with those of the metrical matrix that they are made to occupy. The ends of sentences are inevitably marked by a change in the pitch of the voice; no matter how this is interpreted by different performers, it must occur in some form. Now the sentence is a unit of great variation in length, so the ‘terminal juncture’, as the end-marker is called, may or may not fall in the same places as the natural terminal junctures of the metre: at line- and stanza-ends. The smallest unit in the metre is the metrical point: it is always′ or× ; any two in sequence are likely to be different; the order in which they combine to make up a foot is almost always× ′. The smallest unit in the grammar is the morpheme. It is most often a monosyllable, and may have any one of four stresses:’, ^, ′, or ˇ in descending order of loudness.3 The selection depends on the adjacent stresses, and these in turn are governed chiefly by the grammatical construction in which the morpheme occurs. Greenfly has”; green fly ˆ ’ apart ˇ ’ -itab - in inevitable ’ˆ

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  Poetry: The Basics

  • Jeffrey Wainwright(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  classical tradition has influenced the vocabulary used to describe verse measures. As we shall see later, scansion of lines that are in no way quantitative employs technical terms drawn from this classical tradition. It is useful to know the fundamentals of that terminology so that we can describe metrical features when we encounter them.

  There are five principal types of metrical foot and their names derive from Greek. Originally a foot is a distinctive arrangement of short and long syllables:

  Types of quantitative poetic feet

  i.	iamb : one short and one long syllable, notated	ˇ ˉ
  ii.	spondee : two long syllables, notated	ˉ ˉ
  iii.	trochee : one long and one short syllable, notated	ˉ ˇ
  iv.	dactyl : one long and two short syllables, notated	ˉ ˇ ˇ
  v.	anapestic : two short and one long syllable, notated	ˇ ˇ ˉ

  A classical quantitative line is therefore made up of a set number of feet, the type depending upon the requirements of the poem. The conventional terms for these lengths of line are drawn from Latin.

  These terms, both for groupings of syllables and lengths of line, have been taken over in order to describe lines based upon stress – the main metrical feature of verse in English that we shall approach later. Instead of long and short syllables English scansion has come to recognize stressed and unstressed syllables, with stress often marked \ and unstressed v . In subsequent quotations here I have marked stressed syllables in bold type .

  Lengths of quantitative line

  Dimeter : two feet

  Trimeter : three feet

  Tetrameter : four feet

  Pentameter : five feet

  Hexameter : six feet

  Stress or Accent

  Stress or accent refers simply to the prominence some syllables have over others in speech. In some languages, Italian for instance, where the stress falls is sometimes indicated by marked accents : possibilit à , caffé . English rarely uses such marks except for words borrowed from other languages, but any English word of two or more syllables will be accented. Thus we say, heav -en it-self . Sometimes the same word in different forms will be stressed differently, for example the noun is con -flict but the verb con-flict . The modulations here are not always exact. For instance do we say ‘syllable’ by stressing only syll and leaving -ab and -le unstressed, or do we put a lesser accent on the last to give syll -ab-le ? I think I would go for the former but there are variations. Do we say ‘dis-trib- ute’ or ‘dis- trib-ute’, ‘con- trib-ute’ or ‘con-trib- ute’? Some of these are much more marked with different language groups providing quite different accents. English football fans will speak of United’s de-fence , whereas American sports crowds chant ‘de- fense, de- fense’. In the English Midlands the city is Birm- ing-ham, but in Alabama it can be Birm-ing-ham

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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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  Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

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

    (Publisher)

  But because the line lengths are now very irregular we do not feel that the rhythmic properties of each line are parallel to one another. It is this extra regularity which makes metre what it is. Metred poems, then, are poems where the line lengths and rhythmical patterns within the lines are close enough for us to feel a basic pattern of equivalence from line to line. This is why explaining how the different poetic metres work is an important aspect of explaining rhythm in poetry. 5.4 Different kinds of metre Metre in English verse is a level of organisation which is based upon a two—term contrast between positions in a line which should contain strong and weak syllables. Let us use the traditional terms ictus (/) and remiss (X) to refer to these strong and weak positions respectively. If we restrict ourselves for the moment to a situation where these two positions are only allowed to contain one syllable each, we can see that there are two possible patterns of weak and strong events, X /('di dum') and / X ('dum di'). These two elementary patterns are essential to an understanding of English metrics. The first pattern, X / ('di dum') is traditionally called the iamb and the / X ('dum di') pattern is called the trochee. The basic metrical unit of one strong plus one weak (ictus plus remiss) position is traditionally referred to as the Metrical Foot. Thus we can find iambic feet, trochaic feet, and also other combinations when the basic unit is expanded to include more than two syllables in the remiss of the foot (the Metrical Foot must have one and only one ictus syllable, but can normally have from zero to three remiss syllables). Below I list, with illustrative examples, the major foot structures that can be found with any regularity. Some are much more common than others, the iambic foot being by far the most widespread in English verse

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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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  The Prosody Handbook

  A Guide to Poetic Form

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

    (Publisher)

  The reader is induced to look for and is thus far satisfied with continually finding a certain order. Marked changes in that pattern establish a sense of contrast; the reader is put on his guard. Variation beyond that which is needed for securing rhythmic variety and now and then for a sudden emphasis brought about by metrical surprise, makes the reader wonder why the pattern has changed; and if nothing in the sense of the verse seems to warrant it, the variance is likely to be perceived as mere irrationality or inconsistency. The poet himself, in the midst of composition, is certain to feel obliged to conform more or less continually to his adopted pattern: radical and repeated departures from the scheme are almost inevitably bound up with changes of tone, and the careful preservation and modulation of tone is the very essence of all successful imaginative discourse. Poems that begin as ballads keep on being ballads to the end, and iambic sonnets do not suddenly metamorphose into trochaic couplets. And so, this much at least may be said: the poet tends to adhere to his adopted pattern of stresses and nonstresses; and that pattern is susceptible to being analyzed into units or “feet,” or it would not be a pattern. A further point in defense of the “foot approach” begs admittance. Until quite recent times, English poets were, almost to a man, heirs of classical culture, which included classical verse and classical prosodic concepts and terminology; and their poetry invariably was born and bred on the foot. It would be foolish, then, to disregard in a modernist or intuitionist frenzy the whole business of the foot and its attendant implications. If any point in prosodic matters does not require debate, it is that English poets were early made and long kept acutely conscious of the classical tradition. In answer to the other question, it must be said that it is important to discover the metrical pattern of verse. And, once again, for a very simple reason

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  Meter in English

  A Critical Engagement

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

    (Publisher)

  This constant shifting between dactylic and anapestic bases is so common in English as to constitute some sort of norm. For reasons not adequately explained in prosodic literature, English triple meters sound fine when they are mixed, which was not the case in Latin. Sometimes the intermingling of meters becomes so promiscuous that the poem no longer seems governed by a consistent accentual-syllabic pattern but can only be considered accentual since the number of strong beats per line is the only predictable constant. One sees this principle clearly in Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”:

     

  What is the meter of Tennyson’s poem? A traditionalist might label it anapestic, but that scansion does not adequately account for the opening line, which can only be explained as stress meter. The lines range from three to nine syllables in length, and, if one divides them into accentual-syllabic feet, one discovers as many iambs as anapests (not to mention the recurring monosyllabic feet). To label this poem iambic or anapestic, therefore, is misleading since almost every line would then, to some degree, be irregular. Yet the poem is tangibly metrical—one hears a steady beat common to both the three syllable and nine syllable line. What regular metrical principle unifies the poem’s disparate line-lengths?

  The only consistent and comprehensive explanation of Tennyson’s base meter in these two stanzas is a three-stress accentual measure. Every line unfailingly fulfills this norm. Furthermore, the lines consistently move in a rising rhythm of either iambs or anapests, although they show no clear preference for either foot. To claim that the stanzas display any greater accentual-syllabic organization would be a fiction. A prosodist should claim no more regularity than really exists. The basic meter of a poem is the system that accurately and consistently accounts for its rhythmic movement. If all one can accurately predict about a poem is that every line has three strong stresses, then it is absurd to pretend the norm is anapestic, dactylic, or iambic. False precision is the besetting vice of prosody.

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  Theory of the Lyric

  • Jonathan Culler(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The lines range from three to nine syllables in length, and, if one divides them into accentual-syllabic feet, one discovers as many iambs as anapests (not to mention the recurring monosyllabic feet). To label this poem as iambic or anapestic, therefore, is misleading, since almost every line would then, to some degree, be irregular. Yet the poem is tangibly metrical—one hears a steady beat common to both the three-syllable and nine-syllable line.” 28 The fact that it poses such a problem for foot- scansion when its rhythm is easily graspable for readers indicates that a different conceptual framework is desirable. What is the alternative? A widely accepted recent approach to English verse comes in the work of Derek Attridge, who has produced a series of books on the rhythms of English poetry that abandon foot-scansion, as masking the fundamental operations of English verse, which is based in stress. Attridge argues for the centrality to the English tradition of four-beat verse, especially the four-beat quatrain. Accounts of the English poetic tradition frequently focus on iambic pentameter, for good reasons—it is the principal meter of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and especially important for narrative verse. Instead of taking pentameter as the norm, Attridge suggests that the basic distinction for English is between four-beat verse and nonfour-beat verse (of which five-beat verse is the most common instance), which makes iambic pentameter above all a way of resisting the ballad stanza or hymn stanza and bringing more speech-like rhythms into poetry, through a verse line with no fixed internal division and a relatively flexible accentual pattern

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  How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

  A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

  • Thomas C. Foster(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Harper Perennial

    (Publisher)

  trochaic tetrameter (trochee times four): “Bý thĕ shóre ŏf Gít-chĕ Gú-mĕe, / Bý thĕ shínĭng Bíg-Sĕa-Wá-tĕr,” giving Longfellow the drumbeat sort of rhythm.

  What we’re talking about here is scansion, the analysis of how metrical arrangements play out in the real world, or how a line scans. We should remember that meter is merely the framework over which a poem is stretched. When we examine the actual poem, we not only find out what the baseline meter is but also how and where (and maybe why) the poem departs from that pattern. And what we’re really doing is finding out why we feel what we feel about the poem’s rhythm. The names of things don’t matter so much as that we can see what’s going on metrically; the names just make it possible for us to discuss what we’re seeing. Neither of us will likely remember that those three stressed words, “Bare ruin’d choirs,” have a name (molossus). Or care.

  As you have intuited, metrical feet and line length inevitably get together. Knowing that a verse is written in pentameter tells us nothing until we know what sort of foot is repeated five times over. Among other things, a dactylic pentameter line would be longer than its iambic cousin by five syllables, a not inconsiderable number. At the same time, the iambic line will end on a stress, while the stressed syllable of the last dactyl has to look over two unstressed colleagues to see the end of the line. All of which is to say that they have little in common except a fivefold pattern.

  METRICAL OPTIONS

  I SUGGESTED EARLIER that metrical lines over six beats (roughly twelve syllables) are uncommon. That, however, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Consider this bit of iambic octameter (eight feet of whatever meter) silliness from W. S. Gilbert’s The Pirates of Penzance

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  The Book of Forms

  A Handbook of Poetics, Fifth Edition

  • Lewis Turco(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of New Mexico Press

    (Publisher)

  tailless trochee (′). One can tell these two feet apart only from their position in a line of verse. They occur, for instance, when the unstressed first syllable of an iamb is dropped in order to vary the rhythm of a line of verse, or when the unstressed second syllable of a trochee is dropped for the same reason; the first example below is a line from an iambic tetrameter verse:

  or this, from a trochaic tetrameter poem:

  In an iambic poem this line would still be an iambic tetrameter line, except that it begins with a headless iamb ([  ˘]  ′  |  ˘  ′  |  ˘  ′  |  ˘  ′  ). However, if this line were to be found in the context of a trochaic poem, then it would end with a tailless trochee (  ′  ˘  |  ′  ˘  |  ′  ˘  |  ′  [˘]).

  The spondee (distributed stress, hovering accent ) is a verse foot of two syllables, both of which are accented (′′). (The iamb, trochee, and spondee are double meters : verse feet made up of two syllables.) The amphibrach is a rocking foot of three syllables, only the second of which is stressed (˘′˘); the second unstressed syllable in this foot would have been considered by Gerard Manley Hopkins as an outride —that is, an extra unstressed syllable attached to a verse foot, in this case, an iamb. The anapest, dactyl, and amphibrach are triple meters verse feet made up of three syllables. The double iamb is a foot of four syllables, the first two unstressed and the second two stressed (˘˘′′). It equals two iambs in a line of verse. Classical prosodists would say that the double iamb is a combination of two shorter feet, the pyrrhic or dibrach (˘˘) and the spondee . The pyrrhic, however, does not seem to appear elsewhere in English prosody, unless as a variation in a trochaic poem that reverses the double iamb and would substitute for two trochees and perhaps best be identified as a double trochee

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  The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

  Fourth Edition

  • Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Analysis of poetic modes comes generally after the fact, but in every period, prosodic crit. has a moralistic flavor, with many critics and poets disdaining their predecessors: e.g., 19th-c. poets, such as John Keats and Matthew Arnold, sometimes dismissed their Augustan precursors as writers of mere prose. Inconclusive debate has always attended the effort to relate prosody to meaning. Pope’s famous dictum that “the sound should seem an echo to the sense,” illustrated with his lines about “swift Camilla,” represents one side of the case; the other is taken by Johnson, who (also famously) dismisses the general applicability of the contention. In various periods, poets, critics, and readers have sensed a semiotic function of prosody without being able to generalize persuasively about it. The regular pentameter line and the internal aural challenges to it represent a wider contest between order and individuality, and in the 20th c., the failure of traditional forms often signifies personal and social collapse. Some feminist critics have identified traditional meter with the restrictions of patriarchal control: Emily Dickinson, e.g., is said to have mostly avoided iambic pentameter as connoting the forces of Father and Christianity. But there is little agreement on such an iconic function of prosody.

  See

  ALLITERATION ; ENGLAND, POETRY OF ; FREE VERSE ; HEROIC VERSE ; RHYTHM ; SOUND ; STANZA ; VERSIFICATION

  .

  Old English: Sievers; M. Kaluza, A Short History of English Versification (1911); J. C. Pope, The Rhythm of “Beowulf,” 2d ed. (1966); A. J. Bliss, The Metre of “Beowulf,” 2d ed. (1967); T. Cable, The Meter and Melody of “Beowulf” (1974); Brogan, sect. K; G. Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (1987); W. Obst, Der Rhythmus des “Beowulf” (1987); R. D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (1992); B. R. Hutcheson, Old English Poetic Metre (1995); S. Suzuki, The Metrical Organization of “Beowulf” (1996); T. A. Bredehoft, Early English Metre (2005).

  Middle English: General:

  Schipper; K. Luick Englische Metrik (1893); B. Ten Brink, The Language and Metre of Chaucer (1920); J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English , 2 v. (1930–35); A. McI. Trounce, “The English Tail-Rhyme Romances,” Medium Ævum 1–2 (1932–34); F. Pyle, “The Place of Anglo-Norman in the History of English Versification,” Hermathena 49 (1935); P. F. Baum, Chaucer’s Verse (1961); M. Borroff, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”: A Metrical and Stylistic Study (1962); M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (1963); Pearsall; Brogan, sect. K; U. Fries, Einführung in die Sprache Chaucers (1985); A.V. C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker (1987); M. Tarlinskaja, Strict Stress-Meter in English Poetry (1993). Alliterative Revival: J. R. Hulbert, “A Hypothesis Concerning the Alliterative Revival,” MP 28 (1930); R. A. Waldron, “Oral-Formulaic Technique and Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” Speculum 32 (1957); E. Salter, “The Alliterative Revival,” MP 64 (1966–67); T. Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (1977); A. McIntosh, “Early Middle English Alliterative Verse,” and D. Pearsall, “The Alliterative Revival,” Middle English Alliterative Poetry , ed. D. A. Lawton (1982); H. Duggan, “The Shape of the B-Verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” Speculum 61 (1986); T. Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition (1991); R. Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , ed. D. Wallace (1999); C. Chism, Alliterative Revivals (2002); H. Zimmerman, “Continuity and Innovation: Scholarship on the Middle English Alliterative Revival,” Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 35 (2003); A. Putter, J. Jefferson, and M. Stokes, Studies in the Metre of Alliterative Verse (2007); N. Yakovlev, “Prosodic Restrictions on the Short Dip in Late Middle English Alliterative Verse,” YLS

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  The Grammar of English Grammars

  • Goold Brown(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  hypermeter? 45. In scansion, why are the principal feet to be preferred to the secondary? 46. Can a single foot be a line? 47. What are the several combinations that form dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, and octometer? 48. What syllables have stress in a pure iambic line? 49. What are the several measures of iambic verse? 50. What syllables have stress in a pure trochaic line? 51. Can it be right, to regard as hypermeter the long rhyming syllables of a line? 52. Is the number of feet in a line to be generally counted by that of the long syllables? 53. What are the several measures of trochaic verse?

  LESSON XXI.—OF VERSIFICATION.

  54. What syllables have stress in a pure anapestic line? 55. What variation may occur in the first foot? 56. Is this frequent? 57. Is it ever uniform? 58. What is the result of a uniform mixture? 59. Is the anapest adapted to single rhyme? 60. May a surplus ever make up for a deficiency? 61. Why are the anapestic measures few? 62. How many syllables are found in the longest? 63. What are the several measures of anapestic verse? 64. What syllables have stress in a pure dactylic line? 65. With what does single-rhymed dactylic end? 66. Is dactylic verse very common? 67. What are the several measures of dactylic verse? 68. What is composite verse? 69. Must composites have rhythm? 70. Are the kinds of composite verse numerous? 71. Why have we no exact enumeration of the measures of this order? 72. Does this work contain specimens of different kinds of composite verse?

  [It may now be required of the pupil to determine, by reading and scansion, the metrical elements of any good English poetry which may be selected for the purpose—the feet being marked by pauses, and the long syllables by stress of voice. He may also correct orally the few Errors of Metre

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