Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.
In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.
This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...
Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:
- Metre is not restricted to sonnets and the like
- Neither is rhyming, though it's a bit more obvious
- If you think writing using them makes the work clunky or unnatural, I would suggest that you're not reading very good examples.
Learning Your Scales [link]
The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).
When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:
- Is its vowel long or short? (Length)
- Does it end in a consonant? (Weight)
- Is it stressed or unstressed? (Accent)
Accent
So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)
Length
The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.
In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.
Weight
Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).
A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).
The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).
Moving Your Feet [link]
English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)
So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.
A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:
| [v v] | Pyrrhic | (PIR-ik) | |||
| [v -] | Iamb | (I-am) | |||
| [- v] | Troche | (TROH-kee) | or | Choree | (KOR-ee) |
| [- -] | Spondee | (SPONN-dee) | |||
| [v v -] | Anapaest | (AN-uh-peest) | |||
| [- v v] | Dactyl | (DAK-til) | |||
| [v - v] | Amphibrach | (AM-fi-brak) | |||
| [- v -] | Amphimacer | (AM-fi-may-ser) | or | Cretic | (KREE-tik) |
| [- - -] | Mollossus | (muh-LOSS-us) |
If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.
A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.
Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:
x4
- v v | - v v | - -
- - | | - v
So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.
So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:
- - | - v v | - - | - - | - v v | - -
- v v | - - | - v v | - - | - v v | - v
Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.
Acute Angles [link]
As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.
So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:
v / | v / | v / | v /| v /
"The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)
(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)
You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.
Some common tricks are:
- Feminine ending
You add an extra weak syllable to the end of the line. So-called because in French, grammatically feminine adjectives have an extra -e on the end.
v / | v / | v / | v / | v / v
"Be not | afear'd - the isle | is full | of noises" (The Tempest) - Trochaic inversion
You turn an iamb round into a troche.
/ v | v / | / v | v / | v /
"What's in | a name? | That which | we call | a rose
v /| v /| v / | v / | v /
By a|ny o|ther name | would smell | as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet)
- Pyrrhic and spondaic substitution
Where you replace the iamb entirely either with two weak or two stressed (can be one stressed, one heavy). With the features of Standard English outlined above, this will usually mean two separate, short words.
v / | v / | v v | / v | v / v
"To be | or not | to be? | That is | the question." (Hamlet)
v / | / / | v / | v /| v /
"Oh brave | new world, | that has | such peo|ple in't!" (The Tempest)
The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.
It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.
Volta Means Turning Away [link]
All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.
For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:
x / x / x x | / x x / x
"To be, or not to be - that is the question:
/ x x / x | x x / x / x
Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer
x / x / x | x x / x / x
The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune
x x / / | x x x / x / x
Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles
x x x / x / x | x / x /
And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)
(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)
Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)
I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.
(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)
The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:
| 1. | 2. | Stresses | |
| / \ x x / | / x x / | 2 | |
| THOU mastering me | I did say yes | ||
| \ / x x / x / | \ x / x x / / | 3 | |
| God! giver of breath and bread; | O at lightning and lashed rod; | ||
| / / / x x / | x / x /x x / x / | 4 | |
| World’s strand, sway of the sea; | Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess | ||
| / x / x x / | x / x x / x / | 3 | |
| Lord of living and dead; | Thy terror, O Christ, O God; | ||
| \ x / / x / x \ / x x / | x / x x / / x x /x x / | 5 | |
| Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, | Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: | ||
| x / x x / x x / / x / | x / x x / x x / x x / x \ / | 5 | |
| And after it almost unmade, what with dread, | The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod | ||
| / /x x \ x / x x / | / / x x / x x / | 4 | |
| Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? | Hard down with a horror of height: | ||
| / x x / x /x x / x x / / | x x / x x / x / x \ / x / x x / | 6 | |
| Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. | And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. |
([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)
Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.
A Glance at Rhyme [link]
I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.
As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:
My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)
Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).
A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!
In Summary...
Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.
So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.
(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)
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