What is poetic meter? Transcript (English and Spanish subtitles available in video, clickHERfor Spanish transcription)
DoorRaymond Malewitz, Associate Professor of American Literature at Oregon State University
20 april 2020
When you go to the ophthalmologist to check your vision, they sit you down in front of something called a phoroptor and cycle through different lenses to find the best one for your eyes. “Is it better or is it better?” If you use the wrong lens combination, the world will blur and you will have trouble reading letters. If you have the right combination, those letters will become sharper and you will be able to read.
Reading the meter of a poem out loud is a similar way to test your ears. Consider this line of poetry: the opening of William Shakespeare's famous textSonnet18 Which of the following readings sounds better? This one: “shall I compare you to a summer day?” or this one: “Shall I compare you to a summer day?” The first, right?
How about this opening line from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven"? This one: “ONCE on a midnight gloom, while I was thinking about SWAG and weary”? Or this one: “Once UPon A midNIGHT gloomy, while I FUNDED weak AND worn out”? The first one again, right?
In either case, the reason the first example works is because my pronunciation matches the poetic meter of the words in each line. I read the other readings in the opposite meter and they sound funny and unnatural. How do we describe this difference?
The most common way to do this in English is to follow the stresses in each sentence of the line.As you probably know, words in the English language are made up of a series of stressed and unstressed syllables. In poetry, these syllables are often arranged to create repetitive, sonic units (what literary critics call "feet") that form the meter of a given poem.
iamb_meter.jpg
Shakespeare's sonnet: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" has the following metric pattern (da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM). The repeating unit here is one unstressed syllable and one stressed syllable. This type of metric foot is called a style, and there are five of them here. Because 'penta' is the prefix for five, we call this metric form"jambisk pentameter,"the most common meter in English poetry.
In Poe's line, "There was once a midnight gloomy While I thought weak and weary," you will notice the opposite pattern (DA stupid, DA stupid, DA stupid, DA stupid, DA stupid DA stupid Da stupid DA stupid. repeating unit in this pattern there is one stressed and one unstressed syllable. This metrical foot is called a trochee, and there are eight in this line. Because "octo" or "octa" are prefixes for 8, we call Poe's metrical form"trokaisk-octameter."
trochee_meter.jpg
Iambics and trochees are two of the most common types of poetic feet, so you'll definitely want to look for them when you read poetry. But poems can also use three-syllable metric units. Consider the following opening lines from “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore: “It was the night before Christmas, when in the whole house not a creature moved, not even a mouse.” Here is the meter pattern: unstressed unstressed stressed, unstressed stressed stressed.” ("It was the night before Christmas.") This device is called an anapest, and there are four of them here in each line. The prefix for 4 is "tetra", so is the meteranapetische tetrameter.
The last common metric foot is the opposite of an anapest:a dactyl, a unit of three syllables that begins with a stress and ends with two unstressed syllables. The Greek poet Homer takes this form in his majorepicpoems the Iliad and the Odyssey, and poems in English that often take the dactylic formallude toto this legacy. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses dactylic hexameter in his epic poem "Evangeline," which begins, "This is the primeval age of the forest, the murmuring pines and hemlocks."
daktyl_meter_1.jpg
Dactyls may seem rare, but rap artists have recently adopted this triplet form with great success. Consider the following lyrics from the song 'Versace' by Migos:
Drowning in compliments, backyard pool that looks like Metropolis
I think I'll sell a million in the first week, man, I think I'm an optimist
Born in Toronto, but sometimes I feel like Atlanta adopted us
Although the subject is clearly very different, the scale here is identical to the epic poetry of Longfellow (and by extension Homer). Because there are six dactyls in each line, the meter of this song is also dactylic hexameter.
daktyl_meter_2.jpg
Lam, trochee, anapest, dactyl. If you can recognize these four types of metric feet, you'll be well on your way to reading poetry in a clearer, more natural-sounding way. The next step, of course, is to determine why it matters: how meter can be used not only to read a poem or song, but also to interpret it.
While there are many ways to answer this question, let me give you a simple suggestion that I have found useful in my teaching. Once you have identified the dominant metrical form in a particular poem, look for times when the meter deviates from that form. These moments are often good places to build an interpretation because when we see them we can wonder WHY the meter breaks in that spot and what the sonic dissonance might be conveying. Consider the beginning of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost," which tells the story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. While the poem is writtenblanks fresh iambic pentameter, see if you can spot the moment the meter breaks in these opening lines:
paradise_lost_opening_lines.jpg
"About man's first disobedience and its fruit
From the forbidden tree whose deadly taste
brought death into the world, and all our woe'
If you can figure out the metric problem, you can now ask WHY Milton chose to break the meter at that specific time. If you have any ideas, I hope you will share them with methe comment fieldof the video. In the meantime, good luck, stay healthy and happy reading.
Would you like to quote this?
MLA quote:Malewitz, Raymond. “What is poetic meter?”Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms,20 april 2020, Oregon State University,https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-poetic-meter. Opened [insert date].
Additional resources for teachers
Robert Herrick's 17th century poem "Delight in Disorder" offers many reading options for sonic disorders. The poem is suitable for both metric and rhyme analysis in the order discussed in the video"What is rhyme?"video. Another good poem to sharpen your reading ear is the famous villanelle 'One Art' by Elizabeth Bishop. For more information on Milton's meter, see ours“What is blank verse?”video.
Writing Prompt: Identify the metrical scheme of Herrick's poem. Note any moment in the poem where Herrick seems to break away from this plan. Why would Herrick have chosen to break the agreement at these moments? How can this metrical analysis contribute to the meaning of the poem?
