informal talk about forms: the nuts and bolts of rhythm part 2

by Tom Adam

Following up on last month’s talk about the two “root” styles of verse, today we’ll explore metrical verse. Most formal poetry uses this as its basis.

Metrical verse
Most English verse uses an accentual-syllabic rhythm. While this could be four stresses in an eight-syllable line with no regard to the pattern, most accentual-syllabic verse uses meter: iambic pentameter, trochaic trimeter, etc. In a “best of both worlds” type of scenario, metrical verse gets to use the strong beats of the English language to give the poem an aural structure, and it gets an air of “refinement,” because it is clearly a crafted work, while purely accentual could just be prose broken (without taking the other elements into consideration) into lines by beats.

Formally, there are many types of meter, though only six have any real use. When talking about meter, there are two elements: what type of foot is used, and how many feet per line. How many per line is the second half of the description: it is (some) meter where some is a numerical prefix (penta=5, di=2, hep=7, etc.). The foot describes the repeated pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The six that cover the overwhelming majority of English verse are these (again, the bolded syllables are the stresses):

• Iamb: generally considered the most common foot in the English language, and therefore in English poetry, the iamb is the repetition of unstressed followed by stressed syllables. If you want to get a feel for Iambic verse, check out Shakespeare, it’s just about all based on Iambic lines.
  “But soft, what light through yonder window break“
• Trochee: Easiest way to think of trochaic verses is that it is the opposite of Iambic-it has stressed syllables followed by unstressed. For most English speaker, this has a very strange feel, but (courtesy of Wikipedia) the lines from Poe’s “The Raven” are trochaic:
  “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
  And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
• Finishing out the two-syllable patterns are spondees and pyrrhics, respectively two stressed and two unstressed syllables. Apparently, this line from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, is a good example of a pyrrhic foot, a spondee, a pyrrhic and a last spondee:
  “When the blood creeps and the nerves prick“
• Three syllable patterns are also common. The anapest is two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable:
  “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold“
  -Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
• Opposite the anapest is the dactyl: one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. A poetic form (of usually nonsense or children’s verse) is called the double-dactyl where all the lines dactylic dimeter. While not nonsense, the word ‘lexicographical’ is a double dactyl.

While there are technical terms for patterns longer than three syllables, they are pretty much not used (as patterns or terms), because they can usually be broken down into patterns of patterns. It is also important to note that most writers don’t stay strictly to meter; Shakespeare frequently added an unstressed syllable at the end of his iambic pentameter line to have a feminine ending, and switched trochees in every once in a while.

Meter, like accentual verse, can act like a metronome for the poem. By keeping the speed of the lines fairly consistent, it leaves a solid base for the poet to explore variations that stay connected because of the meter. On the other hand, the types of words used can force the speed of the meter to become faster or slower to affect pacing. Alexander Pope comments on this in his Essay on Criticism:

The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks’ vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;

The most important thing about working in meter, and the hardest, is to make it work for you, not to bend your work to the meter, or to form in general. The rhythm in your poem should seem natural and necessary to the reader, never forced or contrived.