Rhythm and Meter in Poetry

Looking at Rhythm and Meter in Poetry

By The Poetry Center and John Timpane from Poetry For Dummies

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http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/looking-at-rhythm-and-meter-in-poetry.html

Rhythm is the pattern of stresses in a line of verse. When you speak, you stress some syllables and leave others unstressed. When you string a lot of words together, you start seeing patterns. Rhythm is a natural thing. It's in everything you say and write, even if you don't intend for it to be.

Traditional forms of verse use established rhythmic patterns called meters (meter means "measure" in Greek), and that's what meters are — premeasured patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Much of English poetry is written in lines that string together one or more feet (individual rhythmical units). Feet are the individual building blocks of meter. Here are the most common feet, the rhythms they represent, and an example of that rhythm.

• Anapest: duh-duh-DUH, as in but of course!
• Dactyl: DUH-duh-duh, as in honestly
• Iamb: duh-DUH, as in collapse
• Trochee: DUH-duh, as in pizza

To build a line of verse, poets can string together repetitions of one of these feet. Such repetitions are named as follows:

• 1 foot: monometer
• 2 feet: dimeter
• 3 feet: trimeter
• 4 feet: tetrameter
• 5 feet: pentameter
• 6 feet: hexameter

So the famous iambic pentameter is a string of five iambs, as in Christopher Marlowe's line from Dr. Faustus:

or in a more 'advanced' description:

Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/meter.html

English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. In this document the stressed syllables are marked in boldface type rather than the tradition al "/" and "x." Each unit of rhythm is called a "foot" of poetry.
The meters with two-syllable feet are

• IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold
• TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers
• SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

Meters with three-syllable feet are

• ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still
• DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)

Each line of a poem contains a certain number of feet of iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls or anapests. A line of one foot is a monometer, 2 feet is a dimeter, and so on--trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), and o ctameter (8). The number of syllables in a line varies therefore according to the meter. A good example of trochaic monometer, for example, is this poem entitled "Fleas":

Adam
Had'em.

Here are some more serious examples of the various meters.
iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables)

• That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold

trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)

• Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers

anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables)

• And the sound | of a voice | that is still

dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl)

• This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks