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This is an essay written by me years and years ago.
It is aimed at beginners, but I thought some of our poets here might enjoy it anyway.





What you always wanted to know about metre ... but never dared to ask.
This is for people who feel insecure about the correct use of metre, e.g. if you would like to write a sonnet, but do not know how to create the special rhythm of a sonnet. I hope these explanations help!! I did my best to make it understandable even for people who have never written in metre so far, "only" in free verse.


Metre Made Manageable

"The conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are more those of a quasi-musical nature, in the arrangement of metre and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas." (T. S. Eliot)


1. What is metre?

The word "metre" comes from the Greek word "metron" which means "measure". Metre is a device of verse and, among other devices such as linebreaks and rhyme, distinguishes it from prose. It is the underlying pattern that gives a poem its rhythm, its "breathing". Remember that poetry used to be sung in former times (to the lyre, hence the word "lyrical") and that it has a musical, rhythmical quality because of that. Metre often, but not always, goes hand in hand with rhyme; both metre and rhyme have their origin in the oral quality poetry once had, but today poetry is seldom read out aloud. Both devices helped people remember the long narrative poems which often weren´t written down in former times.

So, but what exactly is metre now, and how does it create rhythm? The rhythmical unit of a poem is the line. To find out the metre, look at the first line and divide it into syllables. You will find that there are syllables which bear an accent (which are stressed) and syllables which do not. In many cases you will find that the stressed and unstressed syllables alternate.

An example:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

Now, the first word, which consists of only one syllable, "whose", is not stressed, but the second word, "woods", is, and so on. Starting with an unstressed syllable, the stressed and unstressed syllables alternate, which creates a certain rhythm:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
ba BA ba BA ba BA ba BA
("ba" means unstressed, "BA" means stressed syllable)

If you read it out aloud and overdo the stressed syllables a bit, you will easily recognise the rhythmic pattern, the rhythm is like rocking to and fro.

The poem goes on:

His house is in the village though;

With stresses:

His house is in the village though;
ba BA ba BA ba BA ba BA

This line has the same rhythmic pattern as the line before! Let´s now count the stressed syllables per line, and we will find that there are always four stresses in every single line of the poem. And each line starts with an unstressed syllable, then there´s a stressed one, then an unstressed one again. Now this arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a certain order or pattern is called metre.

The full poem now (which happens to be one of my favourite poems ever, especially the final stanza), with the stresses added - please read it out aloud and overdo the stresses to get a feeling for the metre, then read it out again, normally this time, but try to hear the metre beating "underneath":


Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it q-ueer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound´s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.



2. The feet of verse

Now, after this most beautiful poem ... alas, it´s time for some technical terms:

A verse, which is based on metre, is supposed to "walk" on "feet".
A "foot" is a fixed combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. The smallest unit of a verse are the syllables (you could say the atoms of a line), the next bigger unit are the feet (you could say, the molecules), which are a combination of two or three syllables.

The foot used in the poem above is a pair of two syllables, unstressed+stressed, baBA, which is called an "iamb" (from another Greek word, "iambos"). There are four iambs in each line: baBA baBA baBA baBA - each line in this poem has four feet. If you want to describe the special metre of this poem, you can either say that it has four feet and that the feet are iambs in this case, or, more academically: The poem is written in iambic tetrameter (tetrameter is Greek again and consists of the Greek word for "four", tetra, and the word metre).

Sounds all Greek to you???

Then let´s make it even worse - there are four different feet you should know:

1. Iamb (adj. = iambic): a foot consisting of two syllables, unstressed+stressed, like the words "forgive" or "New York" or "alas"

2. Trochee (adj. = trochaic): a foot consisting of two syllables as well, but, as you might have guessed, the other way round, stressed+unstressed, like in "London" or "heartache" or "hands off!"

3. Dactyl (adj. = dactylic): a foot consisting of three syllables, stressed+unstressed+unstressed, like in "dangerous" or "syllable" or "come to me".

4. Anapest (adj. = anapestic): the opposite of a dactyl, unstressed+unstressed+stressed, like in "Did she stay?" or "in New York".



3. Use your feet

You can base your poetry on each one of these feet, but as a beginner, once you have chosen your foot, you should stick to it. When you are more experienced in using different feet and have developed a good feeling for metre, you can get more experimentative, e.g. have different numbers of unstressed syllables inbetween the stressed ones, which creates a lively rhythm.

An example from one of my poems:

I dreamt of an English garden
transfigured by the dawn,
where the moonlight slept in the hedges
and shadows wrote on the lawn.

Roses of untamed beauty
stood guard of their secrets within,
but seduced with the blush of coyness
and a red full of nightly sin.

(...)

So, now what exactly is the pattern here, you might ask ...
Well, each line has three stresses, without exception, only the "fillings", the unstressed syllables inbetween, vary. It´s a kind of "free" metre which I like very much because it is so lively and closer to normal speech than a strict metrical pattern.


Or you could write one stanza in one kind of foot, and the next one in another, something which is not often done, but can be very interesting and enables you to underline changes of mood in your poem. Trochees for instance can sound quite grave and solemn because the very first syllable of the line is stressed, while dactyls are quite playful, lively, joyful, energetic. But you should be careful - do not change the metre too often, and only when a new stanza begins, and there should be something behind it apart from sheer playfulness - as has been said, a change of mood, a twist, or something along these lines.



4. Line length

Once you have chosen your foot, you decide how many feet there should be in each line. If you want very short lines, you could use only one foot, that is called a monometer - either an iambic or a dactylic or trochaic or an anapestic monometer of course. If there are two feet per line, it´s called a dimeter, with three it´s a trimeter, tetrameter you already know, that´s four, five feet form the famous pentameter (Shakespeare´s plays and sonnets are written in iambic pentameter), that´s the most popular metrical line in English poetry!! Six feet make a hexameter, seven a heptameter, and so on ...


Monometer = one foot per line
Dimeter = two feet per line
Trimeter = three
Tetrameter = four
Pentameter = five
Hexameter = six
Heptameter = seven


Please bear in mind that lines tend to lose their unity when they get too long! The crucial mark are five feet per line, everything above that makes it difficult for the reader to take in the line as a whole. As metre and rhyming belong together, this might weaken your rhyme scheme. Lines of six feet, hexameters, are common, but they tend to have a pause in the middle so that they sound more like two lines consisting of three feet each.

To make the rhythm of your poem more lively, you can vary the number of feet per line as long as the foot itself stays the same, for example the first line could have four iambic feet, the second line only three iambic feet, the third line four again, and so on.

That is the typical metrical pattern for ballads, by the way, here´s an example:

There lived a wife at Ushers Well, (4 iambs)
And a wealthy wife was she; (3 iambs)
She had three stout and stalwart sons, (4 iambs)
And sent them o´er the sea. (3 iambs)

So, just play around with metre a bit, it´s like composing music, it´s all up to you! But remember that we are not talking free jazz here, the metrical pattern only is a pattern if it is fairly consistent!!



5. Between chaos and boredom

I think we need a few more examples to make all this theory come alive:

William Wordsworth: My heart leaps up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.


Now let´s find out the metrical pattern: The underlying foot of this poem is the iamb again, "My heart", baBA.

My heart leaps up when I behold (iambic tetrameter in the first line, four iambs)
A rainbow in the sky: (iambic trimeter now, three iambs)
So was it when my life began; (four iambs again)
So is it now I am a man; (four)
So be it when I shall grow old, (four)
Or let me die! (two iambs)
The child is father of the man; (four)
And I could wish my days to be (four)
Bound each to each by natural piety. (five iambs)


Sometimes a word has to be modulated a bit to fit into the metrical pattern of a poem or line, for example a disyllabic word could be pronounced like a monosyllabic word - this contraction of syllables for the sake of metre is called "elision" (e.g. o´er = over). Or the final "-ed" in verbs where it is not pronounced as a syllable can be made syllabic by voicing the "e" (e.g. blessèd, unusèd). These are so-called "poetic licenses", but they should only be used rarely, and modulate doesn´t mean "rape". If you use metre, you have to choose your words very carefully because you could easily "hurt" the metrical pattern if you do not always bear it in mind.
You destroy the metrical pattern and the beautiful flow of your poem by using words which are naturally stressed in a way that is contrary to the foot the word is supposed to fill. You shouldn´t put a syllable that cannot be stressed in normal speech in a place where the reader expects a stressed syllable. If you still do that, the reader is in a conflict, either he reads the line according to the metre, but then the misplaced word sounds wrong and causes an unintended funny effect, or he has to read the line like prose, breaking the metre.
If you choose the words according to your chosen metre, you get a smooth, flowing verse, if you write against the metre in places, the verse stumbles, stutters or cannot even be read as verse anymore. It is best to read out each new line you have written aloud, overdoing the stresses, to find out if you are not writing against the metre.

But this doesn´t mean that the metre always has to be totally regular. Experienced poets do not write machine-like regular metre, they often include little irregularities, it´s like using dischord in music to make the harmonies sound even brighter - pure harmony or regularity is boring!! For instance it is very common that an iambic line, which normally starts unstressed, starts with a stress, followed by two unstressed syllables, and only after that the normal alternating pattern starts. This is called an "initial inversion" and is so common that one shouldn´t really call it an irregularity.

An example for that, from master Shakespeare himself:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
(normal iambic pattern if you read "man-ya" and "glo-rious" as two syllables each)
flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye
(this is the initial inversion, the line starts with a stress, as you really cannot pronounce it like "flatter", two unstressed syllables follow, and then we are back at the normal, alternating iambic pattern)
kissing with golden face the meadows green,
(another initial inversion, you cannot say kissing)



6. Trochees are good feet, too

Let´s now have an example for one of the other feet, the trochee. I´ll choose one of my own poems:

Dover

Déjà vu, already seen.
White the chalk cliffs´ seabound pureness,
stirred a deep-set, ancient sureness,
flashlight to my roots, their sheen.
And the sea was witness, silent,
as my feet first touched this island,
home to find in pastures green.

Like the knowing when I met you,
when two lives combined anew:
Soulmate, mirror, déjà vu.


I don´t normally go for a trochee, simply because the iamb or dactyl are the more "natural" feet, closer to non-poetic, everyday speech. But I wanted to try it out, and so the underlying metre is a trochee, stressed+unstressed, BAba, here!

Déjà vu, already seen.
(four trochees in this line, a trochaic tetrameter, with the unstressed syllable missing in the last trochee - but it still is one, I´ll explain that a little later)
White the chalk cliffs´ seabound pureness,
(four trochees again, and this time the last trochee is a "full" one)
stirred a deep-set, ancient sureness,
(four trochees, full last trochee)
flashlight to my roots, their sheen.
(four trochees, the last one without its unstressed syllable again, like in line 1)

And so on, you can analyse the metre of the rest of the poem yourself now, you will find that there are always four trochees per line.



7. Cadences

Now to those trochees that were missing their unstressed syllable ... It is allowed to leave out the unstressed syllable of the last trochee of a line. The line ends on a stressed syllable then, with a pause after it instead of the missing syllable, which naturally reads a bit like there is a period coming after such a "heavy" line ending, and indeed such lines often end with a period (see my poem). The same applies to a dactyl at the end of a line, you can leave out one or even both of its unstressed syllables.
This stressed kind of line ending is called "masculine", fully: a masculine cadence. The opposite is a line ending on an unstressed syllable, this is called a feminine cadence. "Feminine" lines tend to flow into the next one (which starts with a stress again, so that the alternating metre isn´t interrupted between the lines), and they usually end with a comma or no punctuation at all. Masculine cadences interrupt or slow down the poem´s flow, while feminine cadences give it momentum.
Masculine and feminine cadences are also important for rhyming: A masculine rhyme would be "seen/sheen", a feminine rhyme "pureness/sureness" - in the first case, you need to rhyme one syllable only, in the second case you need to rhyme two syllables.



8. Dactyls, blank verse and other useless information

Still awake?? Decided to write free verse for the rest of your life? If not, here is another example, this time for a dactylic metrical scheme, again one of my own poems (sorry, but that´s easier than going on a search for suitable ones by the great authors), remember, a dactyl consists of three syllables, stressed+unstressed+unstressed, BAbaba:

Alliterate Me. A Love Song

Alliterate me, as I don´t like my surname;
make us a culture club, art be our day,
fugue me all night, play me Bach till the "ach"-sound
is finally, happily, all I can say;
Briticize me, as I just love your country -
don´t hesitate, babe, I´m not blonde anyway.

I´ll Germanize you till you understand Goethe
and utter your Weltschmerz as Werther would do;
apostrophe you till your poems are flawless,
beautiful, playful, with one "l" (not two) -
Live up to the Zeitgeist! One should be bilingual,
let´s speak Engeranto, love, me (ich) and du.


Ok, let´s find those dactyls now ...

Alliterate me as I don´t like my surname;
(four dactyls here, the second unstressed syllable of the last one is not missing, but to be found at the beginning of the same line - you can find the same device in music, where it is called an offbeat or pickup, I think, I´m not quite sure of the correct English term)
make us a culture club, art be our day,
(four dactyls again, with the last one missing both of its unstressed syllables)
fugue me all night, play me Bach till the "ach"-sound
(four dactyls, with the second unstressed syllable of the last dactyl appearing at the beginning of the next line this time)
is finally, happily all I can say;

(and so on ...)

You can hear that the dactyl sounds quite playful, energetic, while the alternating feet, the iamb and the trochee, sound a bit graver, especially the iamb, which is best suitable for "tragic subjects" - no wonder the unrhymed iambic pentameter, the so-called blank verse (called so because it is unrhymed), is the standard metre of English drama.

A few Shakespearian lines (from Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello, in that order) as examples for the blank verse, the unrhymed iambic pentameter (five iambs per line):

Two households both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene) ...


To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day (initial inversion) ...


Doom´d for a certain term to walk the night (initial inversion)
And for the day confin´d to fast in fires (initial inversion) ...


Her father lov´d me, oft invited me,
Still question´d me the story of my life ...



9. A sonnet is a sonnet is a ...

And now, finally, to the sonnet, because this is why this whole sermon was written! One of our members posted a lovely poem which she called a sonnet, but I told her it wasn´t one, simply because the metre wasn´t right. The rhyming scheme was correct, but this isn´t enough to make a sonnet a sonnet.

A sonnet consists of fourteen lines and has to be written in iambic pentameter, like the Shakespeare quotations above. The so-called Shakespearian sonnet, the most famous form, has the following rhyme scheme:

abab (first quatrain - a quatrain is a stanza consisting of four lines)

cdcd (second quatrain)

efef (third quatrain)

gg (couplet)


Now let´s have a look at some famous lines from Shakespeare´s sonnets to get the metre right - once again, it has to be an iambic pentameter, which means five iambs per line, baBA baBA baBA baBA baBA:

Shall I compare thee to a summer´s day? (initial inversion)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer´s lease hath all too short a date: ...


So oft have I invoked thee for my muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse,
As every alien pen hath got my use,
And under thee their poesy disperse. ...


O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark, (fixèd = disyllabic here)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand´ring bark,
Whose worth´s unknown, although his height be taken. ...


The last example shows that even the Bard had to modulate some words to make them fit into the metrical pattern ("fixèd" and "wand´ring")!!

For your first sonnet(s), I´d suggest you write the first few lines in a flawless, totally regular iambic pentameter, after that you may have some minor irregularities if you really can´t find words that fit the metrical pattern perfectly. You have to give your reader a chance to "swing" into the rhythm first before you allow yourself to break it. With a sonnet, it is best to be as correct as possible in my opinion, and if it´s well done, it leaves a deep impact on the reader - poetry at its best!


Here is my own first attempt at a sonnet (believe me, I was really proud of myself when it was finished):

Time Bandit

Are you the sand that fills my hourglass? (initial inversion)
Or why do all my thoughts, does every cell
cry out your name and wish the months would pass (initial inversion)
like days, to taste again your lips, your smell?

You are the reason why it´s two o´clock (initial inversion)
and one o´clock at the same time for me,
why dates and seasons do my patience mock
and just my dreams of you set distance free.

Oh, how I wish that ours were the hours (initial inversion)
of sighs uncounted; that I could embrace
the peace you breathe while my sweet longing sours
and, lonely, everywhere I see your face.

Watch out, dear thief, whom all my time I give,
you took my heart, but now in me you live.



AND NOW, ALL THE BEST FOR YOUR WRITING!!!

As a final remark:
Free verse is not that easy to write, either ...
As W. H. Auden put it: "In free verse, you need an infallible ear to determine where the lines should end."


Cassia