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Prosody Handout

Poetry & Flash 4: Prosody

When most people think of poetry, the first things they think of are sound and meter. For thousands of years, poetry has been defined by its cadence and rhythms. That is still true today, except now we often reject a set meter and rhyme pattern when we write.

You know what rhythm is. You hear rhythms in music, and sometimes these rhythms are compelling. If you pay careful attention, you’ll see that there is also a rhythm to your thoughts. In our bodies, in our hearts, in our breath. Speech, too, has rhythms, and so does poetry. When rhythm is regular in a poem, it’s called meter.

Meter (noun): the formal rhythmic structure of a line of poetry in terms of its stressed and unstressed syllables.

Look at meter not as if you’re taking a test, but as a whole new way of hearing language. Sound and rhythm in poetry is just as powerful a tool as metaphor, connotation, personification, and so forth.

If you can dance or play an instrument, meter and rhythm will likely come easily to you. If smooth meter does not come naturally to you, it can take hard work to recognize it. But don’t worry—a little practice will help!

Meter is expressed using two factors:

1. The first factor is the foot. It shows the dominant pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables repeated within a line. Typical feet include iambs (the most common in English poetry), trochees, and spondees. (Less common feet include dactyls and anapests.)
2. The second factor indicates how many feet (i.e., stressed syllables) there are in a line. For example, we would say that a poem written with five feet per line uses pentameter. Other common numbers are tetrameter (four feet per line), monometer (one foot per line), dimeter (two feet per line), trimester (three feet per line), and hexameter (six feet per line).

So, to summarize, the meter of a poem includes both the type and number of poetic feet.

 

Here’s a bit more on the patterns of stressing:

Key:

~ = unstressed syllable
/ = stressed syllable

A foot containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable is called an iamb. The iamb is very common in the English language.

Here are a few of the most common stress patterns:

~ /	iambic
~ ~ /	anapestic
 / ~	trochaic
/ ~ ~	dactylic
/ /	spondai

Keep in mind that no meter is perfectly regular, because no two syllables will receive precisely the same stress when spoken aloud. Although not all stresses are equal, don’t worry about these small differences when you determine the meter of a poem. A syllable is either stressed or unstressed.

The placement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem determines the tone, feeling, and effect of the poem, because the poem is first and foremost rhythmic.

Iambic Pentameter

Iambic pentameter is the most common metrical form in English, because it sounds like the natural rhythm of spoken English. We often speak in iambic pentameter without realizing it. Here are a couple of examples:

~   /  ~   /   ~   /   ~   /   ~   /

I’d like to have you meet a friend of mine.

~   /  ~   /   ~   /   ~   /  ~  /

Did you take out the garbage yesterday?

Iambic pentameter has five stressed syllables and five unstressed syllables per line. Each line begins with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This pattern repeats five times in one line. The line in iambic pentameter is therefore ten syllables. Iambic pentameter establishes a calm, regular tone that resembles speech. For an example, read these lines from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 23.”

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay

 

The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay

 

Strict adherence to a specific metrical pattern is beyond the scope of our introductory course on creative writing. We won’t go into a lengthy description of meter and metrical patterns here, as they are widely available elsewhere. Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance is an excellent resource if you’d like to read more.

 

(Oliver, Mary. Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse.)