The craft
Rhythm
English is a stressed language. We do not sing long and short vowels the way Latin did; we bump some syllables and let others slip. Metre is the pattern those bumps fall into — and the art is in the pattern breaking.
Stress, not syllable-counting
Beginners count syllables and call it metre. That is how haiku is often (wrongly) taught, and how English verse is never made. Say photograph, photography, photographic. The stresses move. A metrical line is a sequence of those stresses, grouped into feet.
Scansion is the practice of marking them: ˘ for unstressed, / for stressed — or, more honestly, a light tap and a heavier one, because real speech is not binary. When in doubt, say the line as if you meant it, not as if you were obeying a metronome.
The principal feet
- Iamb ˘ / — to-DAY, a-BOVE, the sea. The default of English verse, because it mimics ordinary speech with a slight lift.
- Trochee / ˘ — TY-ger, GAR-den. Falling, incantatory, good for spells and nursery threats.
- Anapest ˘ ˘ / — in-ter-VENE, to the SEA. Galloping, comic or wave-like.
- Dactyl / ˘ ˘ — EL-e-phant, TAKE her up. The waltz foot; also the opening of the Iliad in English imitations.
- Spondee / / — HEART-BREAK, DEAD STOP. Rare as a true foot; common as a substitution that slams the brakes.
- Pyrrhic ˘ ˘ — two light syllables, usually a guest inside a heavier line.
How lines are named
Count the feet, then name the prevailing one. Iambic pentameter is five iambs: ten syllables in the textbook, but in practice a flexible ten-ish, because English cheats (elision, feminine endings, an extra slack syllable at the end). Tetrameter is four feet; trimeter three; hexameter six. Ballads often alternate tetrameter and trimeter. Shakespeare’s plays think in pentameter even when they break it.
The lamp beside the window holds the night.
Interactive metre lab
Tap the syllables you hear as stressed, then check them against a conventional reading. There is always argument at the edges. That argument is the beginning of having an ear.
Iambic pentameter (da-DUM × 5). Tap a syllable if you hear it as stressed.
Substitution, the real craft
A line of perfect iambs is a metronome, not a poem. The tradition expects you to substitute: a trochee at the opening (“Now is the winter of our discontent”), a spondee for weight, an anapest for hurry. Metre is a promise you keep often enough that the exceptions speak. If you keep it always, the poem is a hymn-tune. If you keep it never, you are writing free verse and should say so.
A feminine ending adds an unstressed eleventh syllable to a pentameter (“To be, or not to be: that is the question”). It softens the close. A catalectic line is missing a slack syllable — truncated, marching.
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter is blank verse: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, much of Frost. It is the closest metre comes to conversation without falling into prose. If you want to write a long meditative poem and you are not yet at home in free verse, blank verse will carry you further than rhyme will.
Cadence without metre
Free verse still has rhythm: the length of the breath, the clustering of stresses, the return of a phrase. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm counted only the stresses and let the slacks swarm. Jazzed, Biblical, Whitman’s catalogues — all of these are rhythmic systems. “No metre” is not “no pulse.” See Free verse.
Once the pulse is in the body, decide whether the line-ends will chime: Rhyme.