Poetry has rhythm, you can feel it in your feet.

It’s special name is ‘metre’, it’s the way the beats repeat.

 

 

Stressed and Unstressed Syllables

Say the above poem out loud.  Can you hear the way the bold letters are naturally stressed as you say them?  These are called the stressed syllables, and the light ones are unstressed.  In the English language the words themselves dictate where the stresses go, and the aim in rhythm poetry is to write in such a way that the natural stresses of the words form a repeating pattern as the poem above does.  Just as an experiment, try reading the above poem out loud in the exact opposite way to that which I have described (ie, stressing the light type, and saying the bold type gently). Can you see how un-natural it feels?  This is where an understanding of different metres and stresses can really help the flow of your poetry.

 

Explaining Metre

 Music and rhythm poetry are very closely linked; indeed many poems when put to music become songs, and vice versa.  Just as music contains rhythm, which is written out in repeating sets (called bars), so rhythm poetry acknowledges these repeating sets of sounds by marking them out in ‘feet’.  So, the poem above has a simple repeating pattern which could be marked out into feet like this :

 POet   /   RY has   /   RHYthm,  /   YOU can   /   FEEL it   /   IN your   /  FEET 

Can you feel how the rhythm starts with a strong beat, then falls to a weak one?  In other words it is a falling rhythm which repeats like this:

DUM-da /  DUM-da    /   DUM –da   

 By marking the pattern out in feet in this way we can give these specific feet names, these being the five main ones:

 

Binary Feet (two syllables)

 IAMB            Da-DUM      (forget, advice, unleash, resound, concise, relax)

Pronounced ” I am”, this starts on a weak sound, then rises to a strong stress (ie a rising rhythm).

 TROCHEE      DUM-Da      (broken, falling, rhythm, metre, knowledge)

Pronounced to rhyme with Hokey cokey the Trochee is the exact reverse of the Iamb and therefore has a falling rhythm.

 SPONDEE     DUM-DUM  (landmark, look-out, full stop, spondee)

The Spondee consists of 2 equally stressed syllables or words, the word “spondee” itself being an example of this definition.

 

Ternary Feet (3 syllables)

DACTYL        TUM titty       (urgency, hurriedly, fortunate, galloping, suddenly)

It’s no coincidence that the example words that I have thought of are all connected to speed in some way, as both the dactyl and the anapaest remind me of the clippety clop of horse hooves.

ANAPAEST     Titty TUM    (Anapaest, underhand, gad about, intervene)

  

Measuring Feet

Each line of rhythm poetry is made up of a varying number of these feet which therefore determines the name of the metre:

1 foot is Monometer, 2 is dimeter, 3 is trimeter, 4 tetrameter, 5 pentameter, 6 hexameter, 7 heptameter, and 8 octameter

 

 Examples of Metre 

Iambic Tetrameter                                                 “I’ve PACKED my CLOTHES, my SUNday BEST

(Lines of 4 feet of Ti TUM)                                          (Example Poem: Evacuee)

Iambic Heptameter                   “I’ll LAND and LAY my EGG upON this LUSCious LEAF of GREEN“

(Lines of 7 feet of Ti TUM)                                          (Example Poem: The Life Cycle of a Butterfly)

Trochaic Heptameter                                 COBwebs ARE a LOVEly SIGHT for EVeryONE to SEE

(Lines of 3 feet of TUM Ti)     (This is not a perfect example, as the soft ending to the final foot of this line is not completed until the beginning of the next line.)

(Example Poem: Cobwebs)

Spondaic                              DUM DUM   (The fact that we do not speak in such monotone in the English language tells you how unlikely this metre is to be used alone)

Anapaestic Tetrameter      “Hear the GALLoping FEET, as the ECHoes reSOUND

Of the CLIPPety CLOP of his HOOVES on the GROUND”

(Lines of 4 feet of Titty TUM)                                       (Example Poem: Horse:  A Champion in His Field)

 Dactylic                                As so often happens in poetry, this following example does not fit the dactylic metre perfectly, but has a shortened (clipped) foot at the end of each line:

“BEAUTiful BUTTerfly FLUTTering by –  – “.

(Example Poem: Beautiful Butterfly)

 

The Clipped Foot

In the same way as the example of Dactylic Metre above does not stick strictly to the pattern of TUM Titty TUM Titty TUM Titty, the following anapaestic pattern has a clipped foot too, but it is at the beginning of the  line.  ” –  I TRUly am SORRy that I broke your CHAIR”.     (Example poem: Letter to Goldilocks)

This is often necessary to avoid the dactylic and anapaestic metres being too predictable and repetitive, and is NOT a sign of a poor poem.  In fact, quite the opposite, as many classic poets have used this technique for effect to add emphasis to the words that they choose to stress.  However, I think that I have already gone into WAY too much detail on this subject, as I only began to learn this level of detail after a year of writing poems, and even then have had to study more closely when I started to attempt to clarify it for you!  Don’t run before you can walk, as you may take the pleasure out of your writing.

May I suggest that if you need a quick look at another summary of rhyme and metre from a different viewpoint you look at this link, http://www.patchword.com/original/articles/rhyme.html the finding of which is thanks to my good friend Josie Whitehead, who has a good deal of help and advice on her website too. www.josiespoems.webeden.co.uk

Anything more than a summary can be found in Stephen Fry’s book “The Ode Less Travelled” which I can highly recommend for its readability and clear, concise guidance and detail on all elements of rhyme and metre.  He gave me the confidence to acknowledge myself as a poet, where I had previously considered myself a ‘lesser’ poet because of my love of rhyme and rhythm poetry.  He also suggests exercises which help to develop a feel for each specific metre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ode_Less_Travelled:_Unlocking_the_Poet_Within