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Trellis Magazine
The Right Word

January 2008 - "Measuring the Marigolds:  Meter Part I"

Most poetic forms in the English language involve the element of “meter”.  The word meter simply means
“measure”.   Meter is the measuring of the rhythm of the words in a poem.
In the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen, Danny Kaye sings a song as a group of schoolchildren recite their
multiplication tables:

      Two and two are four,
      Four and four are eight,
      Eight and eight are sixteen,
      Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…

      Inchworm, inchworm,
      Measuring the marigolds,
      You and your arithmetic
      You’ll probably go far.

      Inchworm, inchworm,
      Measuring the marigolds,
      Seems to me you’d stop and see
      How beautiful they are!

Songwriter Frank Loesser has captured in “Inchworm” the heart of the tension in modern poetry about the
subject of meter.  Should the caterpillar count out the lines, or should he just admire their natural beauty?  
The best poet does both!
English is a beautiful language, full of natural spoken rhythm.  Rhythm is something the poet uses as he writes
a line – he cannot force or create rhythm.  The English language determines the syllables, stresses, and beats
in the words being used.  The writer measures them out in composing the best arrangement of words for
each line of a poem.  As he ends one line and begins another, he creates “verse” (from Latin versus, meaning
a turning of the plow).  Verse is poetry arranged in measured lines.
Listen to these beautiful lines of verse from three poets, and feel the natural rhythm:

      But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
      It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. 1

      Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
      Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore 2

      The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
      And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold 3

The three excerpts have different rhythms.  Each was written carefully in a meter, but the resulting lines are
natural and beautiful.  Their rhythm invites the reader into the poem to hear more.
English verse can be written in three types of meter.  The simplest meter is “syllabic meter”, but it is rarely
used in poetry.  A common type of meter, especially in older poems and folk poems, is “accentual meter”.  
The most common type of meter used in traditional poetic forms, and the most exact meter for writing, is
“accentual-syllabic meter” (as in the three excerpts above).   The building blocks of metered verse are
syllables, stresses, lines, and stanzas.


                                      THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF METERED VERSE

Syllables
Poets work with words, but the word is not the smallest unit of measure for meter.  The “syllable” is the
smallest unit in meter.  A syllable is one spoken sound.  
Many words in the English language are one syllable, such as “I”, “me”, “you”, and “the”.  Lots of words have
more than one syllable.  Two-syllable words include “meter”, “English”, “language”, and “poet”.   The
language has numerous three-syllable words, such as “syllable”, “measuring”, “marigold”, and “beautiful”.  
There are also words with four, five, and even six syllables.

Stresses within Words
When English words of two or more syllables are spoken, there is a natural tendency to say one of the
syllables with more emphasis (stronger) than the other syllables.  This syllable is called “accented” or
“stressed”.  You will notice that you say the stressed syllable a bit louder and with your voice going up higher
in pitch.  
Say this aloud: “the flashlight.”
Did you hear your voice become louder and higher on the syllable flash?  That is the stressed syllable of the
word flashlight.

Stresses within Sentences
As you speak the words in a sentence, you naturally tend to stress some of syllables and not others.  For one-
syllable words, the English speaker tends to stress words that are nouns or verbs in a sentence.  These other
types of words are generally NOT stressed when they are one-syllable and in a sentence:
Personal pronouns (I, me, we, they, he, she, it, her, his, us, etc.)
Conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, yet)
Articles (a, an, the)
Prepositions (to, in, by, on, for, of, etc.)
Forms of the verb “to be” (is, are, am, was, were)
Forms of the verb “to have” (have, had, has)
[Context matters.  In some sentences, these same one-syllable words will be stressed because of importance
in the meaning of that sentence.]

Lines
Metered poetry is composed in lines made up of words.  The line is a counted measure of words that
together comprise one rhythmical unit of the poem. Lines are NOT the same as grammatical sentences or
phrases. Two lines might have a different number of words, or look like different lengths when typed on the
page, but two lines that have the same meter are the same rhythmical length in counts of syllables or
stresses.

Stanzas   
The lines of a verse may be arranged in blocks called “stanzas”.  The stanza may contain lines that are all the
same meter length, or it may contain lines of different meter lengths in some patterned combination.


                                                                 THE THREE METERS

Syllabic Meter   
Syllabic meter is a counting of the syllables in each line of the poem, without regard to whether the syllables
are stressed or not.  The poet uses words to create a desired length for the lines, such as ten syllables.  This
type of meter is usually labeled with the root word “syllable”.  A line that has eight syllables would be
“octosyllabic”, and a line of ten syllables would be “decasyllabic”.
Syllabic meter is popular in the poetry of other languages, such as French and Italian.  English-language poets
seldom compose in syllabic meter because when the lines are read aloud, they do not sound natural and
rhythmic.  The haiku (from the Japanese language) is a poem written in syllabic meter.

Accentual Meter
Accentual meter is a counting of only the strongly-stressed syllables or “beats” in each line of the poem.  The
other syllables are not counted.  The beats are usually strongly spoken, and they are evenly spaced in time.  
Weaker syllables are spoken in the time interval between the beats.  The feeling of a rhythmic beat may fall
on an unspoken pause at the end of a line.  
Accentual meter is the oldest metrical pattern in English poetry. This is the meter of Old English epics,
Beowulf and Sir Gawain.  It is also the meter of common nursery rhymes such as “Little Miss Muffet”, and folk
poetry such as ballads.  Lines of accentual meter sound natural and pleasant in the English language.  They
can be recited to the beat of a drum or the clapping of hands, since they usually have four strong beats per
line, like music. Accentual meter sounds like speech set to a drumbeat.
A common pattern for an English nursery rhyme or ballad is for the first line to have four spoken beats, and
the second line to have three spoken beats and one unspoken “pause” beat.  The alternating pattern of 4
beats/3 beats continues in the rest of the lines.  Here is a nursery rhyme with the spoken beats underlined
and the pauses indicated.  Recite it aloud as you clap on the four beats per line (remember to clap on the
“pause” at the end of the second and fourth line):
            
             Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
             Eating a Christmas pie. (pause)
             He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,
             And said “What a good boy am I !” (pause)


Accentual-Syllabic Meter
Accentual-syllabic meter is a counting and patterning of all the stressed and unstressed syllables in the line.  
The words are arranged so that the stressed and unstressed syllables occur in a pattern.  Accentual-syllabic
meters have a natural-sounding rhythm when the poem is recited aloud, but the rhythm is more even than
normal speech.
The vast majority of poems in the English language use accentual-syllabic meter.  This is a result of the
historical conquest of the Anglo-Saxons (English) by the Normans (French) in 1066.   The native Old English
accentual meter was replaced by or combined with metrical patterns found in Old French poetry. The new
poetry that began to emerge in England used accentual-syllabic meter.
The basic unit of this meter is the “foot”.  A foot consists of two or three syllables in a pattern of stressed
and unstressed.  The English language has words with stronger and weaker syllables, so the feet most often
used are those that mimic natural-sounding speech.  For example, a common two-syllable foot for lines is the
iamb (unstressed-stressed) (ta-DUM).
Each line of accentual-syllabic poetry is composed of a number of feet, and usually all the feet in a line are
the same.  This type of regular accentual-syllabic line is labeled with the root word “meter”.  Many poems
have lines of four feet or “tetrameter”, and a lot of poems have lines of five feet or “pentameter”.  
Therefore, a line described as “iambic pentameter” has five feet of iambs, or ten syllables with stresses
arranged in the pattern  ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM.  In this example of iambic pentameter in
Shakespeare’s line, the words are broken into syllables and the stressed syllables are underlined to help you
see the pattern:
      But, soft! what light  through yon - der  win - dow  breaks?  


                                                        POETIC FORMS THAT USE METERS

An example of a poetic form that uses syllabic meter is the haiku (from the Japanese language).  The haiku
has three lines with 5, 7, 5 syllables, as in this one by Basho:

              All along this road  
              not a single soul – only  
              autumn evening comes

Poetic forms that use accentual meter include the old Anglo-Saxon poetry, the Ballad, the Hymn, and
humorous poetry such as the Nursery Rhyme.   The Ballad has rhyming stanzas, usually blocks of four lines.  
The spoken beats per line are the same in each stanza, usually 4-3-4-3, as in this stanza from S. T. Coleridge's
ballad The Ancient Mariner:

        It is an ancient Mariner,
        And he stoppeth one of three.
        "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
        Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?"

Most poetic forms use accentual-syllabic meter, including the serious Sonnet, the humorous Limerick, and
the unrhymed iambic pentameter of Blank Verse.  Alfred Lord Tennyson composed a long poem In Memoriam
in rhymed iambic tetrameter, from which come these famous lines:

       I  hold  it  true,  what-e’er  be-fall;
           I  feel  it,  when  I  sor-row  most;
           ‘Tis  bet-ter  to  have  loved  and  lost
        Than  ne-ver  to  have  loved  at  all.


References and Footnotes:

1 Romeo and Juliet Act 2, scene 2, lines 2–3, by William Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter.
2 “The Raven” lines 1-2, by Edgar Allan Poe.  Trochaic octometer.
3 “The Destruction of Sennacherib” lines 1-2, by Lord George Gordon Byron.  Anapestic tetrameter.

The Making of a Poem:  A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.  W. W.
Norton & Company, New York 2000.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan.  
Princeton University Press, 1993.

Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms by William Baer.  Writer’s
Digest Books, Cincinnati 2006.

The Book of Forms:  A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco.  University Press of New England, Hanover 2000.

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing:  An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele.  Ohio
University Press, Athens 1999.