Rhythm in Poetry - Can you read the metre?

Rhythm in Poetry

There are lots of things to look for in a poem: similes and metaphors, images, rhyme schemes, alliteration, assonance… The list goes on and on.

One of the most important – but often also one of the hardest to get your head around – is rhythm. It’s easy to spot but often hard to analyse, and even harder to do the thing that exam boards want you to do most of all, which is relate it to the meaning of the poem, to say why the poet has chosen this rhythm rather than any other for the ideas or emotions he or she wants to convey.

Hopefully, then, this article will make the whole business of rhythm a little bit clearer.

So why give a poem rhythm in the first place? If you’re a skilled poet, you can use it to createa range of effects. They can include the following:

• to create a feeling of regularity and stability, or to suggest the opposite;
• to vary the speed and weight of the poem, making it either fast and light or slow and heavy;
• to make it either more humorous or more serious;
• to imitate the rhythm of something that the poem describes, such as a the gait of a horse;
• to make it suitable for a particular style of music.

Getting Stressed

Rhythm in poetry is created using strong and weak beats (just as it is in music). Poets produce these beats by using the stresses in English words. Every word (apart from monosyllables) contains both stressed and unstressed syllables. (In the remainder of this handout, stressed and unstressed syllables will be referred to by the UN-approved international technical terms DUM and di respectively.)

(Monosyllables are a special case. Most of them are stressed syllables. This is not true, however, of ‘little words’ like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘or’, which are extremely unstressed. These two facts can be particularly useful to enterprising poets.)

Every word and phrase in English (and most other languages) can be rewritten as a stress pattern – although, to do this, you need to count the syllables very carefully. For instance, the stress pattern of the phrase ‘unstressed syllables’ is ‘DUMdi DUMdidi’, and that of ‘Stephen Follows’ is ‘DUMdi DUMdi’.

Now find the stress pattern for your own name; and then try doing it for the title of this article.

Poets Regularly Have Stress

Poets use a small number of regular stress patterns, which they will repeat a certain number of times to make a line. Generally, these patterns come in units of two or three syllables, which each have Greek-based names. The most common of these are:

• The iamb (diDUM)
• The trochee (DUMdi)
• The anapaest (didiDUM)
• The dactyl (DUMdidi)
• The amphibrach (diDUMdi)
• The cretic (DUMdiDUM)
• The spondee (DUMDUM)
• The molossus (DUMDUMDUM)

Do either of your names correspond to any of these types of stress pattern? (‘Stephen Follows’, for instance, is two trochees.) What about the title of this article?

Reading the Metre

Each one of these units is technically known as a foot, and this use of regular stress patterns is known as metre. (‘Stephen Follows’ has two trochaic feet. But he’s seeing the doctor about it.)

The metre of regular lines is described using a combination of the term used for the type of foot and the number (in Greek) of these feet that are found in each line. ‘Stephen Follows’, therefore, is in trochaic bimeter: it’s all in trochees and there are two of them. ‘Scary Stephen Follows’ would be trochaic trimeter. ‘Scary silly Stephen Follows’ would be trochaic tetrameter. And so on.

This is why the typical line of a Shakespeare play is said to be in iambic pentameter, because it goes like this:

diDUM diDUM diDUM diDUM diDUM

All the feet are iambs, and there are five of them (‘penta’ being the Greek for ‘five’).

Here’s an iambic pentameter Shakespeare made earlier (a lot earlier, in fact). If you don’t believe that it’s an iambic pentameter, find the strong stresses and mark them:

 ‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.’

However, Shakespeare (and every other poet) knows that having the same metre over and over again can get dull. So once he’s set it up, he’ll often vary it for effect.

Here’s another line from the same play. What has Shakespeare done here to vary the metre, and why? (And what does the actor need to do to make it into the required ten syllables?)

‘Hang thee, strong baggage, disobedient wretch.’

How can the actress use the metre of these next lines to convey the strength of this character’s feelings? What happens if she varies the metre by changing one or more of the stresses?

 ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.

It was the nightingale and not the lark

That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.’

Measuring the Metres

Here are some famous examples of other types of metre (see the list of types of foot above).

In each case, see if you can work out what is the main or only type of foot in each case (turn each one into DUM and di if it helps).

Most importantly, what effect does the use of this type of foot have on the meaning or tone of each one?

1)            ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold’

Lord Byron: ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’

2)             ‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river with

tangerine tree-ees and marmalade skies.’

           The Beatles: ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’

 3)            ‘All ready to put up the tents for my circus.

I think I will call it the Circus McGurkus.’

Dr. Seuss: ‘If I ran the circus’

 4)            ‘Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Break, break, break’

 5)            ‘Shall I die? Shall I fly

  Lovers’ baits and deceits,

  Sorrow breeding?

  Shall I fend? Shall I send?

  Shall I shew, and not rue

  My proceeding?’

William Shakespeare (attrib.): ‘Shall I die?’

NB. There are two possible answers to this one. What are they, and how does each one change the meaning of the poem?