Poetry has a long history of an oral form of storytelling. News used to travel from village to village as a song performed by minstrels. These minstrels would often have a lot of fairly long stories to memorize and therefore they would employ as many tricks to help them remember as they could. One of these was the use of a regular rhythm, a now nearly intrinsic part of poetry.
Rhythm happens when there is a regular repetition of similar events which are separated from each other by recognizably different events – the two different events must alternate in other words. You can have a visual rhythm of ‘light on – light off – light on – light off’ or a physical rhythm of ‘left – right – left – right’ or, the thing more commonly associated with rhythm, sound; the call of ‘1 – 2 – 3 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 1 – 2 – 3’ is the rhythm drilled into the mind of anybody attempting to learn the waltz.
Rhythm is the fundamental carrier of our language; think how much your voice naturally undulates and changes pitch and volume as you speak. What you will probably notice is that this change in pitch and volume occurs between syllables. A syllable is a ‘vocal sound or set of sounds uttered with a single effort of articulation and forming a word or element of a word’ (definition from The Oxford English Dictionary). It is helpful to note that in order to be ‘uttered with a single effort of articulation’, a syllable can only contain a single vowel sound. The syllable is the basic element of rhythm; stressed syllables occur when we give slightly more ‘weight’ to one syllable than another by slightly increasing the duration of the sound or, as previously noted, making it louder or giving it a slightly higher pitch. Stress patterns in speech can be affected by how important a word is in a sentence but they are produced at roughly regular intervals of time. Most of the time this is done unconsciously; when studying rhythm for a prolonged period of time, especially stressed and unstressed syllables, it is surprising how easy it is to forget just how you actually talk normally.
We already know that one of the major ways in which poetry shapes the rhythms of language is by arranging rhythmic sequences of words into regular, measured lines. This is in order to form what is known as ‘meter‘ (‘meter’ actually comes from the Greek word for ‘measure’ – we are measuring the pattern of stressed syllables). We can analyze a poems meter by counting the total number of syllables per line and then counting the number of stresses per line and finding out what is called ‘the metrical foot‘. A metrical foot is a basic unit of stressed and/or unstressed syllables. They are:
- Iamb: unstressed – stressed. For example, when you say ‘New York’, ‘New’ is usually unstressed followed by a slight emphasis on the stressed ‘York’.
- Trochee: stressed – unstressed. The opposite of the iamb, an example of a trochee would be ‘London’. The first syllable – ‘Lon’ – is stressed, while ‘don’ is unstressed.
- Anapaest: unstressed – unstressed – stressed. For those lovely long three syllable words and phrases, we have an anapaest when it is the final syllable that is stressed. In ‘Tennessee’ we have three syllables (Ten-nes-see), with the emphasis at the end.
- Dactyl: stressed – unstressed – unstressed. ‘Leningrad’ is a nice example of a dactyl, with only ‘Len’ being stressed.
- Spondee: stressed – stressed. A much more uncommon metrical foot in the English language, a spondee is a pair of stressed syllables.
- Pyrrich: unstressed – unstressed. The opposite of the spondee, and again very uncommon in English, the pyrrich is a pair of unstressed syllables.
Metrical feet may not be perfectly regular throughout a poem; people do speak slightly differently when they have different accents and so they may emphasize slightly different syllables. It is finding the metrical foot that is used throughout the majority of the poem that is important (note that there may be not regular rhythm; this is called free verse and it is something I will cover in a later post).
Once you have determined the metrical foot, you need to pay attention to the line length in regards to how many feet there are. The names for the different length lines are as follows:
- Monometer – one foot.
- Dimeter – two feet.
- Trimeter – three feet.
- Tetrameter – four feet.
- Pentameter – five feet.
- Hexameter – six feet.
- Heptameter – seven feet.
- Octameter – eight feet.
Note that line length is specifically determined by how many feet there are, not their actual length. A dactylic tetrameter will look longer than an iambic tetrameter because is will contain more syllables (because dactyls are made up of three, while iambs only contain two), but both will be called tetrameter if there are four feet.
Just as I said with the metrical feet, however, line length can slightly alter throughout a poem. If a poem is made up of lines 10 syllables long but one line has only 9, this does not mean the poem cannot be iambic pentameter (five iambs per line). In this case we would say that the poem was iambic pentameter, but that the line with only 9 syllables was catalectic. This simply means that the line contains one syllable less than the rest of them in the poem. If the line contained 11 syllables, it would be hypercatalectic – containing one extra syllable.
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