Rhythm - any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound. In speech, the natural rise and fall of the language
In words of more than one syllable, there are accented or stressed syllables
Accent - the relative prominence given a syllable in relation to it's neighbors, resulting from stress (force of utterance producing loudness), duration, pitch, or juncture (manner of transition between successive sounds)
Rhetorical stresses - stressing different parts of a sentence to make intentions clear
Understanding rhetorical stress and meaning is essential to comprehending poems and their rhythms
Pauses affect rhythm as well
End-stopped line - end of the line corresponds with natural pause in speech
Heavily end-stop when line ends with punctuation
Run-on line - when the sense of the line moves on without pause into the next line
Caesuras - grammatical or rhetorical pauses within lines
In free-verse, the basic rhythmic unit is the line
Consider contrast between end-stop and run-on lines as well as caesuras
Prose poems depends entirely on prose rhythms
Meter - the identifying characteristic of rhythmic language
Metered verse have accented syllables arranged at equal intervals
Rhythm designates flow of actual sound whereas meter refers to the patterns the sound follows
Foot - basic unit of meter, usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables (occasionally no accented syllables)
Compare syllables within a foot to determine stressed and unstressed syllables
*in the spondee the accent is distributed equally over the two syllables and is occasionally referred to as a hovering accent. No whole poems area written in spondee and thus there are only four basic meters
Line - other basis unit of meter
Similar to free verse, the line in metrical verse can have end-stop lines, run-on lines, and caesuras
Naming of line based on number of feet
Monometer - one foot Tetrameter - four feet
Dimeter - two feet Pentameter - five feet
Trimeter - three feet Hexameter - six feet
Stanza - third unit of measurement
Group of lines with a repeated metrical pattern
Metrical Variations - call attention to sounds that depart from the norm
Substitution - replacing the regular foot with another one
Extrametrical Syllables - added to the beginning or end of lines
Truncation - omission of an unaccented syllable at either end of a line
Scansion - the process of defining the metrical form of a poem
- identify the foot
- name the number of feet in a line - if there is a pattern
- describe the stanzaic pattern - if there is one
When marking metrical stresses, only compare the syllables within the foot
A noun usually receives more stress that its modifying adjective
A verb usually receives more stress than its modifying adverb
These rules don't tend to hold up when the modifying word refers to an unusual condition
Though normal reading establishes metrical pattern, metrical pattern influences the reading
Scansion generalizations:
- most readers do not stop to scan a poem, although occasional scansion of a poem holds value. As in the example poem, scansion can help to unlock meaning
- Scansion ignores degree of accent, it only classifies syllables
- Divisions between feet have no meaning. Rhythm often runs counter to meter. Trochaic hinge word yields a predictive pattern when it echoes throughout
- There does not need to be perfect regularity of meter. Once a pattern is found there is an expected rhythm, but the heard rhythm is sometimes different, highlighting important parts. Variation can be introduced by grammatical and rhetorical pauses.
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