People probably invented poetry to help them remember things they wanted to remember – what their gods and ancestors did, how to get from one place to another, what plants were good to eat and what plants were poisonous – all sorts of things that rhythmic patterns and regular rhyme schemes made easier to remember. So, for a long time, much poetry was written in regular rhythmic patterns called stanzas, with a given number of accents (also called “stresses”) per line and a pattern of end-rhymes, usually called a rhyme scheme. Example:
_ / _ / _ / _ /
The way a crow shook down on me (a)
/ _ / _ _ / _ /
Dust of snow from a hemlock tree (a)
_ / _ _ / _ / _ /
Has given my heart a change of mood (b)
_ / _ / _ _ / _ _ /
And saved some part of a day I had rued. (b)
– Robert Frost, “Dust of Snow”
As you can see, most of the rhythmic units are composed of one unstressed and one stressed syllable (The way a crow.)
_ / _ /
That kind of foot ( _ / ) is called an iamb, and if it is the most common foot within a poem, the meter is described as iambic. In this example, you see four stressed syllables in each line, so the metrical scheme of this stanza is iambic tetrameter, a very common pattern in modern English poetry.
A metric foot is not the same as a word. For instance, the word “podiatrist”
_ / _ /
divides into two metric feet, both iambic: po di a trist. In classical metric practice, no foot can contain more than one stressed syllable, or more than two unstressed syllables. From the late 19th Century on, poets have been varying those “rules,” or just saying to hell with them entirely, as Whitman did.
The metric feet are named:
_ /
Iambic: revolt (unaccented/accented)
_ _ /
Anapestic: in the mist (unaccented/unaccented/accented)
/ _
Trochaic: rapid (accented/unaccented)
/ _ _
Dactylic: gracefully (accented/unaccented/unaccented)
_ / _
Amphibrachic: descending (unaccented/accented/unaccented
The substitutive feet (feet not used as primary, instead used to supplement and vary a primary foot) are referred to using these terms:
/ /
Spondaic: fat cat (accented/accented)
_ / _ _ / _
Pyrrhic: the house on the hillside (“on the” is unaccented/unaccented
The types of line lengths are:
One foot: Monometer –
/
What!
/
Tear
_ / _
That tattered
/ _
ensign
/
down?
Two feet: Dimeter –
_ / _ /
The rain it falls
_ / _ /
On just, unjust
_ / _ /
And dust, they say,
_ / _ /
Falls back to dust.
Three feet: Trimeter –
_ / _ _ / _ _ / _
There was an old man from Kentucky
_ / _ _ / _ _ / _
Who one day felt powerful lucky
Four feet: Tetrameter –
_ / _ / _ / _ /
Drucilla Dooley duly drew
_ / _ / _ / _ /
A jackdaw in cerullean blue
_ / _ / _ / _ /
It flew and flew and flew and flew
_ / _ / _ / _ /
And joy Drucilla newly knew.
Five feet: Pentameter –
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
(Hardly any modern English poetry is structured in line lengths beyond pentameter, so
unless you plan to get into Greek or Middle Eastern verse forms, you needn’t trouble
your head with the following three.)
Six feet: Hexameter
Seven feet: Heptameter
Eight feet: Octameter
You can describe any rhyme scheme (a repeated pattern of end-rhymes) by labeling the first end-word with an “A,” the next new-sounding end-word with a “B” and so on. So the rhyme scheme of Frost’s “Dust of Snow” is “AA, BB.” The rhyme scheme of the form known as a Shakespearean Sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
To scan a poem means to mark the stressed and unstressed syllables, as I have in all the examples above, divide each line into feet, and mark the rhyme scheme, using a letter of the alphabet to the right of each line. This will allow you to describe the form of the poem – in the case of Sonnet 73, the form is iambic pentameter, three stanzas rhymed abab cdcd efef, and a couplet (two line stanza) rhymed gg. That is also the description of a “Shakespearean Sonnet.” (The other major sonnet form, the Petrarchan Sonnet, is also in iambic pentameter, with the first 8 lines (the octave) rhymed abba/abba and the final 6 lines (the sestet) rhymed cdd/ece. You can diagram any Shakespearean sonnet as:
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / a
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / b
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / a
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / b
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / c
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / d
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / c
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / d
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / e
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / f
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / e
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / f
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / g
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / g
That diagram describes the metric form of any Shakespearean sonnet, but if you scan any Shakespearean sonnet, or any other section of Shakespeare’s writing, you will soon find that the actual stresses do not always fall where the form would have them. In Sonnet 73, for example, the stresses in the first three lines follow the form exactly – five iambic feet per line. But the 4th line varies that pattern, placing a stress on the first two syllables (making a spondaic foot). This variation of the metric pattern creates the rhythm of the verses – that is, the actual pattern of stresses/non-stresses as opposed to the rigid repetitions of the metric form.
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
This tension between rhythm and meter is what makes the best poetry sound close to natural human speech, and also what makes it resemble music: repetition and variation. Try scanning the entire Sonnet 73 on the next page. Mark the stressed and unstressed syllables and write the letters for the rhyme scheme to the right of each line (even though you won’t need to think much to do so, since they follow the “Shakespearean” sonnet’s rhyme-scheme exactly):
Sonnet 73
– William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
Why scan poems? A couple of reasons. Scanning makes you more aware of metric patterns and how good writers both follow and vary them, and after you’ve scanned enough poems, you’ll find it far easier to do those things in your own writing.
Why would you want to bother to learn to write formal verse, when so much of the verse written from the 1920s up to the present has not followed any of the old metric rules or worked within the old metric structures, but has been written as “free” verse – that is, with no pre-set line lengths, metric patterns, or regular rhyme schemes.
You might find one practical reason: while “poetry” has pretty much cast off all requirements for fixed forms and repetition, song lyrics have not done so with nearly as much abandon. So if you plan to write song lyrics, you’ll have a much easier time of it if you learn to write within strict metric patterns first. Please take my word for this.
I don’t know if the next reason could be called “practical” or not. Robert Frost once said that writing free verse was “like playing tennis without the net.” In other words, if you don’t have to say what you want to say within the confines of a fixed metric pattern and a fixed rhyme scheme, you’ve lost most of the challenge that writing poetry offers, and therefore you’ve lost most of the fun of the game. Both you and your readers, if any, will have lost the delight of discovery, and you will never experience the small miracle that sometimes occurs when you have to find a rhyme to complete a line, and finding it makes you say something you didn’t know you were going to say, think something you didn’t even know you knew. Without the nets of meter and rhyme, you’ll probably just keep saying the same tired crap that everyone else says. The snow lies on the ground like a beautiful white blanket.
