7
The Technical Language of Poetry
In this chapter, we’ll be looking at some basic formal elements of poetry. Much of this material is based on sound. It is easier to understand with spoken examples. At the end of this chapter, you will find links to videos that reinforce material presented here.
The vocabulary that has been developed to study poetry is elaborate. Although you may feel you’re being exposed to a lot of new words at once, in fact we will only be sampling this vocabulary here. You’ll find a longer reference list of common vocabulary words at the end of this chapter.
The study of the nature, forms, rules, and techniques of poetry is called poetics; part of this, the study of poetic meter and sound, is called prosody. The following poetics describes very well the majority of poems written in English from the late 15th century (the time just before Shakespeare) to the present. The major exception is free verse, which is primarily a 20th-Century phenomenon. Although you may use the authors’ video lecture and other materials at the end of the chapter as a supplemental glossary, the entries are not in alphabetical order because concepts described in many entries depend upon a knowledge of those that have been described before. You can’t understand what blank verse is, for example, until you know what meter is. Fortunately, you have a computer and can search for entries easily if you need to refresh your memory.
These are the most basic words anyone needs to know who wishes to discuss poetics:
Foot: We mentioned in a previous chapter that, for the most part, English poetry is measured by stressed syllables. As we stated there, a stressed syllable and its accompanying unstressed syllables is called a foot. English poetry has four basic feet, the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl and the anapest. Of these four, the iamb (pronounced “I am”) is by far the most common. The iamb consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Traditionally an unstressed syllable is marked by a ˘, and an stressed syllable is marked ´. But, for visual ease here, we will mark the stressed syllables in bold.
iamb: The bar
A trochee (pronounced “troh-key”) is a backwards iamb, a two-syllable foot in which the first syllable is stressed:
trochee: bro-ther
The anapest (pronounced as written, “an-a-pest”) and dactyl (pronounced “dak-til”) are three syllable feet thus:
anapest: on the hill
dactyl: Canada
In addition to these four basic feet, there are two more, less common, that you should know, the spondee (“spon-dee”) and the pyrrhic (“peer-ick”). These feet are common substitutions in poetic lines. In other words, they are not generally the basic meter of the line, but serve to add variation to the regular pattern set up in the meter by repeating one of the four basic feet. The spondee consists of two accented syllables together; the pyrrhic consists of two unaccented syllables together.
pyrrhic: to a
Line and meter: A string of feet is a line. The dominant pattern of stresses in a line is called the meter (there are usually subtle variances to enhance the musical qualities of a line). It’s obvious from looking at a poem where a line begins and ends. What you may not know is that lines have names based on the meter and on number of feet the line contains. Lines in English poetry tend to repeat the same foot a number of times. Variations tend to be isolated. For example, one anapest, or spondee or pyrrhic may show up in an otherwise iambic line. But it is still an iambic line.
REMEMBER THE FORMULA:
Here are some more line names, from one beat to eight:
You’re unlikely to come across a regular line longer than eight feet.
To give the full name to a line, you put the adjective form of the foot beside the name of the length. Greek epics, for example are written in dactylic hexameter. This type of line is natural to Greek and rare in English. (Even translations of Greek epics are often not rendered in dactylic hexameter.) (Complicating this comparison is that, in Classical Greek, they used a form of “quantitative” meter in which the length of a line is determined by how long it takes to say it; most traditional and modern English poetry uses a form of “accentual-syllabic” meter where the length of a line is determined by both the number of “stressed” or more heavily accented syllables (the “beat” essentially) and the total number of syllables in a line.)
The most common line in formal and traditional English poetry is iambic pentameter. A pentameter line, as the name suggests, is a line with five feet. An iambic pentameter line would therefore look like this: da da | da da | da da | da da | da da
An example would be,
The bear is in the house be-side the brook.
The second most common line is iambic tetrameter, a four beat line:
I nev-er lost as much but twice
The third most common is iambic trimeter. Alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines is used in the ballad stanza form (more on that in Chapter Seven next week) and also in many traditional hymns. Although not iambic, the possibly familiar form of the Limerick tends to use anapestic trimeter lines for a comic, galloping effect in its first, second, and fifth lines.
Hexameter is used in much traditional poetry as well. An “Alexandrine,” for example, is a line of iambic hexameter thrown in for a special effect at different times.
If you can hear how many “beats” are in a line together with the predominant rhythmic pattern of stressed syllables, that provides the answer of what kind of metrical line it is. (It can be very tricky, though, to determine if a poet is using a two or three foot units.) One can describe any line by cross referencing with your vocabulary list. (This system of “prosody,” the patterns of rhythm and sound that can be “scanned,” applies only to traditional poetry. Much of 20th Century poetry is written in a more “open” free verse manner that we will learn more about in Chapter Ten.)
If you feel you understand all this, great. (If you don’t, don’t worry about it too much. I have to admit that I didn’t really begin to understand this until I was in graduate school. For now, it’s just becoming familiar with the basic terminology.) If you want to set the idea of iambic pentameter more firmly in your mind, here is a video that may help.
Scansion/Scanning/Scan: The task of determining the meter of a line, of being able find the proper name of a poetic line, is called scanning or scansion.
A word of warning: to understand how poems work, it is necessary to be able to scan them. However, knowing what scansion is and being able to scan are not the same. Many students in the past have come to me saying they can’t figure out how to scan a given line in a poem. (I may or may not be able to help them, to be perfectly honest, as this was not the main focus of my dissertation.) The only sure way to improve is to practice. Here are a few helpful hints that might get you started.
- First, you should understand that stress is based both on the natural rhythms of the language, and is therefore “natural,” and also upon the habitual practice of poets, and is therefore “conventional.” (Try not to put the wrong em- PHA– sis on the wrong syll- A- ble.) If you are a native speaker of the language, then you have much of the expertise you need in order to scan a line. But you will also need to read a lot of poems with an ear for the meter to get the rest.
- That said, if you are asked to scan a line, do this:
- Identify the stresses of longer words. If a word is longer than one syllable, the stressed syllable is the normally accented syllable. If you can’t figure out which syllable is accented, say the word over and over, stressing a different syllable each time. Only one pronunciation will sound right. If you are still confused after doing this, you can always look in a dictionary. Dictionary pronunciation guides often identify accents. (Note: a poetic foot does not always respect word boundaries; one word may contain more than one foot, and a foot may contain more than one word.)
- Note, one syllable words are tricky. You can usually decide ahead of time that prepositions such as “in” and “on” will not be stressed. But this is not always true. And pronouns such as “I” or “she” may or may not be stressed depending on the line. Consider the following two lines:
I never lost as much but twice [I nev-er lost as much but twice]
If I am forced to stay I’ll scream. [If I am forced to stay I’ll scream]
In the first line the first “I” is unstressed. (The first time we read this line we might stumble over this word wondering whether to stress it or not. Further reading will reveal that for the sake of a smooth rhythm it should not be stressed.) In the second line the first “I” is stressed but the “I’ll” is not stressed.
How do we know? The tendency of the English line is to fall into regular patterns of stress. The determination we’ve made for these three “I” syllables cause these lines to fall into regular iambic patterns. Repeated readings of these lines will show that native speakers tend to read these lines as we’ve indicated.
- So, third: once you have found the fundamental foot, let that guide you in determining stress—keeping in mind that substitutions are always possible.
- Fourth, remember scansion is not an absolute science. People do disagree about how to scan particular lines. And there may be more than one way to scan some lines. The trick is to read the line naturally and then take a hint from the obvious pattern developed by the line to help you through troublesome syllables. Remember, unless you are reading free verse, most lines will fall into a regular pattern. (But I repeat: most poems throw in substitutions here and there to keep you from falling into a trance.)
- Remember that in scanning you are merely uncovering and identifying what you already are doing when you read the line. The line should always sound natural. You only scan a poem to analyze it—to find out how it works.
But why do poets use different lines anyway?
We’re making a slight detour from vocabulary building here. But if you know why this matters, you will probably be more able to learn the material. Different lines have different effects. We won’t be able to go into any elaborate study of different lines and their effects here. But I’ll offer two very different lines for comparison.
First we have four lines of the typical iambic tetrameter: ˘´ ˘´ ˘´ ˘´
Whose woods/ these are/ I THINK/ I know.
His house / is in/ the vil-/ lage though.
He will / not see/ me stop– /ping here
To watch/ his woods/ fill up/ with snow.
(Notice in the second line here “in” is stressed, even though it’s one of those little prepositions I mentioned above, and “is” is unstressed even though it’s a verb: the line determines the pattern of stresses.)
Now compare that to this slightly irregular dactylic dimeter: da da da | da da da
Half a league, / half a league
Half a league /on-ward
All in the / val– ley of / death
The dactylic foot makes the line seem faster and gives the appropriate sense (for this poem) of horses running. Even though the dactylic foot is longer than the iambic foot, its slack syllables give it the impression of speed; the frequent stress in an iambic line slows the line down.
And now back to vocabulary…
Sound Effects in Poetry
Rhyme/rhyme scheme: You probably already know what rhyme is. Poems don’t just have rhymes, though; they also have patterns of rhyme. Rhyme is one of the most obvious elements of poetry. When the last words of lines rhyme, this is called end rhyme.
Nay, fly to altars; there they’ll talk you dead:
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
When rhymes appear in the middle of lines, this is called internal rhyme.
Once upon a midnight, dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.
The pattern of end rhymes is called rhyme scheme. Rhyme scheme is designated by alphabetic letters in this way:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood a
And sorry I could not travel both b
And be one traveler long I stood a
And looked down one as far as I could a
To where it bent in the undergrowth b
NOTE: If you are asked to show the rhyme scheme of a particular poem, you must do so using a’s, b’s, c’s etc., in lower case.
A perfect rhyme of vowel alone (if there is no consonant) (go, show) or vowel + consonant if there is one (goat/boat), is called true rhyme.
If the “rhyming words” sound similar without a true rhyme, (like car/tear or goat/slow), this is called slant rhyme (or off rhyme or half rhyme).
Note: rhyme is based entirely on sound, never on spelling. “Cough” and “off” are a true rhyme. “How” and “low” are a slant rhyme even though they look the same.
When two words end with the same spelling but different sounds (cough/through), this is called sight rhyme.
Other sound devices. Poems use other forms of sound-alike tricks in addition to rhyme as well. These include
- alliteration, the repetition of a consonant sound at the beginning of linked words: Billy Bob burnt Busy Bill’s bumblebee;
- assonance, the repetition of a vowel sound in linked words–in close proximity: Billy wins his millions limping (the short “i” sound),
- anaphora, the repetition of the same word at the beginning of several lines.
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond
- cacophony, A harsh, discordant use of sound–often used to mirror the meaning of the context in which it is used. (Opposite of euphony.)
- consonance, linked words share similar consonant sounds but have different vowel sounds: reason/raisin, mink/monk. Sometimes only the final consonant sound is identical: fame/room. (A subtype of Slant Rhyme.)
- enjambment, the continuation of a sentence without a pause (or maybe just the slightest hint of a pause) beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza into the next line (happens in most traditional verse where there is not a grammatical break at the end of a line such as a comma, semicolon, or period)
- epistrophe, the repetition of the same word at the end of successive lines. Epistrophe is very rare. Here’s an example from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool”:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
- euphony, the harmonious effect when the sounds of words connect smoothly with the meaning in a way pleasing to both the ear and the mind. (Opposite of cacophony.) (Writer Dorothy Parker once famously riffed on an old joke about what the most beautiful word in the English language is, responding “cellar-door.” But that the words she most liked to see were “cheque” and “enclosed.” Philologist Willard Epsy chose “gonorrhea” as one of his ten most beautiful English words. See other candidates on this website.)
- onomatopoeia, an attempt to represent a thing or action by a word that imitates the sound associated with it (a cow says “moo”; in some languages these sounds can vary quite a bit–I don’t think that there’s another language in which a rooster says “cock-a-doodle-doo”).
Rhythm: Patterns of stress produce rhythms. Rhythms are named by the meter, using the vocabulary you learned above. We say “the poem has an anapestic (or an iambic) rhythm.” The word applies to poems in the same way that it applies to music. Poets choose rhythm to create tone, mood, and pace—to bring out their subjects. Think of how painters use color. Listen to the quick anapestic rhythm of the following poem (“The Dance” by William Carlos Williams):
The Dance
In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as the dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.
Notice how the rhythm of the poem imitates the dance featured in the painting it describes.
(The Peasant Dance by Pieter Bruegel)
Next week, we will look at how these different rhythms get combined together into different stanza patterns (as well as some traditional poetic forms).
Video Lecture: Meter as Meaning
Assigned Poems
- Poe, “Annabel Lee”
- Parker, “Résumé”
- Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
- Hopkins, “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur”
- Shakespeare, “Full fathom five thy father lies” from The Tempest (example of alliteration)
- Blake, “The Tyger” (example of trochaic meter)
- Shakespeare, witches’ speech in Macbeth IV.i.10-19, 35-38 (example of trochaic meter)
- Pope, “True ease in Writing” from Essay on Criticism (lines 364-85) (discussion of different sound effects in poetry)
Some Poems Suggested by Lindsay and Bergstrom (not required):
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 71
Thomas Wyatt, “They Flee from Me” (Links to an external site.)
John Wilmot, “Against Constancy” (Links to an external site.)
William Blake, “Ah Sun-flower,”
Emily Dickinson, “269 (Links to an external site.) [Wild Nights-Wild Nights]”
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (Links to an external site.)
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Charge of the Light Brigade” (Links to an external site.)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Aftermath” (Links to an external site.)
A. E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees” (Links to an external site.)
Thomas Hardy, “Channel Firing” (Links to an external site.)
Robert Frost, “Come In,”
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (Links to an external site.)
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” text
VIDEO LINKS
Poetics Videos
Syllable:Poetics Part One: What is a syllable? (Links to an external site.)
Stress:Poetics Part Two: What About Stress (Links to an external site.)
Feet:Poetics Part Three: Feet (Links to an external site.)
Line:Poetics Part Four: Line (Links to an external site.)
VIDEO LECTURE: Meter Is Meaning: Week 5 Meter is Meaning.mp4
Poetry Vocabulary