Meter

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Verse is metered language. What, though, is meter? 

"Meter" comes from the Ancient Greek "metron," meaning "measure." When we measure, or count, our lines, we are writing in meter. 

The simplest way to write meter is to simply count syllables. When we are writing poems with lines containing the same numbers of syllables, we are writing in what is called syllabics. In syllabics, we are not concerned about the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables or the length of syllables. These are common in languages which are not stressed, like Japanese, or tonal, like Chinese. However, in a language like English or German, our words are either stressed or unstressed. As a result, syllabics often sound stressed anyway.

Coincidentally, the Greek language, on which we have based most of our regular syllabic structures, wasn't stressed, but rather was made of long and short syllables. Such poetry is called quantitive verse. 

Most readers of poetry will be familiar with poetry with lines containing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, called feet. The best-known poetic foot in the English language is the iambic foot, which is a simple alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables. 

We mark stressed syllables with a "/" and unstressed syllables with a "˘", which sounds "da-DUM."

   ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

  ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /

Thou art more lovely and more temperate!

Here, in Shakespeare's famous sonnet, we have lines of alternating iambic feet. Since there are five iambs, we call this a pentameter--"penta" for "five," meaning five-count. An iambic pentameter is thus a five-count of iambs. 

• Dimeter: contains two metrical feet
• Trimeter: contains three metrical feet
• Tetrameter: contains four metrical feet
• Pentameter: contains five metrical feet
• Hexameter: contains six metrical feet

These are going to be the most typical meters. As Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel argue in their essay The Neural Lyre (also found in Turner's book Natural Classicism, above), we're typically going to find the ten syllables of iambic or trochaic pentameter to be most "comfortable" in English because it fits into our auditory moment of about 3-4 seconds. If we're using anapest or spondee, then, a trimeter or tetrameter would fit that moment best. 

This, of course, gets us to the issue of regular rhythms. The most common regular rhythms in poetry are the following:

iamb:      ˘ / (ex: compare)

trochee: / ˘ (ex: summer)

spondee: / / (ex: Bang! Bang!)

anapest: ˘ ˘ / (ex: of unstressed)

dactyl: / ˘ ˘ (ex: beautiful)

There are, of course, others:

pyrrus: ˘ ˘

tribrach: ˘ ˘ ˘

amphibrach: ˘ / ˘

bacchius: ˘ / /

cretic: / ˘ /

antibacchus: / / ˘

molossus: / / /

The tribrach and the molossus are the most difficult to create because if there are three unstressed syllables in a row, we'll tend to hear one of the unstressed syllables as stressed; and equally, if there are three stressed syllables in a row, we'll tend to hear one of them as unstressed. To get your listener to hear a tribrach, you would likely have to have a very strongly stressed syllable on either side of it.

With most of these feet (excepting tribrach and molossus), you can use each of them to create a regular rhythm. With all of them, though, you can use them in combinations. For example, the Sapphic stanza is made up of three Sapphic lines and an adonic line. The Sapphic lines are two trochees, a dactyl, and two trochees, while the adonic line is a dactyl followed by a trochee. Thus, the Sapphic stanza is as follows:

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ / ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ ˘ / ˘

Note that the first three are 11-syllable lines (hendecasyllabics) in pentameters of mixed feet.

As one can imagine, there are a large number of potential combinations of syllabics, meters, and feet--an infinite variety if we ignore the requirement for the creation of line lengths that fit in the auditory moment. It's possible to create very complex meters and then repeat them in each line--or in alternating lines, or some other pattern. I would recommend that if you want to retain the word as a form of verse, though, that there be some kind of regularity--the simple and the complex have to be in balance--otherwise, you'll simply end up creating prose. And there's no need to figure out the meter and feet to write prose.

Another way meter is created is through the use of the caesura. A caesura is a pause in the middle of a line. The caesura helps to create a rhythm both within the lines and across the lines. If you use punctuation in the middle of your line, you'll create a natural caesura. But even without punctuation, the reader will create a natural (though weaker) pause in the middle of a long-enough line. While many English poems aren't built around caesuras, traditional Germanic (including Old English/Anglo-Saxon) verse was built around the caesura, with patterns of alliteration being determined by that internal pause.

Finally, in contradistinction to the caesura, where there's a pause in the middle of a line, there's enjambment, which means the syntax of a line isn't contained by that line, but is rather continued into the next line. Another way of putting it is that the line doesn't end with punctuation. The result is that a line that ends with punctuation is a harder pause than one without punctuation.

Regular number of syllables, feet, caesuras, and enjambment (and rhymes) are all ways to create meter, and to make for complex meters. It's important to both maintain regularity and disrupt that regularity simultaneously in order to prevent the reader from getting bored.

Remember, too, that changes in patterns are meaningful to the reader. Take advantage of that fact. If there's a change in feet (using a trochee instead of an iamb in a particular line, for example), then that word should probably be important. The same could be said of rhymes--your rhyming words should be more important than articles or prepositions, unless they're being used there for some kind of effect (meaning, they have meaning in being there).

Of course, there are also variations in stress--some syllables are more stressed than others, and this creates a more complex music over the regularity of the meter.

Things get even more complex if we read poems aloud, because then we add things like pitch, loudness, length, and timbre. Much of this will of course depend on how the reader chooses to read it, if the person has a high or low voice, if they think it would sound better loud or quiet, with longer or shorter time pronouncing given syllables, and personal, regional, or cultural speaking patterns.

All of this means that metered poetry is fundamentally musical. Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on rhythm even contains musical notation. This musicality brings both sides of the brain together--music and language--into a fuller, more complex art.

Verse is metered language. Meter is an artistic tool. It is what makes poetry a language art. The more we think about these kinds of rules, the more artistic our art will be.