Download Rhythm and Meter

Rhythm and Meter
Rhythm
• Rhythm refers to the regular recurrence of the
accent or stress in poem or song.
• Consider
Nursery Rhymes
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty
Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses
and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty
together again.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
and Jill came tumbling after
John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”
• Poets rely heavily on rhythm to express meaning
and convey feeling.
Busy old fool, unruly sun
Why dost thou thus
Four feet with two syllables
per foot = tetrameter.
Five feet with two syllables
per foot = pentameter
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us
• If rhythm is the pulse or beat we hear in the
line, then we can define meter as the measure
or patterned count of a poetic line.
• Meter is a count of the stresses we feel in the
poem’s rhythm.
• By convention the unit of poetic meter in
English is the foot, a unit of measure
consisting of stressed and unstressed
syllables.
Duple meters: two syllables per foot.
Triple meters: three syllables per foot.
A poetic foot may be either iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic.
iambic (iamb)
• an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
syllable, a pattern which comes closest to
approximating the natural rhythm of speech.
• Note line 23 from Shelley's "Stanzas Written in
Dejection, Near Naples":
And walked with inward glory crowned
This line of poetry is iambic tetrameter. Each “foot” has two syllables (unaccented
followed by accented). Four feet = tetrameter.
Trochaic (trochee)
• a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable,
as in the first line of Blake's "Introduction" to
Songs of Innocence:
Piping down the valleys wild
anapestic (anapest)
• two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed
syllable, as in the opening to Byron's "The
Destruction of Sennacherib":
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold
dactylic (dactyl)
• a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed
syllables, as in Thomas Hardy's "The Voice":
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me
spondee and pyrrhic
• Two accented syllables together is called
spondee (knick-knack)
• Two unaccented syllables together is called
pyrrhic (light of the world)
• Both spondaic and pyrrhic feet serve as
substitute feet for iambic and trochaic feet.
• Neither can serve as the metrical norm of an
English poem.
Feet
• The woods are lovely dark and deep.
tetrameter
• That time of year thou may’st in me behold,
pentameter
Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter
almost exclusively in his plays.
Rhythm and Meter Work
• Take the rest of the class to complete the
scansion sheet of various stanzas of poems.
• Read them out loud and tap them aloud.
• You may work in groups, but make sure you
turn in your own work at the end of class.
• No class Monday, August 15. Check engrade
for the e-assignment.