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The Metrical Foot
1. Dominant
used
Metrical
Foot
breve (U) and ictus (/)
iamb – a foot made up of a unstressed and a stressed
syllable; most dominant foot in English speech (impart and
allure)
anapest – a foot made up of 2 unstressed and a stressed
syllable (understand and va-va voom)
iambs and anapests are examples of rising meter since
they end with stressed syllables
trochee – stressed and unstressed syllables (fifty and
lovely)
dactyl – one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables
(telephone and merrily)
falling meter since they end with unstressed syllables
spondees — stressed/stressed
pyrrhics — unstressed/unstressed
2. Number of Feet in the Line (see Glossary): iambic
tetrameter, iambic pentameter, iambic hexameter (or an
Alexandrine)
Other Important terms when scanning a line for meter
end-stopped
run-on lines (enjambment)
caesura
2. Rhyme Scheme
end-rhyme
English sonnet: abab cdcd efef gg
Italian sonnet: abbaabba cdcdcd or cdecde
Ballad stanza: abcb (or abab)
Ottava Rima: abababcc
masculine rhyme
feminine rhyme or “double rhyme”
internal rhyme (womb-tomb)
forced rhyme (eye-symmetry)
eye rhymes (prove-love)
imperfect rhyme (also known as slant rhyme or near rhyme)
(lids-lads)
blank verse (see an example of heroic couplet and blank
verse)
3. Stanza (see Glossary)
couplet
tercet
quatrain
4. General Sound Devices
alliteration – repetition of the initial consonant sound; can
also occur at the beginning of a stressed syllable
assonance – repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds,
especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby
words.
consonance – repetition of a sequence of two or more
consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowel:
flush/flash, live/love, lean-alone, hearer-horror (sometimes
the same thing as imperfect rhyme, as in the Housman poem,
“lad/laid” where it links two stanzas)
euphony – language which strikes the ear as smooth, pleasant,
and musical
cacophony – language which seems harsh, rough and unmusical
onomatopoeia
a word or a sequence of words whose sound resembles
that it denotes: i.e. “buzz,” “hiss”
can also mean more generally some poetry’s aim to
correspond to, or to strongly suggest, what they denote
Rhetorical Figures
anaphora
chiasmus
zeugma