So he slept through the poetry section of the upper class English school and pay someone like me to write a sonnet for you, but now that you're in the SCA, you are moved to create poetry. All is not lost. One of the things you love to read, is that there are many examples of contemporary poetry, that does not really rhyme. Rhyming poetry seems in vogue in the English language in the late 14 Century has arrived, William Langland's Piers Plowman's vision, published about 1360isn't rhymed, but Chaucer's Canterbury Tales published about 20 years later, is. Much of Shakespeare's work is unrhymed. The poetic feature you cannot duck, however, is rhythm.
Whatever other hallmarks a culture's poetry might have, be it rhyme, alliteration, or fixed structure, they all have rhythm. Rhythm in speech or poetry is created because we don't place the same emphasis on every syllable we speak. We stress, or emphasize, certain syllables, while other syllables remain unstressed, or de-emphasized. A lot of earlier poetic forms tended to ignore the placement of unstressed syllables in any line and only dealt with the stresses per line. Piers Plowman begins [1, 2]:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Though there are a varying number of unstressed syllables (placed haphazardly), there are consistently four stresses per line:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
The stressed syllables also show alliteration, i.e., they begin with the same sound. Rather than rhyming the end of his lines, Langland "rhymed" the initial sounds of his stressed syllables; in this quatrain (four lines of poetry), he used only s, sh, h, and w for 16 stresses. The rhythm here is created by a regular pattern of stressed syllables.
Chaucer was a man ahead of his time. Whether Chaucer felt limited by the demands of alliteration, or whether he simply liked the sound of the more rhythmically fixed lines he was reading in foreign poetry, he chose to write in a style totally unlike Langland's (and most earlier) work. This style quickly became the English standard [2, 3]:
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
From atthe was lord and governor.
And in his tyme swich a conquerour.
Chaucer has a rhythm even stronger, unstressed and stressed syllables from a repeating pattern. It is a style known as a fixed meter. This special instrument called iambic pentameter, accented with 10 syllables per line and five equally spaced. This instrument was recorded in English poetry up to 1600 and beyond. But they are (upset) before jumping. First, we musttalk about the revolutionary shift from stress-based verse to lines of a fixed meter, and to do that, we need to take off our shoes.
The basic unit of any fixed meter is called the foot. If you think about it, footsteps, especially marching steps, seem to naturally drive us into a set rhythm, as in, "Left, left, left-right-left!" (Notice no one thinks that they're meant to hop on their left foot; they understand that the right step is simply unstressed.) Our journey into the wonderful world of feet begins with a single step, and indeed a single syllable, namely the...
Monosyllabic foot: one stressed syllable, like "day." Usually, this foot occurs as an oddball in a line of a different meter, because as you can imagine it's pretty artistically limiting. Here's a line of monosyllabic tetrameter (tetra from the Greek for "four", so a line of four monosyllabic feet):
Go. Seek. Find. Kill.
Not much to work with. I can't think of a period example of monosyllabic foot poetry.
Most poetic feet contain more than one syllable, so a line will have more syllables than feet. It's important to start thinking about feet rather than syllables, because the type of foot forms the rhythm. Lines composed of two-syllable feet are sometimes called "duple meter." A line with four two-syllable feet will have 4x2=8, yes, eight syllables. There are four types of two-syllable feet:
Iamb: one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, like "today" and "before." If you never know or understand any foot but the iamb, it won't matter a darn. Iambic meter is the natural cadence of both English and French, so you'll find that overwhelmingly most period English and French poetry is iambic. If you're wondering what kind of word "iamb" is, it's Greek, like most poetic terms. If you're feeling like all these terms are too high-brow for you, you should know that Iambe was famous in Greek mythology for entertaining Demeter with bawdy stories, so instead of thinking about High School poetry class, think of what a saucy wench Iambe was and you'll feel better.
People often doubt that they speak in iambic meter most of the time, because they've been taught that Shakespeare wrote in iambic meter, and they know they don't talk that way. Oh, but you do. We hate having too many stressed syllables in a row. Why do you think nobody in folk music ever rides a white horse, but a milk-white horse? "White horse" is two stressed syllables and sounds jerky to us, but "a milk-white horse" alternates stressed and unstressed syllables and flows more musically to our ears. Most English words of more than one syllable alternate stressed and unstressed syllables; the few words that have multiple stressed syllables together are typically compound words, or words made by sticking two smaller words together, like "handcuff" and "football."
Once you've identified the type of foot, like iambic, the name of the meter does nothing more than tell you how many feet are in each line (it just tells you in Greek). Here are the lines you're likely to run into, all illustrated in iambic feet:
1, Monometer: A horse! (One foot, two syllables, da-DUM)
2, Dimeter: A loaf of bread. (Two feet, four syllables, da-DUM da-DUM)
3, Trimeter: I need my coffee, please.
4, Tetrameter: My hovercraft is full of eels.
5, Pentameter: I think he went to Wal-Mart on his break.
6, Hexameter: But then he came back home and went to bed and slept.
7, Heptameter: You'd think that I'd have something more important to relate.
Okay, I had to use "relate" rather than "say" to preserve the meter, but you can see how little tweaking must be done to normal speech to even out the rhythm. You should be able to spot the iambic feet in those lines (just break the lines into two-syllable chunks and note that each chunk sounds roughly like da-DUM). Obviously, in normal speech, we don't make quite as much distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, and the longer the statement, the less distinct we get. Look at the natural stress in this line (here bold indicates a stressed syllable):
I need my coffee, please.
Without hearing it first, you'd naturally read this written line as three iambs, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Now, you COULD say it like this:
I need my coffee, please.
DUM da-da-DUM da-DUM. But you'd recognize it as unusual, and realize that I was trying to emphasize the word "I", namely that I need my coffee more than the next person (probably true!). The longer a line gets, and the longer the words get, the more likely you'll have a syllable that should be stressed but isn't, or vice versa. If I'm speaking formally, I can read this line as follows:
I think he went to Wal-Mart on his break
But given no direction, you're just as likely to say it:
I think he went to Wal-Mart on his break.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Poetry that never deviates from the pure meter often sounds like a second-grader wrote it:
I think that I shall never see
A snail that wants to climb a tree
He might fall down and bump his head
Or take so long he'd still be dead.
Period poetry is lousy with variations from the pure meter, but it's done consciously, for emphasis or effect. Most of Shakespeare's plays are iambic pentameter, unrhymed, so the lines should sound like da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. But look:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glor'ious summer by this son of York.
Whoa! Four real iambs out of ten chances! But this is an opening line, and it's meant to have tremendous punch. So it does. To an ear expecting regular iambic, this feels like somebody stripped the clutch. And that's my cue to introduce another scary term: scansion. Scansion describes how well the poet stuck to the meter. If a line "doesn't scan" it means there is noticeable deviation from the expected rhythm, and without an obvious reason, like Shakespeare's emphasis above. Here are two ten-syllable lines:
The night was cold, and darkness filled the sky
John jumped on the bed, and Susan said, "Hey!"
The first line scans perfectly in iambic pentameter, the second doesn't, which is why the first sounds rhythmic and poetic and the second doesn't. Bad poets can't even count to ten (or whatever syllable count is appropriate to the line), so they often drop syllables or throw in extras. Middling poets can usually count to ten, but they just can't perceive the difference between a line that scans and one that doesn't, so their poems end up sounding like prose that happens to have lines of the same length. Just because you have 10 syllables per line does NOT mean you have iambic pentameter. It's all about RHYTHM.
Really strong deviations from meter are often used in modern poems for comic effect. Consider these two limericks:
There was a young man of Japan,
Whose limericks never would scan.
When they said it was so,
He replied, "Yes, I know -
"But I always try to get as many words into the last line as ever I possibly can!"
and
A decrepit old gas man named Peter
While hunting around for the meter
Touched a leak with his light
He arose out of sight
And, as anyone can see by reading this, he also destroyed the meter.
You know the rhythm you expect in the last line of a limerick, and the unexpected quality of a line that varies wildly from that expected rhythm gets your attention. Again, I can't think of a period example of this type of deviation, so save it for your open mic poetry.
Besides iambic pentameter, other common meters in period poetry include iambic tetrameter, as in the Agincourt Carol (ca. 1415) [4]:
Owre kynge went forth to Normandy,
With grace and myyt of chivalry;
The God for hym wrouyt marvelously,
Wherefore Calle Englonde can cry, and
and "iambic tetrameter alternating trimeter and" also known as "ballad meter", as in The Battle of Otterburn (1550, spelling modernized for clarity) [5]:
So shoot, archers, for my own good (da-da-DUM DUM DUM DUM-da-da)
Flee and leave sharp arrows (da-da-DUM DUM DUM-da)
Minstrel, play warison
And there are also quit
Alternate lines of four feet in lines of three feet. Hence the name.
I spent so much time oniambs, that you've probably forgotten the category: two-syllable (duple) feet. We'll move one now, but I'll take one more opportunity to say that the importance of the iamb can't be overemphasized. Unless you're writing poetry in a language other than English (of course iambs also turn up in Italian, German...) and/or you're recreating a poetic style from a period earlier than the 14th century, you should be working in iambs most of the time, if not exclusively.
Trochee: one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable, like "daily" or "quiet." Interestingly, the fashion of rhyming poetry seems to have gone hand-in-hand with a shift in preference for iambic over trochaic meter. This makes a good deal of sense, since trochaic feet leave an unstressed syllable at the end of the line, and a rhyme of an unstressed syllable makes far less impact on the ear than a rhyme of a stressed syllable. Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry, though it was often irregular in its placement of unstressed syllables, frequently started a line with a stress and ended a line with a trochee:
Many men are singing (singing, DUM-da)
Making songs to Odin (Odin, DUM-da)
Or in the mother tongue, as these lines by 10th century Norwegian skald Eyvindr Finsson skaldaspillir [6]:
Barum Ullr of alla
imunlauks a hauka
fjollum Fyrisvalla
frae Hakunar aevi
I'm assuming you can figure out that is a trochee (think "Allah"), DUM-da. Since the hallmarks of Anglo-Saxon and Norse verse have little to do with fixed-foot meter, they're outside the scope of this article, but it's helpful to know that if you want to start writing them, you're better off thinking in trochees than iambs.
Spondee: two stressed syllables, like "daybreak" or "ballpark." This is another foot that you'll find thrown into a line of iambic or trochaic verse for emphasis. Like monosyllabic feet, your listeners would feel like they were being shouted at if you kept it up too long, but again, you'll find them often in Anglo-Saxon and Norse verse as kennings, or compound words used to poetically replace another word, like "swan-road" for ocean or "corpse-beer" for blood.
Pyrrhic: two unstressed syllables, for which I can't think of a single-word example. ("Monopoly" can be thought of as an iamb followed by a pyrrhic foot.) As a pyrrhic battle is one with no winner, a pyrrhic foot is one with no stress. Pyrrhic feet are not uncommon in forms of poetry (like Anglo-Saxon) whose lines are typically defined by number of stressed syllables rather than the absolute number of syllables; they also occur frequently with spondees in iambic or trochaic verse to control the number of stresses in a line.
Congratulations! You survived. Armed with a full knowledge of the duple meters, we can now assess the scansion of the worst poetry. Here are two lines of 12 syllables each:
The trouble with a rainy day lies mainly in
Knowing the time to use umbrellas and rain boots.
The trou- ble with a rai- ny day lies main- ly in
(iamb) (iamb) (iamb) (iamb) (spondee) (pyrrhic)
Know- ing the time to use um- brel- las and rain boots
(trochee) (iamb) (iamb) (iamb) (pyrrhic) (spondee)
That's six stressed and six unstressed syllables per line, and seven out of twelve are iambs, so you'd have to call this iambic hexameter, but it doesn't sound like poetry, does it? That's the bad scansion caused by varying the feet without good reason (unless you want to call attention to the rain boots). What happens if we set foot this strange?
The problem with a day of rain is very clear: To know when your roof should look (OK, they rhyme and what can I say, I am a High Flyer ..) Now is the unbroken rhythm. Sing. It seems that poetry (poetry inane, but we're not talking about content for the moment). Yes, I left my boots. Sometimes to keep the rhythm of the piece, it is necessarydifficult decisions, but that makes poetry different from prose. The pattern must come first. If you prefer boots, ditch the shield:
The problem with a rainy day, no one refute: To know the time when you should wear rubber boots
Notice how it changes "rain boots" to "Wellies" got rid of that ugly spondee (the milk-white horse thing again). At first you may need to sacrifice content in order to protect the instrument, but as you get better, you will learn to work insay what you want and have a piece that tries.
Hold onto your hat! Now is the time to enjoy half as much. Lines of trisyllabic feet are together called, you guessed it, "triple time." A number of dual pentameter has ten syllables and have a series of triple pentameter ... We must not always the same hands! On the right, 3x5 = 15, is that fifteen syllables. Here are trisyllabic feet want to know, then ...
Dactyl, a stressed syllable followed by twounstressed syllables, like "yesterday", "Lavender" and terrible (see below), "anapest". All in waltz or 3 / 4, is in dactylic meter. Often used to evoke the feeling of a galloping horse. Dactyls were to be rampant in the greek epic poem, in fact, dactylic hexameter as "heroic meter" known for its use in the Greek epics.
Anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in "voluntary" "fun" E. Unfortunately the word "anapest" not one, there is aDattilo. This is another galloping horse's feet, is also popular in Chanteys sea. "A visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clark Moore ("It was the night before Christmas ...") was written in tetrameter anapestic, like most of the books of Dr. Seuss.
Amphibrach: two unstressed syllables with each syllable as "pajamas" and "tomato" is underlined. The longest lines are trimeter amphibrachic limerick: "There was a young lady of Niger ..." Amphibrachs were in Latin and usedGreek verse.
There are other trisyllabic feet, and even tetra-syllable feet, but unless you investigate the classical languages and dead, you're probably never run on it. Why have Latin and greek a different concept of stress as the modern English, they needed many more types of feet. Believe me when I say I do not. If you can acquire a knowledge of working in the few presented here and train your ear, stick it in his letter, the tools toYou write a wide range of poetry. Good poetry.
"Oh, no, you said that it would be a test !!!!!!!!!"
Here are some examples to test their skills. Try changing the line in units of two (or three) syllables, and adjust the device with the descriptions of each foot, and the number of feet per line on the chart on page 3 Here's a tip: count the number of stressed syllables, and both are dimeters iambic trimeter anapestic six syllables, but the line will have three iambic stress (for aFeet) and the line anapestic will consist of two (one for each foot). Yes, and monosyllabic caliber spondaic dimeter both have two voltages. Hey, if it were easy, it would always do! The answers appear after the bibliography.
1 On the back of the box is the hexameter A. Price monosyllabic
2 Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound! B. trochaic pentameter
3 Something Wicked This closer, C. trimeters anapestic
4 Fight! Fight! Fight! Drink! Drink! Drink! D. dactylicTetrameter
He saw blades 5 iambic trimeters E.
6 I went to the bank and withdrew my deposit. F. trochaic tetrameter
Favorite 7, follow me with tenderness, love iambic pentameter G.
8 And now the end is near, and I'm just spondaic dimeter H.
9 Nonsense! I. anapestic tetrameter
10 Wendy went fairly quickly with Peter J. iambic tetrameter
11 It 'a sad situation when lovers will cool gauge dactylic K.
Before 12Queen he knelt L. amphibrachic tetrameter
Bibliography
[1] Langland, William, "The Vision of Piers Plowman," Prologue, WWW: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia, 2005.
[2] Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Nevill Coghill (Translator), The Canterbury Tales, Penguin Classics, New York, 2003.
[3] Many Middle English words ending in were initially pronounced as two syllables, like 'old' and 'time', but eventually the terminal became silent or dropped off and the pronunciation became modernized. This often makes it difficult to go back to Chaucer and count syllables in a line, but trust me, there are 10.
[4] Bodleian Library MSS. Selden, B 26, "The Song of Agincourt", 15th c.
[5] British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra, C.iv, ca. 1550.
[6] "The Prose Edda in Old Icelandic," Skaldskaparmal, XLIII, part 2, WWW: Heithin Text Archive, 2005.
Perrine, Laurence. Sound and Sense, An Introduction to Poetry (4th edition). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Preminger, Alex, editor. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Answers: 1-C, 2-J, 3-F, 4-A, 5-H, 6-L, 7-D, 8-G, 9-K, 10-B, 11-I, 12-E.
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