Rhyme. Poetry Explained. Clearly! 3-How to Easily Recognize Rhyme.

Classroom Discussion

In the Introduction, I talked about the “nuts and bolts of poetry,” that is, the elements that make a poem, well, a poem. In past centuries, these elements were pretty much prescribed: if you are going to write a poem, you must do this and this and this. Think of the rules of any sport; they define what the sport is. But, of course, it is what the player does with those rules that makes sport exciting. The same used to be true of poetry, but in the last 150 years or so, those rules began to erode until today a poem is a poem because the poet says it is. That is quite literally true. Conversely, without the rules, the reader has to judge for himself whether or not it is, indeed, a poem. The anxiety of freedom. But there has to be some basis on which we make that judgment. One of our goals here is to become familiar with the “nature” of poetry so as to be able to make that judgment.

Okay, let’s take a look at some of the structures that built poetry in the past and build some poetry today: meter and rhyme. Meter  is poetry’s way of establishing rhythm.  Young people today may have their first exposure to poetry through Rap or song lyrics, which usually combine both meter and rhyme in their lyrics. It is the rhythm, of course, that makes us want to dance. But we don’t just wiggle around indiscriminately–unless we’re terrible dancers. When we dance–whether it’s up and down or side to side–we tend to emphasize some beats more than others. Poetry does the same thing. Whether a beat is emphasized or not is how meter is measured. And just as you move with your feet, so meter is composed of what are also   called  “feet,”   that is,  the combination of stressed and  unstressed beats  (these  beats  also  are  often referred to as “accented” and “unaccented”).   The  beats in English-speaking poetry are, in most cases, the syllables that make up the words. For the sake of economy, throughout these texts “stressed syllable” and “unstressed syllable” will be referred to as “stressed” or “stress” and “unstressed” or “unstress.” Stressed syllables will be indicated by being in italics type. For example, the “beat” of syllables in the word “constitution” would be rendered as: con-sti-tu-tion.

When a poem is “measured” in terms of its feet, this is called scansion. To scan a poem is to analyze its meter, the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. Let’s look at an example, from Victor James Daley’s, “At the Opera.”

Notice the organization of weak and strong stresses in each line. There are four groups, or feet, of two syllables, one syllable unstressed  and one stressed. This type of foot is called an iamb, arguably the most common foot in Western poetry. The Benefit of meter, of course, is that it adds a song-like quality to poetry, whether intentionally pleasant or unpleasant. The potential drawback is that meter can lend a “sing-song” quality to poetry, trivializing it. I would say the poet here walks a very fine line between Benefit and drawback.

Listed below are the various feet that are used in poetic meter ( – indicates unstressed; ‘ indicates stressed):

—   pyrrhus, pyrrhic

-‘   iamb, iambic

‘-  trochee, trochaic ”

__spondee, spondaic

‘–  dactyl, dactylic

–‘  anapest, anapestic

If you would like to practice scansion, try it on the following lines from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

A Bird, came down the Walk – 

He did not know I saw –

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw, 

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass –

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass –

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There’s another element of scansion that is as significant as feet: how many feet are used in a line. If we look back at the opening of Dickinson’s poem,

we can see that there are three feet in the first, second, and fourth lines, but four feet in the third line. Four iambs. Lines with four feet in them are called tetrameter, “tetra” being the Greek word for “four,” as in “tetrahedron,” a four- sided   solid   like   a   pyramid. When referring to the scansion of a poem, the type of foot is named first, then the line meter.    So   a    four-footed line containing iambs would be called iambic tetrameter. Probably the most frequently used meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s most commonly used meter, “penta” being the Greek word for “five,” as in pentagon.

So:

dimeter = 2 feet

trimeter = 3 feet

tetrameter = 4 feet

pentameter = 5 feet

hexameter = 6 feet

heptameter = 7 feet.

Now  look at line 14:

Like one in danger; cautious

Three iambs, and ??? What do we do with that last syllable (which I have italicized). When reading a poem, some syllables are so “short” that they can be discounted. When reading the word, “cautious,” our voices  somewhat “swallow” the last syllable, –tious. In Prosody–which is the study of poetic meters      and     versification–this “ignoring” of a last syllable is called hypercatalexis. I think this is too technical.  I for one have never heard of it, the term I mean .

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