In poetry, the meter (or metre) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order. Prosody is a more general linguistic term, that includes poetical meter but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal. The scansion of a poem is the analysis of its metrical structure.
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The meter usually depends on acoustic properties of the spoken words, such as the length or stress of their syllables, independently of their meaning. The sound attributes that determine the meter may vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.
In most Western classical poetic traditions, the meter of a verse can be described as a sequence of feet, each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types—such as stressed/unstressed (the norm for English poetry) or long/short (as in most classical Latin and Greek poetry).
The most common meter in English poetry, the so-called iambic pentameter, is a sequence of five iambic feet or iambs, each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one ("da-DUM") :
| So | long | as | men | can | breathe, | or | eyes | can | see, |
| So | long | lives | this, | and | this | gives | life | to | thee. |
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This approach to analyzing and classifying meters originates from ancient Greek tragedians and poets such as Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Sappho.
Another component of a verse's meter are the caesurae (literally, cuts), which are pauses or other breaks inserted between certain syllables of the verse. In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. In English poetry, a caesura refers to a break within a line.
Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation is the inversion of a foot, which turns an iamb ("da-DUM") into a trochee ("DUM-da"). Another common variation is a headless verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. Yet a third variation is catalexis, where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof - an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci':
The metrical "feet" in the classical languages were based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (indicated as daa and duh below). These are also called "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels. The foot is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. In English poetry, feet are determined by emphasis rather than length, with stressed and unstressed syllables serving the same function as long and short syllables in classical meter.
The basic unit in Greek and Latin prosody is a mora, which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable is equivalent to two moras. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants. Various rules of elision sometimes prevent a grammatical syllable from making a full syllable, and certain other lengthening and shortening rules (such as correption) can create long or short syllables in contexts where one would expect the opposite.
The most important Classical meter is the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer and Virgil. This form uses verses of six feet. The first four feet are dactyls (daa-duh-duh), but can be spondees (daa-daa). The fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The sixth foot is either a spondee or a trochee (daa-duh). The initial syllable of either foot is called the ictus, the basic "beat" of the verse. There is usually a caesura after the ictus of the third foot. The opening line of the Æneid is a typical line of dactylic hexameter:
In this example, the first and second feet are dactyls; their first syllables, "Ar" and "rum" respectively, contain short vowels, but count as long because the vowels are both followed by two consonants. The third and fourth feet are spondees, the first of which is divided by the main caesura of the verse. The fifth foot is a dactyl, as is nearly always the case. The final foot is a spondee.
The dactylic hexameter was imitated in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Evangeline:
Also important in Greek and Latin poetry is the dactylic pentameter. This was a line of verse, made up of two equal parts, each of which contains two dactyls followed by a long syllable, which counts as a half foot. In this way, the number of feet amounts to five in total. Spondees can take the place of the dactyls in the first half, but never in the second. The long syllable at the close of the first half of the verse always ends a word, giving rise to a caesura.
Dactylic pentameter is never used in isolation. Rather, a line of dactylic pentameter follows a line of dactylic hexameter in the elegiac distich or elegiac couplet, a form of verse that was used for the composition of elegies and other tragic and solemn verse in the Greek and Latin world, as well as love poetry that was sometimes light and cheerful. An example from Ovid's Tristia:
The Greeks and Romans also used a number of lyric meters, which were typically used for shorter poems than elegiacs or hexameter. One important line was called the hendecasyllabic, a line of eleven syllables. This meter was used most often in the Sapphic stanza, named after the Greek poet Sappho, who wrote many of her poems in the form. A hendecasyllabic is a line with a never-varying structure: two trochees, followed by a dactyl, then two more trochees. In the Sapphic stanza, three hendecasyllabics are followed by an "Adonic" line, made up of a dactyl and a trochee. This is the form of Catullus 51 (itself an homage to Sappho 31):
The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics:
The metric system of Old English poetry was different from that of modern English, and more related to the verse forms of most of older Germanic languages. It used alliterative verse, a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number (usually four) of strong stresses in each line. The unstressed syllables were relatively unimportant, but the caesurae played a major role in Old English poetry.
Most English meter is classified according to the same system as Classical meter with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the meter can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively. The most common characteristic feet of English verse are the iamb in two syllables and the anapest in three. (See Foot (prosody) for a complete list of the metrical feet and their names.)
The number of metrical systems in English is not agreed upon.[1] The four major types[2] are: accentual verse, accentual-syllabic verse, syllabic verse and quantitative verse. The alliterative verse of Old English could also be added to this list, or included as a special type of accentual verse. Accentual verse focuses on the number of stresses in a line, while ignoring the number of offbeats and syllables; accentual-syllabic verse focuses on regulating both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in a line; syllabic verse only counts the number of syllables in a line; quantitative verse regulates the patterns of long and short syllables, this sort of verse is often considered alien to English.[3] It is to be noted, however, that the use of foreign metres in English is all but exceptional.[4]
The most frequently encountered line of English verse is the iambic pentameter, in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations practically inexhaustible. John Milton's Paradise Lost, most sonnets, and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse. Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare, although it is also notable in the work of Milton, Tennyson (Ulysses, The Princess) and Wordsworth (The Prelude).
A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a heroic couplet, a verse form which was used so often in the eighteenth century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect (although see Pale Fire for a non-trivial case). The most famous writers of heroic couplets are Dryden and Pope.
Another important meter in English is the ballad meter, also called the "common meter", which is a four line stanza, with two pairs of a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter; the rhymes usually fall on the lines of trimeter, although in many instances the tetrameter also rhymes. This is the meter of most of the Border and Scots or English ballads. In hymnody it is called the "common meter", as it is the most common of the named hymn meters used to pair many hymn lyrics with melodies, such as Amazing Grace:[5]
Emily Dickinson is famous for her frequent use of ballad meter:
In French poetry, meter is determined solely by the number of syllables in a line. A silent 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant, but is elided before a vowel (where "h aspiré" counts as a consonant). At the end of a line, the "e" remains unelided but is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables, like a feminine ending in English verse). The most frequently encountered meter in French is the alexandrine, composed of two hemistiches of six syllables each. Classical French poetry also had a complex set of rules for rhymes that goes beyond how words merely sound. These are usually taken into account when describing the meter of a poem.
In Spanish poetry the meter is determined by the number of syllables the verse has. Still it is the phonetic accent in the last word of the verse that decides the final count of the line. If the accent of the final word is at the last syllable, then the poetic rule states that one syllable shall be added to the actual count of syllables in the said line, thus having a higher number of poetic syllables than the number of grammatical syllables. If the accent lies on the second to last syllable of the last word in the verse, then the final count of poetic syllables will be the same as the grammatical number of syllables. Furthermore, if the accent lies on the third to last syllable, then one syllable is subtracted from the actual count, having then less poetic syllables than grammatical syllables. Interestingly, Spanish poetry uses poetic licenses, unique to Romance languages, to change the number of syllables by manipulating mainly the vowels in the line. For example:
This stanza from Valle de Collores by Luis Llorens Torres, uses eight poetic syllables. Given that all words at the end of each line have their phonetic accent on the second to last syllables, no syllables in the final count is either added or subtracted. Still in the second and third verse the grammatical count of syllables is nine. Poetic licenses permit the union of two vowels that are next to each other but in different syllables and count them as one. "Fue en..." has actually two syllables, but applying this license both vowels unite and form only one, giving the final count of eight syllables. "Sendero entre..." has five grammatical syllables, but uniting the "o" from "sendero" and the first "e" from "entre", gives only four syllables, permitting it to have eight syllables in the verse as well. This license is called a synalepha (Spanish: sinalefa). There are many types of licenses, used either to add or subtract syllables, that may be applied when needed after taking in consideration the poetic rules of the last word. Yet all have in common that they only manipulate vowels that are close to each other and not interrupted by consonants.
Some common meters in Spanish verse are:
In Italian poetry, meter is determined solely by the position of the last accent in a line. Syllables are enumerated with respect to a verse which ends with a paroxytone, so that a Septenary (having seven syllables) is defined as a verse whose last accent falls on the sixth syllable: it may so contain eight syllables (Ei fu. Siccome immobile) or just six (la terra al nunzio sta). Moreover, when a word ends with a vowel and the next one starts with a vowel, they are considered to be in the same syllable: so Gli anni e i giorni consists of only four syllables ("Gli an" "ni e i" "gior" "ni"). Even-syllabic verses have a fixed stress pattern. Because of the mostly trochaic nature of the Italian language, verses with an even number of syllables are far easier to compose, and the Novenary is usually regarded as the most difficult verse.
Some common meters in Italian verse are:
In the Ottoman Turkish language, the structures of the poetic foot (تفعل tef'ile) and of poetic meter (وزن vezin) were indirectly borrowed from the Arabic poetic tradition through the medium of the Persian language.
Ottoman poetry, also known as Dîvân poetry, was generally written in quantitative, mora-timed meter. The moras, or syllables, are divided into three basic types:
In writing out a poem's poetic meter, open syllables are symbolized by "." and closed syllables are symbolized by "–". From the different syllable types, a total of sixteen different types of poetic foot—the majority of which are either three or four syllables in length—are constructed, which are named and scanned as follows:
| fa‘ (–) | fe ul (. –) | fa‘ lün (– –) | fe i lün (. . –) | |
| fâ i lün (– . –) | fe û lün (. – –) | mef’ û lü (– – .) | fe i lâ tün (. . – –) | |
| fâ i lâ tün (– . – –) | fâ i lâ tü (– . – .) | me fâ i lün (. – . –) | me fâ’ î lün (. – – –) | |
| me fâ î lü (. – – .) | müf te i lün (– . . –) | müs tef i lün (– – . –) | mü te fâ i lün (. . – . –) |
These individual poetic feet are then combined in a number of different ways, most often with four feet per line, so as to give the poetic meter for a line of verse. Some of the most commonly used meters are the following:
| Ezelden şāh-ı ‘aşḳuñ bende-i fermānıyüz cānā Maḥabbet mülkinüñ sulţān-ı ‘ālī-şānıyüz cānā |
Oh beloved, since the origin we have been the slaves of the shah of love Oh beloved, we are the famed sultan of the heart's domain[6] |
| Ḥaţā’ o nerkis-i şehlādadır sözümde degil Egerçi her süḥanim bī-bedel beġendiremem |
Though I may fail to please with my matchless verse The fault lies in those languid eyes and not my words |
| Bir şeker ḥand ile bezm-i şevķa cām ettiñ beni Nīm ṣun peymāneyi sāḳī tamām ettiñ beni |
At the gathering of desire you made me a wine-cup with your sugar smile Oh saki, give me only half a cup of wine, you've made me drunk enough[7] |
| Men ne ḥācet ki ḳılam derd-i dilüm yāra ‘ayān Ḳamu derd-i dilümi yār bilübdür bilübem |
What use in revealing my sickness of heart to my love I know my love knows the whole of my sickness of heart |
| Şevḳuz ki dem-i bülbül-i şeydāda nihānuz Ḥūnuz ki dil-i ġonçe-i ḥamrāda nihānuz |
We are desire hidden in the love-crazed call of the nightingale We are blood hidden in the crimson heart of the unbloomed rose[8] |
Classical Sanskrit and Vedic Sanskrit use meters for most ancient treatises that are set to verse. Prominent Vedic meters include Gayatri, Ushnik, Anushtupa, Brhati, Pankti, Tristubh and Jagati. The basic meter for epic verse is the Sloka. Sanskrit meter is quantitative, following the same general principles as classical Greek and Latin meter. The Bhagavad Gita is mainly written in anustupa (with some vasanta-tilaka sections) interspersed with some Tristubh. For example, when Krishna reveals his divinity to Arjuna the meter changes to Tristubh. Tristubh is the most prevalent meter of the ancient Rigveda, accounting for roughly 40% of its verses.
Metrical texts are first attested in early Indo-European languages. The earliest known unambiguously metrical texts, and at the same time the only metrical texts with a claim of dating to the Late Bronze Age, are the hymns of the Rigveda. That the texts of the Ancient Near East (Sumerian, Egyptian or Semitic) should not exhibit meter is surprising, and may be partly due to the nature of Bronze Age writing. There were, in fact, attemtps to reconstruct metrical qualities of the poetic portions of the Hebrew Bible, e.g. by Gustav Bickell[9] or Julius Ley[10], but they remained inconclusive[11] (see Biblical poetry). Early Iron Age metrical poetry is found in the Iranian Avesta and in the Greek works attributed to Homer and Hesiod.
Latin verse survives from the Old Latin period (ca. 2nd c. BC), in the Saturnian meter. Persian poetry arises in the Sassanid era. Tamil poetry of the early centuries AD may be the earliest known non-Indo-European metrical texts (with the possible exception of the Chinese Shi Jing). The oldest surviving fragment of Germanic poetry is the verse on one of the Gallehus horns (ca. AD 400). Irish and Arabic poetry both have early records dating from about the 6th century.
Medieval poetry was metrical without exception, spanning traditions as diverse as European Minnesang, Trouvère or Bardic poetry, Classical Persian and Sanskrit poetry, Tang dynasty Chinese poetry or the Japanese Heian period Man'yōshū. Renaissance and Early Modern poetry in Europe is characterized by a return to templates of Classical Antiquity, a tradition begun by Petrarca's generation and continued into the time of Shakespeare and Milton.
Not all poets accept the idea that meter is a fundamental part of poetry. Twentieth Century American poets Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Robinson Jeffers, were poets who believed that meter was imposed into poetry by man, not a fundamental part of its nature. In an essay titled "Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy" Dan Schneider echoes Jeffers' sentiments: "What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes? Or if someone claimed that there were just 2 colors in creation? Now, ponder if such a thing were true. Imagine the clunkiness & mechanicality of such music. Think of the visual arts devoid of not just color, but sepia tones, & even shades of gray." Jeffers called his technique "rolling stresses".
Moore went even further than Jeffers, openly declaring her poetry was written in syllabic form, and wholly denying meter. These syllabic lines from her famous poem "Poetry" illustrate her contempt for meter, and other poetic tools (even the syllabic pattern of this poem does not remain perfectly consistent):
Williams tried to form poetry whose subject matter was centered on the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the variable foot. Williams spurned traditional meter in most of his poems, preferring what he called "colloquial idioms." Another poet that turned his back on traditional concepts of meter was Britain's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins' major innovation was what he called sprung rhythm. He claimed most poetry was written in this older rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of the English literary heritage, based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot.