Metre (poetry)

• 1. Introduction

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  Metre in poetry is the basic rhythmic structure underlying a verse or lines in verse. Before a single word of a poem is read aloud, metre is already at work, shaping how the ear receives it. The word dactyl, one of the oldest named units of verse, comes from the Greek word daktylos, meaning finger. A finger has one long bone followed by two shorter ones, and that is exactly what a dactyl sounds like: one long syllable followed by two short. That single anatomical image unlocks something extraordinary. Across thousands of years and dozens of languages, poets have built intricate rhythmic systems, and scholars have developed equally intricate tools to study them. The field of study that covers both the craft and the analysis of metre is called prosody. What follows asks: how does metre actually work, where did it come from, and why do some poets reject it entirely?

• 2. Stress, Weight, and Syllable Count

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  English poets and ancient Greek poets both organized their lines into rhythmic patterns, but they listened for completely different things. English is an accentual language, so its verse tracks which syllables carry stress. A reader of Shakespeare or Milton hears a pattern of beats and offbeats, stressed and unstressed syllables alternating in a kind of back beat against which natural speech plays expressively. Classical Latin and Classical Greek operated on an entirely different principle called quantitative metre, where the length of time taken to pronounce a syllable determined its weight. A long syllable in those systems was literally one that took longer to say. It contained a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference at all to the metre.

  French and Classical Chinese represent a third path. In these languages, syllable length is not strongly differentiated, so their verse traditions count syllables alone. Classical French poetry is built around the alexandrine, a line of twelve syllables. Classical Chinese poetry often used five characters per line, and since each Chinese character maps to one syllable, that meant five syllables per line. Classical Chinese verse added further constraints on top of simple counting, including rules about thematic parallelism and tonal antithesis between lines.

  Sanskrit complicated this picture still further. It used three distinct approaches simultaneously: syllabic metres that counted syllables with relative freedom, syllabo-quantitative metres in which both count and light-heavy patterns were fixed, and purely quantitative metres that measured duration in units called morae. The Anushtubh metre, used throughout the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, has exactly eight syllables in each line with only some positions specified as to length. The most exhaustive modern compilations of Sanskrit metres contain over six hundred of them, a repertoire larger than that of any other metrical tradition.

• 3. Feet and the Line

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  The iambic pentameter is the most frequently encountered metre in English verse. Its name breaks down neatly: five iambic feet, each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Shakespeare's sonnets, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and a great deal else in the English literary tradition all run on this pattern. When lines of iambic pentameter go unrhymed, they become blank verse, the form most famously deployed in Shakespeare's plays and in Milton's great works. Alfred Lord Tennyson used it in Ulysses and The Princess; William Wordsworth used it throughout The Prelude.

  A pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines forms what is called a heroic couplet. This verse form was used so frequently in the eighteenth century that it is now associated mostly with humorous verse, though notable exceptions exist. John Dryden and Alexander Pope are the most celebrated writers of heroic couplets.

  Not all lines sort neatly into a sequence of feet. The hendecasyllable, an eleven-syllable line favored by Catullus and Martial, cannot be described easily through feet. Sanskrit metres present the same difficulty. The system of naming lines by their foot-count runs from monometer (one foot) through dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, and octameter. In classical Greek and Latin, however, the term iambic trimeter refers to a line carrying six iambic feet rather than three, a naming convention that differs from the modern system.

• 4. Pauses, Breaks, and Run-Ons

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  A caesura is a natural pause that falls in the middle of a line rather than at a line-break. William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale contains clear examples of this device. In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is specifically a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. Old English alliterative verse depends on the caesura structurally: each line is divided into two half-lines by it, as visible in the poem Piers Plowman.

  Enjambment works in the opposite direction. Where the caesura creates a pause inside the line, enjambment carries the syntax past the line's end without terminal punctuation. The meaning runs forward from one poetic line to the next. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale supplies examples of this technique as well.

  Poems with a well-defined overall metrical pattern also tolerate deliberate variations. An inversion turns an iamb into a trochee, flipping the unstressed-stressed sequence into stressed-unstressed. A headless verse drops the first syllable of the first foot. Catalexis shortens the end of a line by a foot, or part thereof. John Keats used this last device at the close of each verse in La Belle Dame sans Merci.

• 5. The Dactylic Hexameter

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  The dactylic hexameter is the most important metre of the classical world. It is the metre of Homer and Virgil. Each line runs six feet, with the first four positions occupied by dactyls or spondees, the fifth foot being almost always a dactyl, and the sixth closing with a spondee or a trochee. The initial syllable of either foot in a line carries the ictus, the basic beat of the verse. A caesura typically falls after the ictus of the third foot.

  The opening line of the Aeneid is a standard example of the form. In that first line, the first two feet are dactyls whose first syllables contain short vowels that nonetheless count as long because each vowel is 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, and the final foot is a spondee.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imitated the dactylic hexameter in English in his poem Evangeline, working within the constraints of a stress-based language rather than a quantitative one. The dactylic pentameter, a related but shorter form, was never used alone. It followed a line of dactylic hexameter in the elegiac distich, or elegiac couplet, a pairing used for elegies, solemn verse, and sometimes light love poetry in the Greek and Latin world. Ovid's Tristia is among the works composed in this form.

• 6. The Arabic Tradition

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  Classical Arabic poetry has sixteen established metres, and the scholar who first subjected them to systematic analysis was Al-Farahidi, who lived from 718 to 786 CE. He noticed that poems consisted of repeated syllable patterns in each verse, and his first book, al-Ardh, described fifteen types of verse. A sixteenth was later added by Al-Akhfash. The fundamental principles of Arabic poetic metre are called arūdh, or ilm al-shir, terms that translate roughly as "science of poetry."

  Al-Farahidi's system classifies syllables as either short or long. A short syllable contains a short vowel with no following consonants. A long syllable contains either a long vowel or a short vowel followed by a consonant. Classical Arabic phonology does not allow a syllable to end in more than one consonant, which constrains the system significantly. The traditional method for notating a poem's metre in Arabic is to write out a concatenation of derivations of the verbal root F-A-L.

  Dr. Ibrahim Anis, one of the most distinguished scholars of Arabic literature and language in the twentieth century, wrote candidly about the difficulty of Al-Farahidi's legacy in his book Musiqa al-Shir. He stated that no other branch of Arabic studies contains as many technical terms as Al-Farahidi's prosody, and that the rules of metric variation are so numerous they defy memory and impose severe hardship on students. Al-Farahidi's disciples assigned technical meanings to rare terms, and no scholar over the following eleven centuries attempted to simplify the rules. Anis asked plainly whether it was not time for a new, simple presentation that avoided contrivance and made the science of prosody manageable. Numerous scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have taken up that challenge.

• 7. Dissent and Reinvention

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  Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Robinson Jeffers were among the twentieth-century American poets who rejected metre as artificial. Jeffers called his alternative technique "rolling stresses." An essay titled "Robinson Jeffers, and The Metric Fallacy" by Dan Schneider amplified Jeffers' position, arguing through analogy that a system built on only two syllable types is as limiting as a music made of only two notes.

  Moore went further than Jeffers. She openly declared that her poetry was written in syllabic form and wholly denied metre. The syllabic lines of her famous poem Poetry illustrate her rejection of metrical and other poetic tools, and notably the syllabic pattern in that poem does not remain perfectly consistent throughout.

  Williams developed what he called the variable foot. He focused his poetry on the lives of common people, and he preferred what he described as colloquial idioms over traditional metrical regularity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a British poet, pursued his own distinct reinvention called sprung rhythm. Hopkins argued that most English poetry inherited a rhythmic structure from the Norman side of the literary heritage built on repeating groups of two or three syllables with the stressed syllable falling in the same position on each repetition. Sprung rhythm instead organized feet around a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four, with the stress always falling on the first syllable of the foot. The earliest known metrical texts anywhere are the hymns of the Rigveda, placing the origins of the tradition in the Late Bronze Age; the innovations of Moore, Williams, and Hopkins are, by that measure, the most recent chapter in a very long argument.