How To Write In Meter 101

You Gon' Learn Today.

Listen to the episode here!

A couple weeks back, I was invited by Dargan Ware, one of my fellow Jeopardy contestants and himself a Jeopardy Champion, to give a couple craft talks at the Alabama State Poetry Society, of which he is president. I went down to Birmingham and gave one lecture on meter and another on the sonnet. It subsequently occurred to me that, though I’ve been doing this show for years, I’ve never actually provided a systematic explanation of how to read and write in meter. My method up until now has been to teach prosody through examples, but I know that some people learn better through straightforward instruction, and it’s about time I made something for them. Better late than never, here is a resource for anyone new to Versecraft who would like to get a thorough introduction to the kind of formal elements I often discuss. If you’re an old hand at writing and scanning meter, feel free to skip this one, although I hope that if you do listen, you learn something new too.

Metrical composition is the practice of organizing language into sonic, usually rhythmic, patterns. Up until about one hundred years ago, there had been a millenia-long consensus throughout most cultures of the globe that poetry was synonymous with metrical composition. Poetry (or verse) was defined as metrical language, and prose was defined as non-metrical language, regardless of genre or subject. The art of poetry, to the extent that it was distinct from the art of literature generally, was nothing more nor less than the art of metrical composition.

Today, we tend to have much more impressionistic, personal definitions of poetry. Many of us would say of poetry, as a judge once famously said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Yet even if we are satisfied with this fast-and-loose state of semantic affairs, it ought to alarm us that meter, the historical essence of poetry for thousands of years, is largely unpracticed by and even unknown to most people who identify as poets today. We know that poetry by any definition is, in the 21st century, an unpopular art— poetry according to the historical definition is almost dead.

At this point, you would be entirely justified in saying: “That’s quite a shame, but why should I care? Am I meter’s keeper? Metrical poetry, what have I to do with thee?” Well, the mere fact that the overwhelming majority of our poetic forbears thought that meter was worthwhile ought to at least make us curious what meter might have to do with us. As it turns out, poets from around the world, from Greece to Arabia to India to China, independently came to the conclusion that meter is valuable not because they wished to make life difficult for themselves, but because meter made their writing more powerful in a myriad of ways. For the sake of concision, I will simply list 10 of the ways here:

1. Compositional mindfulness– Having to slow down and choose your words carefully in order to fit a metrical pattern discourages hasty, careless work and encourages more deliberate and creative choices.

2. Musicality– Metrical poetry has rhythm– it makes language dance. A poem which delights not only the mind and heart but the body itself is a more powerful poem.

3. Memorability– Catchiness and musicality have the additional benefit of making poems more memorable. The main reason poems were originally written in meter in the first place was because they had to be memorized by oral storytellers, and metrical poetry sinks into the recesses of the brain far better than prose.

4. Structural integrity– Form and content are inseparable, and more organized language often leads to more organized thinking. The use of meter encourages the poet to follow trains of thought to their completion, thoughts which can be dialectically complexified into stanzas. Meter thus stimulates lucidity, logical flow, and meaningful transitions.

5. Prosodic expressivity– In order for rule-breaking to have any meaning, there have to be rules in the first place. Poets often establish a metrical norm specifically to have the pleasure of bending or breaking that norm in musically striking ways which create or reinforce dramatic effects in the poem, effects which are not possible without meter.

6. Prosodic literacy– The more you write in meter, the more you understand and appreciate the artistry of poets of the past who wrote in meter (a.k.a. almost all of them). To have no ear for meter is to be deaf to a great portion of the beauty of Homer, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and beyond. Moreover, a deep understanding of meter will give you a far greater understanding of your own rhythmic effects if and when you choose to write free verse.

7. Allusiveness– To write in meter is to be in conversation with the poetry of the past. Certain forms and meters have rich literary associations, and poets who draw on these associations enrich their poem with meanings and suggestions far beyond their ostensible subject matter.

8. Cultural integrity– Those who criticize metrical verse as “Eurocentric” often forget that nearly all traditional poetries around the world were originally written in some form of meter, and that it was Euro-American modernism which robbed many peoples of their cultural heritages and promoted “free verse” in the 20th century. To write metrically is to recapture some of the music of the ancestors, no matter who you are.

9. Stylistic elevation– Poetry shouldn’t sound just like ordinary speech– it should sound special, more weighty, more important. Meter is one way to elevate poetry above everyday language, and the kicker is that if you like using everyday language in your poetry, you can compose it in meter and thereby have your cake and eat it too.

10. Advocacy of order– This is perhaps the most profound reason. To write in meter is to express delight in, belief in, and hope for order in the world, and to write orderly poetry is to yourself actively impose order on reality, both in your own mind and in the minds of others. Metrical poetry is both a spiritual symbol and a literal manifestation of the inner beauty of the cosmos– the linguistic, human-made equivalent of a snowflake’s mathematical splendor.

This, in brief, is the case for meter. It should now be clear that regardless of what sort of poetry one ultimately wishes to write, a knowledge of meter can only be beneficial, and that those who would be poets have not only a cultural obligation but a self-serving motivation to become conversant with it.

I began with the idea that meter consists of sonic, usually rhythmic patterns. People accustomed to thinking of meter as a straitjacket often do not realize how much variety meter actually allows for, not only in the number of patterns but in the kinds of patterns. Here are some of the most common kinds of meter:

Accentual Meter: Poetry which simply maintains a consistent number of accents (here synonymous with verbal emphases, i.e. speech stresses, but this will not be true in other systems) per line without regard to syllable count. Old English or Anglo-Saxon poetry (like Beowulf) is composed of accentual meter (usually four accents or beats per line) in combination with certain rules of alliteration (the technique of placing words in close proximity to each other which begin with the same sound), and the placement of caesurae (notable pauses which subdivide the line). Here are the first three lines of a modern poem, “Junk,” by Richard Wilbur, which imitates the Anglo-Saxon meter:

An áxe ángles || from my néighbor’s áshcan;
It is héll’s hándiwork, || the wóod not híckory,
The flów of the gráin || not fáithfully fóllowed.

Here, I have used an accent to indicate, well, the accents, and “||” to indicate the medial caesura (pause in the middle) which separates the two hemistichs (half lines). Each hemistich has at least one alliterative word, and the entire line usually has three total. Accents fall on the alliterative syllables and one other syllable. This is an intricate way of employing accentual meter, but accentual meter can also be used without rules of alliteration and caesural placement:

I’m úsing accéntual méter
hére in thís exámple.
There’s thrée béats per líne,
no s´yllable cóunt in síght.

Syllabic Meter: Poetry which simply maintains a consistent number of syllables per line without regard to accent count. Languages which don’t have strong accentual qualities, like French and Japanese, often employ a version of syllabic meter in their poetry. The most famous form associated with syllabic poetry is the haiku, which consists (in English) of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. This sort of meter is very quiet and can often go unnoticed, which is why it is commonly supplemented with additional sonic techniques, like rhyme.

The French often use a twelve-syllable line like this.
But without a rhyme, it might be something you miss.

A twelve-syllable line is called an alexandrine, and a pair of consecutive lines which rhyme with one another is called a couplet. A great deal of French poetry consists of Alexandrine couplets (sometimes with particular caesural rules as well). The example above may not sound particularly musical to us. Indeed, it might sound to us like doggerel (non-metrical poetry that rhymes, often associated with either humor or incompetence). In French however, this sort of line would sound much smoother. It is the presence of strong stresses in English, here arranged in no particular order, which makes this sound clunky. Different meters are suited to different languages. If you are accustomed to writing free verse, however, writing in unrhymed syllabics is a fantastic way to introduce a formal element into your work without committing to an entirely new sort of music. For example, here is the first stanza of Thom Gunn’s excellent syllabic poem, “Considering the Snail:”

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

The consistent seven-syllable line doesn’t draw attention to itself, but nevertheless gives the poem a subtly restrained, elegant quality which elevates the expression.

Parallelist Meter: Poetry which is organized according to parallel, often parallel-syntactical, sentence constructions. This sort of meter is most associated with Biblical Hebrew verse, particularly the Psalms, though it can also be found in other ancient Semitic cultures. Parallelist meter occupies an interesting gray area between verse and prose because it does not operate on the micro-level of the syllable, but on the macro-level of the phrase. Essentially, it is the consistently repeated use of a set of call-and-response rhetorical devices, the repetition of which creates its own sort of “rhythm” and set of musical expectations. Here is the famous beginning of Psalm 23 in the KJV:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

The colons and semicolons indicate the partition/joint between either half of the parallel construction. This parallelism can be achieved through cause-and-effect (line 1), syntactical similarity (line 2), elaboration (line 3), rephrasing emphasis, antithesis, and several other kinds of relationships. It is difficult to write in parallelist meter today without sounding grandiose, but for topics of sufficient grandeur or moods of sufficient spiritual intensity, it may be appropriate. Today, Parallelist verse is most influential in American poetry through the tremendous influence it had upon the rhythms and rhetoric of Walt Whitman.

Quantitative Meter: Poetry which is organized according to patterns of long-timed and short-timed syllables. Quantitative meter is the meter of classical Indo-European languages like Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. For the English speaker, it is a meter that is sometimes difficult to understand because we do not have a distinction between long and short syllables in our language, and as such, quantitative verse is not possible in it. The easiest way to wrap your head around quantitative meter is to think of it like music: a short syllable is like a quarter note; a long syllable is like a half note. When these quarter note syllables and half note syllables are combined in intricate patterns, they create a chant-like effect, perfect for the oral recitation of the Vedas or the Iliad. For our purposes, the most important thing about quantitative meter is that it gave us the vocabulary we use to talk about the most flexible, powerful, and popular kind of meter in English, which is…

Accentual-Syllabic Meter: Poetry which is organized according to a fixed number of accents and syllables, measured in the form of feet. Feet are rhythmic units consisting of a small number of accented and unaccented syllables (in quantitative verse, they are sets of long and short syllables). When these units are repeated, they create lines of verse. We can think of them as the building blocks of poetry. In common practice, only five types of feet are used, and of these five, only the first three are used with regularity. They are:

Iamb: an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, notated (u / ). Example: remóte, re-MOTE

Example of an iambic line (from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18):

Shall Í compáre thee tó a súmmer’s dáy?

Trochee: an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable, notated ( / u ). Example: wáter, WA-ter

Example of a trochaic line (from Blake’s “The Tyger”):

T´yger t´yger, búrning bríght (||) ín the fórests óf the níght

Anapest: two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable, notated (u u / ) Example: contradíct, con-tra-DICT

Example of an anapestic line (from Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib”):

For the ángel of Déath spread his wíngs on the blást

Amphibrach: an unaccented syllable, followed by an accented syllable, followed by an unaccented syllable, notated ( u / u ). Example: exámple, ex-AM-ple

Example of an amphibrachic line (from Auden’s “O Where Are You Going?”):

“O whére are you góing?” said réader to ríder

Dactyl: an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables, notated ( / u u ). Example: énergy, E-ner-gy

Example of a dactylic line (from Longfellow’s Evangeline):

Thís is the fórest priméval. The múrmuring pínes and the hémlocks

A line of iambs is iambic; a line of trochees is trochaic; a line of anapests is anapestic; a line of amphibrachs is amphibrachic; a line of dactyls is dactylic. How many of these feet are used to create each line also determines the identity of the line. A line of one foot is monometer; two feet, dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter. Longer lines than this are generally too unstable to be used– “octameter” simply breaks down into two tetrameters, etc. Thus, iambic pentameter, the most common (because most flexible) kind of poetic line in English, is a line of five iambs in a row: (ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM). A poem in which an iambic pentameter norm is established is said to be in iambic pentameter. A poem which alternates between one kind of line and another (or several others) is said to be in mixed meter.

To write in accentual-syllabic meter may seem a daunting task. Trying to write a decent poem is hard enough– trying to write a decent poem while also accounting for the stress value of every single syllable may seem nigh-impossible. The truth, however, is that writing metrically is much like riding a bike. When you try riding a bike for the first time, it may seem like a task fit only for acrobats, but once you get a feel for it and it “clicks,” it feels as natural as breathing. Just as, when you know how to ride a bike, you don’t have to constantly worry about whether you’re balanced or not, once you get a grasp of writing in meter, you will no longer have to pre-analyze every word you put on the page. The phrases your muse gives to you will begin to subconsciously arrange themselves in the correct patterns, and your language will sing. To get meter “in your ear,” much like learning a language, simply requires a good deal of practice (through writing) and exposure (through reading and recitation).

For some people– said to have “good ears”– hearing, identifying, and writing in (accentual-syllabic) meter is relatively intuitive and can be learned quickly; for others, it can be a struggle. The main reason people struggle with meter is because they have a difficult time correctly identifying where accents belong in phrases, much as people considered “tone-deaf” have a hard time correctly identifying and reproducing pitches. If this is you, however, you should not lose hope. The first step to identifying accent is identifying stress (in accentual-syllabic meter, these are different but related things, as we shall see), and in order to speak English at all, a basic ability to identify stress is essential– you do it all the time without thinking about it. For instance, it is very common in English to find two-syllable words which, when pronounced as trochees, are nouns, and when pronounced as iambs, are verbs. Consider the following dialogue:

“He won the contest.”
“I contest your judgement!”
“You’d dare to insult me?”
“That wasn’t an insult! He cheated!”
“So, you want to conduct an investigation?”
“Yes, I’m suspicious of his conduct.”

Here, the words “contest,” “insult,” and “conduct,” change their stress depending upon how they function in the sentence. If you weren’t able to articulate or pick up on this difference, this exchange would be deeply confusing if not unintelligible, but we all manage to both understand and pronounce it with ease.

To be fair, in this example we are dealing with absolute stress, which is quite elementary to understand. If we look at words in isolation, we know that certain syllables will always be pronounced more strongly than others. We also know that semantically prominent words, like verbs and nouns, will almost always be pronounced with more stress than auxiliary or connecting words like particles, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. These factors, in combination with semantic or situational emphasis, result in speech stress, the syllables we naturally emphasize in our verbal delivery.

What people trip up on, usually, is the concept of relative stress, which is possibly the most important concept in accentual-syllabic meter. In accentual-syllabic meter, a syllable which is relatively stressed is an accent. The determination of which syllables are accented and which are not allows us to determine the accentual-syllabic meter we are working with.

Relative stress refers to how much stress a syllable has relative to the other syllables next to it, and it is relative stress which determines whether a syllable is marked as accented or unaccented. It is the deft use of variations in speech stress while maintaining a consistent pattern of relative stress which keep meter sounding fluid and interesting, even without substitutions (that is, placing a foot of one type in a metrical line of another type– more on this later). Consider this line of iambic pentameter:

The cat, the dog, the horse, the cow, the duck.

If we mark both accents (with “´”) and speech stresses (with bold capitals), we get:

The CÁT, the DÓG, the HÓRSE, the CÓW, the DÚCK.

In this line, every unstressed syllable is unstressed to about the same degree, and every stressed syllable is stressed to about the same degree. There are both five accents and five speech stresses; a pattern of both relative and speech stress is maintained. This kind of monotony is fine once in a while, but it would get boring and cloying very quickly if every iambic pentameter line had this same exact distribution of stress. When meter sounds “clunky,” it is often because it is monotonous in this way. Now let’s return to Shakespeare’s line, possibly the second most famous line of iambic pentameter:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

This language sounds fluid and natural because there are a variety of stress levels throughout the syllables of the line. Nevertheless, this is still iambic pentameter, because five relatively unaccented syllables alternate with five relatively more accented ones. In the “cat dog horse” line, there were five strong stresses; in this line, there are only three prominent speech stresses:

Shall Í comPÁRE thee tó a SÚMmer’s DÁY?

Even if we consider only these strong stresses, we find that they are not exactly equal: “Day” is stronger than “Sum-.” The unaccented syllables are not equal either: “com-” is stronger than “-mer’s.” We may even say that “com-,” an unaccented syllable, has more stress than “to,” an accented syllable! But this is ok– the point is that “com-” is relatively weaker than “-pare,” and “to” is relatively stronger than “thee.” That’s what allows the iambic pentameter to work. You can think of the iambic line somewhat like a wave, consisting of alternating troughs and peaks. The depths of the troughs and the heights of the peaks (levels of speech stress) can vary considerably, but as long as the troughs and peaks alternate one right after the other, the iambic rhythm is maintained.

If we divide the line into iambs, it looks like this:

Shall I | compare | thee to | a sum | -mer’s day?

We see that some iambs are, as a whole, stronger than others: “compare” has much more stress than “thee to.” “Compare” is a heavy iamb, “thee to” is a light iamb. But because, in both cases, a relatively weaker syllable is followed by a relatively stronger syllable, they are both iambs. We also notice, crucially, that iambs are not restricted to single words or parts of speech. We do have single-word iambs, like “compare,” but we also have two-word iambs, like “Shall I,” and even iambs which cut across words, like “-mer’s day.” Having this sort of variety in your iambs naturally leads to rhythmic modulation, the variation in speech stress that we have been talking about. Rhythmic modulation is what keeps iambic lines sounding fresh, fluid, and natural, rather than metronomic and robotic. When people (for example, modernists like Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme) criticize meter with words like “stiff” and “metronomic” it is because they are obtusely neglecting to take rhythmic modulation into account. Meter can be stiff and metronomic, but only when it is done badly.

“But wait a minute!” you might say. “Aren’t you simply choosing to read this line as a succession of iambs? Even if we maintain fidelity to how this line sounds when spoken, couldn’t we just as easily read it (or, in poetry terms, scan it) like this?”

Shall Í | compáre thee | to a súm | -mer’s dáy?

My wife, a medieval scholar vexed with being forced to scan Latin poetry in school, has presented me with just this sort of challenge. This scansion would give us a much more exotic line: a tetrameter consisting of iamb, amphibrach, anapest, iamb (there is, however, still a pattern here: these feet are all rising rhythms, going from weak to strong stresses, rather than falling rhythms, going from strong to weak). You are correct that this would be a perfectly legitimate way to pronounce this line– if it were in prose, or if it were in isolation.

However, because this line is part of a poem, we must utilize the framing which fits the poem at large; we must find the pattern that works for the whole. When we move on from the first line to lines 2 and 3, we quickly hear the common rhythm among them, and our ear calibrates accordingly. All of these lines can be read as following the same pattern– moving from a relatively weaker to a relatively stronger syllable five times in a row, a.k.a. iambic pentameter:

Shall Í | compáre | thee tó | a súm | -mer’s dáy?

Thou árt | more lóve | -ly ánd | more tém | -peráte:

Rough wínds | do sháke | the dár | -ling búds | of Máy,

Shakespeare gives us, just in these lines, an enormous range of rhythmic modulation. “Rough winds” and “do shake” are both quite heavy iambs, whereas “-ly and” and “-perate” are diaphanously light. But again, all that matters is the relative stress. We normally wouldn’t think of the word “temperate” as having much stress on the last syllable at all, but because it has slightly more stress than the medial syllable (which modern Americans normally wouldn’t pronounce at all), and because the strong first syllable belongs to the previous foot and therefore doesn’t provide any competition, the iamb works.

If we look again at the strong iambic combo “rough winds do shake,” we see that it does not merely provide some refreshing modulation, but that it actually imitates what it describes. The strong stresses shake the line just as the rough winds shake the flowers. This is yet another cool trick of meter– it can make the poem’s rhythm mimetic of its content.

Sticking with Shakespeare, let’s look at the single most famous line of iambic pentameter:

To bé, | or nót | to bé, | thát is | the quéstion:

Do you spot the two major irregularities here? The last two feet do not appear to be iambs at all. The line appears to read: iamb, iamb, iamb, trochee, amphibrach. Shakespeare, however, has not made a mistake. He is making use of what are known as metrical substitutions– deliberate placements of heterogenous feet in a line. A fifth foot amphibrachic substitution, which we see here, is the most common substitution made in English verse, and is usually called a feminine ending. You can think of a feminine iambic line simply as a regular iambic line with an extra offbeat, which creates a falling rhythm at the end. Before we discuss the other substitution, the trochee in the fourth foot, let’s look at the line which follows this one in Hamlet’s speech:

Whéther | ‘tis nó | -bler ín | the mínd | to súffer

Here we see another feminine ending, but also a trochee in the first foot. A trochee in the first foot of an iambic line is the other most common substitution found in English verse. Sometimes called a reversed initial foot, it allows the poet to begin the line with a bit more force than usual, “pressing down” (BA-bum) rather than “lifting up” (ba-BUM). Now normally, placing a trochee in an iambic line anywhere other than the first foot can be risky business– a trochee is, after all, the opposite of an iamb, and can bring an iambic rhythm to a screeching halt in the wrong place.

So why does Shakespeare place one in the fourth foot of his first line? To explain, we must return to the idea of the caesura, a pause in the midst of a line. The comma after “be” in the third foot functions as a caesura in Shakespeare’s line, which gives the ear and rhythm a little time to reset. Thus, the fourth foot trochee has the effect of a reversed initial foot, almost as if Shakespeare was beginning a new line. The comma, the caesura, has prepared the fourth foot to be a trochee. If there had been no caesura, a fourth foot trochee might still have been possible (it sounds better than a second, third, or, God forbid, fifth foot trochee) but it would have been a little more noticeable or even caused a slight stumble in our reading. Why does Shakespeare put a trochee here? Because it adds rhythmic emphasis to his semantic emphasis: To be or not to be: that is the question. Meter can function both as a musical and a rhetorical device.

Before we conclude, let us briefly touch on one more common variation. In A.E. Housman’s poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” we read:

The time you won your town the race
we chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
and home we brought you shoulder-high.

Notice how much more thumping Housman’s meter sounds than Shakespeare’s, even though both are writing in iambs. In Housman’s poem, dominated by monosyllabic words, every stress is incredibly prominent, and the difference between levels of stress among the feet is minimal. This “thumpiness” is also partially due to the fact that we are in tetrameter here rather than pentameter, which naturally has more of a marching quality. Housman is no ruffian, however– he is deliberately trying to make his poem song-like, whereas Shakespeare is more interested in imitating the rhythms of natural speech. We see here what a big difference rhythmic modulation, or lack of it, can make.

But really what I want to talk about here is the third line. If you scan it, it appears to be nothing but a parade of trochees with a missing last syllable. What is that doing in an iambic poem? But notice: if we were to add an imaginary unaccented syllable at the beginning, the line would be perfectly iambic. Thus, if we take a slight pause where the first syllable should be before we read the line, it ends up sounding of a piece with the rest of the poem. This sort of line is called acephalous, which literally means “headless,” because it is simply an iambic line with its initial syllable, or “head,” chopped off. This sort of line can be prepared in two ways. Firstly, you can do what Housman does, which is put a pregnant pause right before the line to “reset” the reader’s ear (this can be achieved with punctuation or with a stanza break). Secondly, you can make the previous line feminine, resulting in a continuous iambic flow from one line into the next, the acephalous line “borrowing” a foot from the overabundant feminine line before it.

Many other substitutions are possible, but should be used with extreme care, especially when starting out writing in meter. You must learn the rules before you can break them. The existence of substitutions should not be taken as a permission slip to perpetuate metrical anarchy, and if too many substitutions are used, the metrical effect becomes lost entirely.

With these basic tools, you are now ready to begin metrical composition. For those who are interested in a much more in-depth treatment of meter, as well as rhyme and traditional forms, I highly suggest Timothy Steele’s authoritative book, All the Fun’s In How You Say a Thing. May Apollo favor your efforts, and thank you for helping to keep this beautiful tradition alive.