Writing Help 129 | - ☆ Freelance Writer
Apr 06, 2013 | #1
Poetic Terms You Have to Learn
As you can tell from the very title of this article, we are dealing here with a significant and substantial aspect of poetic discourse; after all, if meter were something we could move over quickly, the article would simply be titled "Meter" rather than "Meter I," which of course suggests that there will be sequels to this original article. I remember the first time I looked to the front of a classroom and saw the words "poetic meter" written at the top of the chalkboard; all of us had some idea as to what it was, but all of us were at least somewhat afraid. Meter, we all knew, was that magical aspect of poetics that made poetry the domain of the educated and intellectual, whereas we were scarcely more than children. Some of us were silent and some of us made jokes as people will when we are feeling uncomfortable and out of our element, but none of us beamed with that obvious confidence which shines forth from students who know what is coming and eagerly await it.
As the lesson proceeded, the fears we shared were confirmed with every passing moment, and as the teacher continued, we were drawn further and further into the dull incomprehension observers, rather than active members, of a class fall into without fail. Finding yourself merely watching an instructor rather than actively engaging the material he or she is presenting is the first sign that the material is going over your head, either through lack of attention or a failure to integrate it into your current knowledge base. There were some of us in either camp, although the former group certainly dominated, and the class went on seemingly forever, ended, and let us loose with very little to say about what had just happened. Certainly, what we had just been exposed to was important enough to justify having spent 50 minutes on, but for the life of us none of us could recall much more than a handful of specific details. There was mention of feet, stress, rhythm, patterns, and syllables, but the relation between the key terms was arcane, esoteric, not something which could be easily digested and comprehended so casually as they would have to have been in under an hour. Something was missing, and as a result, the whole structure fell to pieces, or more properly, was never bound together in the first place. Aside perhaps from iambic pentameter, even the brightest of us walked away from that class knowing little, if anything, more than we had when we began.
It is tempting, as it always is, to blame the teacher, and failing that, society as a whole for robbing us of our attention spans and not preparing us for intellectual rigors. I have heard free verse blamed, as well as television, popular music, movies, role-playing games, and more recently, video games, cell phones, and I-pods. However, none of these scapegoats are truly accountable, at least not primarily. The teacher did well to try to expose us to these concepts which are not easy to teach and never popular among students, even after Robin Williams' remarkable English studies boosting Dead Poets' Society. All of the other distractions named certainly gave us many options aside from poetry for entertainment, but it has to be noted that if the teacher had been lecturing on the conventional components of contemporary rap or the functional apparatus of Sony's new PSP, the crowd would not have been more intrigued. The flaw was not with the methodology or the audience and its having been poorly prepared and programmed. Rather, it rests in the essential nature of meter; it allows the magic to take place, but an explanation of sorcery and its performance are remarkably different things.
To look for analogous instances of our ill-fated poetry class, look at what happens in classes that dissect any aspect of a phenomenon that people generally find quite enjoyable. In junior high, I remember gym class very well, as I am sure many of my friends do. I always looked forward to it, and it was an excellent way to break up a day spent in the restlessness of a classroom. Almost uniformly, we enjoyed playing sports and engaging in the various physical activities with which we were presented (even the square dancing, though few of us would admit it). However, almost to a person, we detested the days that were spent describing the rules and the mechanics of the sport or activity in question. We loved floor-hockey passionately, but we did not want to hear about the physics behind a good slap-shot, how by striking the floor just behind the ball we could use the natural flexion of the stuck to create a whipping effect which would propel the ball faster. We didn't want to spend time learning break-out formations and offensive zone strategies; we simply wanted to play, because it was the combined effect of the sport as a whole, rather than the elements that composed it, that we loved. If you had asked any of us if we thought the tedious details were important to the game as a whole, we would have responded in the affirmative. However, if you had asked us if we wanted to sit through an hour hearing about them instead of playing, we would have responded with an even more emphatic no.
And so, this is the unenviable position in which teachers and professors find themselves. Actually, their position is slightly worse than the once described above, since fewer students are in love with poetry in general than with a given athletic endeavor. So, instructors first have to teach their wards how to love and appreciate poetry, or at least provide them with an environment which leads them to it. Then, since reading and loving poetry is not synonymous with studying it, teachers must take apart the entities which have been so carefully constructed to hide their technical workings in a powerful integrated whole. There is seldom time to do this in a gradual enough manner, introducing the poetics slowly so that enjoyment comes first, and a more fine-grained technical ability later, and so students get a crash course in appreciation and examination which seldom captures the imagination.
The solution, of course, is time, a resource that there is precious little of in either university classrooms or the public schools. With the requisite curricular demands largely focused on the novel, composition, media studies, and presentation skills, poetry is given short shrift, and as anyone who loves poetry knows, it must be tasted gently and savored slowly, like fine wine or chocolate, not powered down the throat like flat Coke and cheeseburgers.
So, what is the right approach, if any, to teaching the technical aspects of poetry? Fortunately, I do not have to come up with an answer to that question for the purposes of this series. Covering fewer poems in more detail rather than many in an attempt to give students a broader range is a start, since one poem slowly savored is superior to five suddenly swallowed. The second is to engage students with contemporary materials, ranging from the poets of today writing on edgy themes to some popular music which is the descendent of a long poetic tradition. Finally, it is of the utmost importance that students be allowed to experience poetics in their own time, at a reasonable pace, and this is one of the key advantages to writing an article series on the subject. This writing on meter will be here whenever a given individual cares to give it a look, and it can serve as a useful addition to any course on poetry a student takes.
So, to be somewhat consistent with my own recommendations, I will begin the more technical discussion of meter not with a definition and a series of interlocking terms which will surely prove somewhat daunting, but rather with a line that is particularly memorable and metrical: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." This final line from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" is an often cited example of a regular metrical line, and thus serves as a good place to begin our discussion of meter. Read the line over several times, and see if you find yourself slipping into a certain rhythm, a certain pattern. If you had to add a line to this one, think about how it would go, how it would sound, and how you could make it sound the way this one does. All of these considerations are what meter is about, and you will not find many poets, if any at all, who do not take this into consideration at various points in their poems, even those that sound highly irregular.
The primary use of meter, of course, is not to establish patterns within a single line, but rather to provide a general pattern which adheres throughout a poem, or at least through a significant portion of it. If poetry possesses a certain music, meter is the underlying beat around which the tune is arranged. There must be variation around this dominant arrangement, to be sure, but it is the baseline which makes variation significant. Read the following lines, and listen for a regular beat; reading them more than once and reading them aloud will give you an even better feel for what is happening:
In times of loss the healer must be time
For speed and soothing share no common ground
The wounds inflicted shun a rapid close
The poison needs to drain before the cure
Now, although we find no end rhyme in these lines, and therefore no significant rhyme scheme (though technically you could label it ABCD), there are regular patterns which are as much, or even more, a part of poetry's heritage. One of the first things to do when evaluating the meter of a given poem or section of a poem, after reading it aloud and allowing it to bounce around in your mouth and mind for a time, is to count the syllables in a number of consecutive lines. In the lines above, we can see that all of them, not coincidentally either I might add, have ten syllables. This immediately points to the likelihood that there is a regular meter present here, and although this is not always the case, it is highly probable. Ten syllable lines especially point to the likelihood of a regular meter, as that line length enjoys a long and storied history in English poetry, which will be explored in future articles on such topics as blank verse, and the sonnet.
It is important to remember at this point that complete uniformity is not necessary for there to be a significant, notable regularity. I have chosen the example above because it is completely regular, in order to make things as straightforward as possible, and to eliminate any confusion that might arise from irregularities. However, in practice poets often vary even a very predictably regular pattern with exceptions, and so over the course of a poem which runs predominantly on 10 syllable lines, there will likely be some examples of lines that run only 9 syllables, and some which run to 11 or even 12. Most often, the variation will be limited, and will not stray more than 2 syllables from the baseline pattern. This variation can create interesting effects if used sparingly; if used too often, it destroys the overlying pattern and begins to look random.
Once you have established a regular syllabic pattern, it is time to look for smaller, more telling patterns of organized sound. The smallest of these is known as the foot, and it is the literary equivalent of the molecule in chemistry; it is the structure beneath which you cannot go without destroying the poem's essential aural properties. A foot consists of a given number of syllables, depending on the pattern established in the poem as it manifests itself in a given line. However, unlike syllable divisions which have to do with vowels and the opening and closing of the mouth (and which come very naturally to us from an early age), feet are not such a natural phenomenon, and require some degree of measurement in order to appear obviously, especially for those who are not accustomed to listening to and labeling them.
The trick to finding feet (the plural of foot, of course!), is to recognize the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a given line of verse. Stress in poetry, to use a pun which is already so overused as to be completely hackneyed, is a major cause for stress in students attempting to learn it. However, it is the absolute foundation of meter, and without knowing how stress works, your ambitions of poetic scholarship will be severely limited.
In English, as well as in many, many other languages, some syllables receive more time and attention than others, both in general and in specific configurations. For example, take almost any two-syllable ing word you can imagine, and think about which part of the word receives the most emphasis, time, and volume. Working, timing, slapping, smacking, playing and the rest are all stressed on the first syllable, while the ing ending receives relatively little attention, as we pass through it to get to the next important word. This follows a strong tendency in English to "front-load" many of its words, placing the emphasis on the lead syllable. On the contrary, French tends to back-load its words, which accounts in part for the humorous differences in accent when a speaker of one tongue attempts the other. There are many instances of constructions which reverse this tendency in English, of course, but the tendency is general enough to be significant, and useful.
What I refer to as the small words of English, which include the one-syllable prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, are generally not stressed, and it is usually a safe bet that the, on, and, in, their, of, a, and words like them will not be stressed in most circumstances. In order to remember this general rule, it is helpful to consider not only the grammatical type of these words (preposition, article, and conjunction), but also the importance each has in the conveying a given message. Of course these words are necessary, but they are almost never the focal points of a given line, or even a regular sentence for that matter. Consider the line "Fathers drop their shoulders down in shame." Now, if I had to choose the most important words here, I would pick fathers, drop, shoulders, and shame. Note that their and in seem far less important, and drop, while above them significantly, still doesn't rank as highly. Placement is also an important factor for these words; if one occurs at the start of a line, it is far more likely to be unstressed than stressed. If, however, it appears at the end of a line, where a lot of stress is usually placed in English poetry, it is more likely to receive (uncharacteristically) a stress.
Just as there are several classes of words in various positions which are usually unstressed, so too are there categories of words and syllables that are most often stressed, in regular language just as in poetry. It is important to note that the notion of stress is not a feature unique to poetry, but is actually a feature of language itself. Any given sentence I utter, including all of those that appear in this article, can be parsed not only for grammar and syntax, but for meter as well. Of course, while this might be an interesting exercise in some cases, and for those who study rhetoric at the most advanced levels, since prose is not defined by its metrical arrangements, such analysis will most often result in the production of uninteresting results.
Whenever a word has two syllables, as we discussed in part IV of this sub-series on meter, one is very, very likely to be stressed, while the other is likely to be unstressed. As noted, English tends to privilege the first syllable as far as stress is concerned, although this is no hard and fast rule. In multi-syllabic words, the stress cam come anywhere in the word, but is once again likely to be at the start or in the middle. In any event, the number of unstressed syllables in a multi-syllabic word is likely to be fewer than the number of stressed syllables, though again this is a statistical tendency rather than any kind of set rule.
Whenever a word consists of a prefix and/or suffix, these parts are likely to be unstressed, and the root of the word is very likely to hold the stress. Note that prefixes need not be obvious, like sub, pre, an, in or im. Word beginnings like be and de featured in such words as beware and destroy can also be considered prefixes, and, as in the cases just mentioned, the root of the word rather than the prefix is stressed. Say aloud to yourself the following words, and try to hear where the stress rests: demented, rejected, beginning, unwritten, bespoken, unworthy. It should come as no surprise that, in each case here, the middle of the word, which contains the root, is stressed, while the prefixes and suffixes are unstressed, supporting syllables.
Another useful rule of thumb to consider when determining stress is that monosyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives are usually stressed. This makes sense, as they are the most important and memorable words in any given speech act. It is easy to keep this in mind if you learn and remember the general rules for capitalization in English titles. Important words like those just mentioned are always capitalized, whereas the "little words" are not. In the title "Guns Fire in the Harsh Times of War," we can see that the nouns Guns, Times, and War are all capitalized, as is the verb Fire, and the adjective Harsh, while the little words in and of (both prepositions) as well the (a definite article) are not. If this were a poetic line, the stress would line up directly with the capitalization we see here; read the line over several times, in your mind and aloud, and you will see that this is the case. The line contains an unusual preponderance of stressed syllables (not for a title, but certainly for a poetic line) making it seem weighty, not to mention solemn. The number of stresses produces slow reading and (relatively) frequent pauses, which is appropriate for its subject matter, dealing with serious and important matters. This is but one of the many, many effects which meter manipulation can produce, and as we continue this extensive sub-series, we will have opportunity to enjoy many of them first hand.
For the purposes of this introduction to poetic meter, we can consider all syllables either stressed or unstressed, in a relatively straightforward binary on/off system. It should be noted that there are degrees of stress, and that there are complex systems for dealing with such variation; however, such fine points go beyond the goals of this series, which are introductory rather than specialized. It also needs mentioning that certain syllables that are more or less neutral can be stressed in some contexts and not others, and a powerfully established metrical pattern can pull these words into either direction, depending on their position in a line. Again, for the purposes of this outline, I will keep things as basic as possible, with obvious stressed and unstressed syllables, so that the basic principles stand out as clearly as possible.
Now that we have discussed a number of strategies for picking out stressed and unstressed syllables, let's look at a previous example and try to apply what we have been discussing:
In times of loss the healer must be time
For speed and soothing share no common ground
The wounds inflicted shun a rapid close
The poison needs to drain before the cure
If you guessed that the bolding in the example above was indicative of some metrical property, you guessed right. Now, read through the lines and consider whether the bolded syllables are stressed or unstressed. In specific instances, this may be harder to determine than others, but taken as a whole, it becomes clear that the bolded syllables indicate stressed syllables. Thinking back to the guidelines we have been discussing, as well as the natural flow with which you find yourself reading the line, it becomes evident that every second syllable, beginning on the second, is stressed. Taking the first line as exemplary, we can see that the nouns, the important verbs, and roots of words are all stressed, whereas the little words like the prepositions, articles, and the verb be are all unstressed.
It is obvious that a regular metrical pattern is established in the first line and maintained with unfailing regularity throughout the stanza, and noticing this is a vital step towards labeling the verse according to its metrical properties. Now that we have identified the stressed and unstressed syllables, and found a regularity, it is time to determine how many feet each line has. As we discussed previously, a foot is the smallest indivisible measure of meter, and its size and composition are determined by the pattern of stresses in a line. As a general rule, a foot is the smallest repeated pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables across a single line of poetry. Keep this well in mind, because it is a statement that many students find difficult to remember and apply. In the example provided, the smallest repeated pattern is unstressed/stressed. This layout repeats itself four more times across each line, and so we have a total of five feet in each line. This is a very common arrangement in English poetry, and you will likely encounter it many times, regardless of what kinds of English classes you find yourself in.
It is tempting to try to divide the lines into other patterns, and there is no doubt that other configurations are possible. However, when you remember that you are looking for the smallest repeated pattern, unstressed/stressed is the only foot that fits. From here on, all stressed syllables will be bolded, as in the above example, and all feet will be described using the symbols / for stressed, and - for unstressed. So, the foot which we see in the example above will be described simply as - /.
Now that we have determined how many feet the line has, and what type of foot we are dealing with throughout, we have what we need in order to name the line according to its metrical properties, and if you have studied meter at all in the past, you will already have determined that our example stanza is a classic example of iambic pentameter. This is the most common regular metrical arrangement in English poetry, and has been used from before Shakespeare through the present day. This is all well and good, you might be saying, but how on earth did you come up with a name like that to describe a series of five - / (unstressed/stressed) feet? This is where the nomenclature of meter comes in, and while it may seem random or arbitrary at times, there is a definite logic to its application.
The names of all regular metrical configurations contain two terms. The first of these terms indicates the kind of feet, and is reported in adjective form; we will cover this somewhat later, as it is the more complex, least intuitively systematic of the two parts of the metrical descriptor. The second term, which we will delve into first, indicates the number of feet contained in the regular metrical line in question. This second term is easiest to identify because it follows a predictable pattern of naming, based on its prefix. Many of us, through common use or through various science courses, are familiar with a host of Greek prefixes which designate number. It is these prefixes which are used to label the number of feet in a line of poetry, making this second term of the set very easy to remember. Monometer indicates a one-foot line, dimeter a two-foot line, trimeter a three-foot line, tetrameter a four-foot line, pentameter (as in our example) a five-foot line, hexameter a six-foot line, heptameter a seven-foot line, and octameter an eight foot line. This could obviously continue on almost into infinity, but anything beyond eight feet is hardly useful, for very few indeed are the poems which employ lines of such length. In fact, there seems to be a natural tendency among poets and readers of poetry to "naturally" want a line to end before it hits seven feet, and although no rules govern this, even lines of seven and eight feet are relatively rare in English poetry.
By the same token, certain regular metrical line lengths on the short side of the spectrum are also remarkably rare. Think, for example, of the last time you read a poem in monometer. These do exist, but they tend to be brief, and feel somewhat experimental. It is difficult, after all, to establish a rhythmic flow over the course of such a short line, and while monometer may be used at times over the course of a poem for emphasis, it is seldom the regular governing meter of an entire poetic work, and certainly not a long poem. Dimeter, especially when composed of feet with only two syllables, is similarly rare, primarily for the same reasons. It is not until we get to trimeter that we see significant, extended use in regular metrical arrangements, as even six syllables is enough to establish a sense of rhythm within and across lines.
Having said all this, it is important to note that within a given governing regular metrical structure, poets will sometimes use odd-sized lines to produce given effects. For example, if iambic pentameter is the overarching meter, a poet may include some lines that stretch into hexameter, or even heptameter. The effect here is often to conclude a section of verse with a more substantial, fuller feeling line. It also slows down a given section of the poem, and this can be effective for providing a reflection on what has come before, or for emulating a slowing sense within the content or events of the poem.
Similarly, poets will sometimes introduce surprisingly small lines into an otherwise "normal" metrical flow, again for the express purpose of creating some effect. We mentioned earlier that this device can be used for emphasis, and you can imagine that including a monometric line in a predominantly pentametric structure would cause the reader to take definite notice of the anomaly. As opposed to the introduction of a noticeably longer line, the introduction of monometric or dimetric lines serves not to sum up or reflect, but rather to end or begin a line of thought abruptly. The effect is brief but powerful, causing you to screech to a halt unexpectedly in the middle of a regular flow. The individual words in these small lines all gain a greatly increased significance, and unless they are pivotal to the poem in question, they will really have no place in such an emphasized line.
So, the systematic labeling of lines according to the number of feet they contain is now child's play to you, and you will soon find it as easy as counting syllables, that most basic of poetic exercises. Now, however, comes the tricky part, which is naming all of those pesky little feet of which there are many, many possible variations. Unfortunately, there is no simple Greek system for labeling the kind of foot a line possesses; it has Greek roots all right, but the terms are far more colorful, terribly unsystematic, and often seemingly arbitrary. You will need to memorize these, but fortunately the number you will commonly come across in English represents only a fraction of the possible total.
To get you off and running, you already know one type of foot, which is the iamb of our most recent example stanza. An iamb is a two-syllable foot structured - / (unstressed/stressed), and is the most common foot in English meter. Its partner, also quite common though not as popular as his famous cousin, is the trochee, which is another two-syllable foot, but arranged in the opposite stress pattern, / -. Knowing these two foot types alone will take you a long way, and if you decide to read nothing further in this series, please make sure to at least be able to identify these. Each of these is most commonly employed in serious poetry, with the iamb being considered the most serious, solemn, and somber, while the trochee tends to create a more insistent, hammering, aggressive sounding line.
Since we are traveling in the order of highest utility, we move next into the realm of the most common three-syllable feet, the first of which is called the anapest. The anapest is structured --/, and while it looks like it might be a near relative to the iamb, a reading of any line in this meter will quickly show that its impression on the ear is far different. Its antithesis is known as the dactyl, and as we would expect, it is structured /--. These meters are far less common in English than their two-syllable rivals, but when they are used they create effects that are even more distinctive. The anapest is a favorite of all kinds of comics, and every poetic form from the nursery rhyme to parody to the lewd song gains something from the use of this form. The dactyl, on the other hand, creates a thundering, galloping momentum, which tends to move the reader rapidly from one line to the next in a nearly breathless fashion.
If you are a fan of combinations and permutations, you will no doubt be aware that there are several other possible three-syllable feet, and I will describe them here not because they are common regular governing meters in English (they are not), but because they come up often enough as variations that they are worth being able to identify. The first of these is the amphibrach, structured - / -. This foot type is most commonly employed in lighter verse, and sees significant use in the short, humorous limerick, though it is seldom employed in a regular, strictly structured manner.
The amphimacer is the mirror image of the amphibrach, structured / - /, and is so infrequently employed in English verse that its effects are unremarkable. The bacchius, named for the Greek god of wine and revelry, runs - / /, while its opposite is appropriately titled the antibacchius, quite a mouthful to say and a mindful to remember, running / / -. I am well aware that by now, if you have been following closely, your head might well be spinning (I know mine is, and I deal with meter most days of the week). However, if you identify any of the metrical arrangements mentioned on this page, your professor will likely credit you in front of the class for being an exceptionally bright spark, and if you identify these feet for your teacher, she will immediately send you to the next grade, or interrogate you for hours about where you copied your paper.
As you can imagine, the combinations grow larger and larger for every additional syllable that is added to a metrical foot, and for this reason we will not proceed into the realm of four-syllable feet or any number beyond that. English poetry employs such meter only on very, very rare occasions, and if you are studying and labeling such complex metrical arrangements, chances are that you know where to go to get the appropriate terminology for the task at hand.
Those among you who are keeping track will have noticed that I have conveniently decided to skip over various possibilities at both the two- and three-syllable levels, and I admit that this is the case. I did not do so through oversight, laziness, or because of some difficulty inherent in those possibilities, but rather because they simply cannot serve as the dominant ordering meter of a given line. They are all employed from time to time in English poetry, and certainly deserve mention, but only as accentual feet which contribute to an overall effect, not as ordering feet in regular metrical arrangements.
The first and most common of these is known as the spondee, and this handy little foot is structured / /. As you can see, a line arranged in this manner would be very difficult to compose indeed, and would likely have to be made up of a series of monosyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in what would likely be an ungrammatical sequence. The opposing two-syllable possibility, the dibrach, faces similar difficulties in becoming the regular meter of a poetic line. Its - - form means that no words in the line would have a stress, and anyone who has attempted to create a poem like this is aware of how difficult that is to do. Both of these foot types can be employed to shift a regular meter into a variation, or to add or remove emphasis from given words, but cannot stand alone as regular metrical structures.
For the same reason the spondee and dibrach are untenable feet in a regular metric pattern, so too are their longer three-syllable cousins. The molossus, (yes, that is its name; I am not making any of this up) is a spondee that does strength training, weighing in at / / / (three consecutive stressed syllables). On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a foot that eats even less than the dibrach, predictably called the tribrach. This unassuming foot is structured - - - (three unstressed syllables), and does not appear in English very often at all, even as an accent to a regular metrical pattern. In the presence of any stressed syllables, the shy, modest tribrach tends to break off into different metrical configurations, making it difficult to locate at any time.
So, now that you have memorized all of the foot types, having already memorized the terms to describe the number of feet in a given line, you are ready to tackle almost every line of verse the English language can throw your way. Once you have identified the foot type, whether that be an iamb, an anapest, or an amphibrach, simply add an adjectival ending to it (usually just ic, though you may have to alter the ending of the stem slightly to accommodate this), hit the space bar, record the correct term for the number of feet per line without any modification, and you have successfully identified the meter of the line (and perhaps even the poem) in question. It is as easy as that! This skill you have learned, by the way, is known as scansion, (the verb is simply to scan), and it is one of the cornerstones of any advanced type of poetic analysis.
To test your newfound skills, try scanning the following stanza and determining the correct metrical terms:
At the end of the night,
On the train to delight,
With your soul you can see,
Why this love has to be.
Read this over several times, to yourself and aloud, and see what rhythm naturally emerges; is there a certain way you find yourself reading the lines that is regular and musical? Hopefully there is, and what follows next will merely help you to formally confirm your intuition.
Beginning with a syllable count, we see that each line contains six of them, which from the outset creates a quick, choppy effect. Next, we move into the identification of stressed and unstressed syllables, and we notice right away that the number of unstressed syllables is far greater than the number of stressed. In the first line we have four little words, including at, the, of, and the, two propositions and the same article twice. End and night are both nouns, and both significant to the line. The stress then falls on the middle and end of the line, giving us the arrangement - - / - - /. Looking at the rest of the lines, we can see this pattern holds true in a very regular way, and so it is safe to say this is the dominant, regular metrical pattern of the stanza.
Next, we need to find the shortest repeating pattern, and the only possibility here is - - /, which occurs twice in each line. So, we now know we have two feet in each line, making the lines dimetric, and thinking back to our foot types, we remember the name for such a foot is an anapest. Although we have been presented with a relatively rare verse form in English, we can confidently state that this stanza is written in completely regular anapestic dimeter. I encourage you to seek out and scan as much poetry as you can, putting into practice all we have been discussing, and developing an ear for meter, both in its regularities and in its exceptions.
Meter
As you can tell from the very title of this article, we are dealing here with a significant and substantial aspect of poetic discourse; after all, if meter were something we could move over quickly, the article would simply be titled "Meter" rather than "Meter I," which of course suggests that there will be sequels to this original article. I remember the first time I looked to the front of a classroom and saw the words "poetic meter" written at the top of the chalkboard; all of us had some idea as to what it was, but all of us were at least somewhat afraid. Meter, we all knew, was that magical aspect of poetics that made poetry the domain of the educated and intellectual, whereas we were scarcely more than children. Some of us were silent and some of us made jokes as people will when we are feeling uncomfortable and out of our element, but none of us beamed with that obvious confidence which shines forth from students who know what is coming and eagerly await it.
As the lesson proceeded, the fears we shared were confirmed with every passing moment, and as the teacher continued, we were drawn further and further into the dull incomprehension observers, rather than active members, of a class fall into without fail. Finding yourself merely watching an instructor rather than actively engaging the material he or she is presenting is the first sign that the material is going over your head, either through lack of attention or a failure to integrate it into your current knowledge base. There were some of us in either camp, although the former group certainly dominated, and the class went on seemingly forever, ended, and let us loose with very little to say about what had just happened. Certainly, what we had just been exposed to was important enough to justify having spent 50 minutes on, but for the life of us none of us could recall much more than a handful of specific details. There was mention of feet, stress, rhythm, patterns, and syllables, but the relation between the key terms was arcane, esoteric, not something which could be easily digested and comprehended so casually as they would have to have been in under an hour. Something was missing, and as a result, the whole structure fell to pieces, or more properly, was never bound together in the first place. Aside perhaps from iambic pentameter, even the brightest of us walked away from that class knowing little, if anything, more than we had when we began.It is tempting, as it always is, to blame the teacher, and failing that, society as a whole for robbing us of our attention spans and not preparing us for intellectual rigors. I have heard free verse blamed, as well as television, popular music, movies, role-playing games, and more recently, video games, cell phones, and I-pods. However, none of these scapegoats are truly accountable, at least not primarily. The teacher did well to try to expose us to these concepts which are not easy to teach and never popular among students, even after Robin Williams' remarkable English studies boosting Dead Poets' Society. All of the other distractions named certainly gave us many options aside from poetry for entertainment, but it has to be noted that if the teacher had been lecturing on the conventional components of contemporary rap or the functional apparatus of Sony's new PSP, the crowd would not have been more intrigued. The flaw was not with the methodology or the audience and its having been poorly prepared and programmed. Rather, it rests in the essential nature of meter; it allows the magic to take place, but an explanation of sorcery and its performance are remarkably different things.
To look for analogous instances of our ill-fated poetry class, look at what happens in classes that dissect any aspect of a phenomenon that people generally find quite enjoyable. In junior high, I remember gym class very well, as I am sure many of my friends do. I always looked forward to it, and it was an excellent way to break up a day spent in the restlessness of a classroom. Almost uniformly, we enjoyed playing sports and engaging in the various physical activities with which we were presented (even the square dancing, though few of us would admit it). However, almost to a person, we detested the days that were spent describing the rules and the mechanics of the sport or activity in question. We loved floor-hockey passionately, but we did not want to hear about the physics behind a good slap-shot, how by striking the floor just behind the ball we could use the natural flexion of the stuck to create a whipping effect which would propel the ball faster. We didn't want to spend time learning break-out formations and offensive zone strategies; we simply wanted to play, because it was the combined effect of the sport as a whole, rather than the elements that composed it, that we loved. If you had asked any of us if we thought the tedious details were important to the game as a whole, we would have responded in the affirmative. However, if you had asked us if we wanted to sit through an hour hearing about them instead of playing, we would have responded with an even more emphatic no.
And so, this is the unenviable position in which teachers and professors find themselves. Actually, their position is slightly worse than the once described above, since fewer students are in love with poetry in general than with a given athletic endeavor. So, instructors first have to teach their wards how to love and appreciate poetry, or at least provide them with an environment which leads them to it. Then, since reading and loving poetry is not synonymous with studying it, teachers must take apart the entities which have been so carefully constructed to hide their technical workings in a powerful integrated whole. There is seldom time to do this in a gradual enough manner, introducing the poetics slowly so that enjoyment comes first, and a more fine-grained technical ability later, and so students get a crash course in appreciation and examination which seldom captures the imagination.
The solution, of course, is time, a resource that there is precious little of in either university classrooms or the public schools. With the requisite curricular demands largely focused on the novel, composition, media studies, and presentation skills, poetry is given short shrift, and as anyone who loves poetry knows, it must be tasted gently and savored slowly, like fine wine or chocolate, not powered down the throat like flat Coke and cheeseburgers.
So, what is the right approach, if any, to teaching the technical aspects of poetry? Fortunately, I do not have to come up with an answer to that question for the purposes of this series. Covering fewer poems in more detail rather than many in an attempt to give students a broader range is a start, since one poem slowly savored is superior to five suddenly swallowed. The second is to engage students with contemporary materials, ranging from the poets of today writing on edgy themes to some popular music which is the descendent of a long poetic tradition. Finally, it is of the utmost importance that students be allowed to experience poetics in their own time, at a reasonable pace, and this is one of the key advantages to writing an article series on the subject. This writing on meter will be here whenever a given individual cares to give it a look, and it can serve as a useful addition to any course on poetry a student takes.
So, to be somewhat consistent with my own recommendations, I will begin the more technical discussion of meter not with a definition and a series of interlocking terms which will surely prove somewhat daunting, but rather with a line that is particularly memorable and metrical: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." This final line from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" is an often cited example of a regular metrical line, and thus serves as a good place to begin our discussion of meter. Read the line over several times, and see if you find yourself slipping into a certain rhythm, a certain pattern. If you had to add a line to this one, think about how it would go, how it would sound, and how you could make it sound the way this one does. All of these considerations are what meter is about, and you will not find many poets, if any at all, who do not take this into consideration at various points in their poems, even those that sound highly irregular.
The primary use of meter, of course, is not to establish patterns within a single line, but rather to provide a general pattern which adheres throughout a poem, or at least through a significant portion of it. If poetry possesses a certain music, meter is the underlying beat around which the tune is arranged. There must be variation around this dominant arrangement, to be sure, but it is the baseline which makes variation significant. Read the following lines, and listen for a regular beat; reading them more than once and reading them aloud will give you an even better feel for what is happening:
In times of loss the healer must be time
For speed and soothing share no common ground
The wounds inflicted shun a rapid close
The poison needs to drain before the cure
Now, although we find no end rhyme in these lines, and therefore no significant rhyme scheme (though technically you could label it ABCD), there are regular patterns which are as much, or even more, a part of poetry's heritage. One of the first things to do when evaluating the meter of a given poem or section of a poem, after reading it aloud and allowing it to bounce around in your mouth and mind for a time, is to count the syllables in a number of consecutive lines. In the lines above, we can see that all of them, not coincidentally either I might add, have ten syllables. This immediately points to the likelihood that there is a regular meter present here, and although this is not always the case, it is highly probable. Ten syllable lines especially point to the likelihood of a regular meter, as that line length enjoys a long and storied history in English poetry, which will be explored in future articles on such topics as blank verse, and the sonnet.
It is important to remember at this point that complete uniformity is not necessary for there to be a significant, notable regularity. I have chosen the example above because it is completely regular, in order to make things as straightforward as possible, and to eliminate any confusion that might arise from irregularities. However, in practice poets often vary even a very predictably regular pattern with exceptions, and so over the course of a poem which runs predominantly on 10 syllable lines, there will likely be some examples of lines that run only 9 syllables, and some which run to 11 or even 12. Most often, the variation will be limited, and will not stray more than 2 syllables from the baseline pattern. This variation can create interesting effects if used sparingly; if used too often, it destroys the overlying pattern and begins to look random.
Once you have established a regular syllabic pattern, it is time to look for smaller, more telling patterns of organized sound. The smallest of these is known as the foot, and it is the literary equivalent of the molecule in chemistry; it is the structure beneath which you cannot go without destroying the poem's essential aural properties. A foot consists of a given number of syllables, depending on the pattern established in the poem as it manifests itself in a given line. However, unlike syllable divisions which have to do with vowels and the opening and closing of the mouth (and which come very naturally to us from an early age), feet are not such a natural phenomenon, and require some degree of measurement in order to appear obviously, especially for those who are not accustomed to listening to and labeling them.
The trick to finding feet (the plural of foot, of course!), is to recognize the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a given line of verse. Stress in poetry, to use a pun which is already so overused as to be completely hackneyed, is a major cause for stress in students attempting to learn it. However, it is the absolute foundation of meter, and without knowing how stress works, your ambitions of poetic scholarship will be severely limited.
In English, as well as in many, many other languages, some syllables receive more time and attention than others, both in general and in specific configurations. For example, take almost any two-syllable ing word you can imagine, and think about which part of the word receives the most emphasis, time, and volume. Working, timing, slapping, smacking, playing and the rest are all stressed on the first syllable, while the ing ending receives relatively little attention, as we pass through it to get to the next important word. This follows a strong tendency in English to "front-load" many of its words, placing the emphasis on the lead syllable. On the contrary, French tends to back-load its words, which accounts in part for the humorous differences in accent when a speaker of one tongue attempts the other. There are many instances of constructions which reverse this tendency in English, of course, but the tendency is general enough to be significant, and useful.
What I refer to as the small words of English, which include the one-syllable prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, are generally not stressed, and it is usually a safe bet that the, on, and, in, their, of, a, and words like them will not be stressed in most circumstances. In order to remember this general rule, it is helpful to consider not only the grammatical type of these words (preposition, article, and conjunction), but also the importance each has in the conveying a given message. Of course these words are necessary, but they are almost never the focal points of a given line, or even a regular sentence for that matter. Consider the line "Fathers drop their shoulders down in shame." Now, if I had to choose the most important words here, I would pick fathers, drop, shoulders, and shame. Note that their and in seem far less important, and drop, while above them significantly, still doesn't rank as highly. Placement is also an important factor for these words; if one occurs at the start of a line, it is far more likely to be unstressed than stressed. If, however, it appears at the end of a line, where a lot of stress is usually placed in English poetry, it is more likely to receive (uncharacteristically) a stress.
Just as there are several classes of words in various positions which are usually unstressed, so too are there categories of words and syllables that are most often stressed, in regular language just as in poetry. It is important to note that the notion of stress is not a feature unique to poetry, but is actually a feature of language itself. Any given sentence I utter, including all of those that appear in this article, can be parsed not only for grammar and syntax, but for meter as well. Of course, while this might be an interesting exercise in some cases, and for those who study rhetoric at the most advanced levels, since prose is not defined by its metrical arrangements, such analysis will most often result in the production of uninteresting results.
Whenever a word has two syllables, as we discussed in part IV of this sub-series on meter, one is very, very likely to be stressed, while the other is likely to be unstressed. As noted, English tends to privilege the first syllable as far as stress is concerned, although this is no hard and fast rule. In multi-syllabic words, the stress cam come anywhere in the word, but is once again likely to be at the start or in the middle. In any event, the number of unstressed syllables in a multi-syllabic word is likely to be fewer than the number of stressed syllables, though again this is a statistical tendency rather than any kind of set rule.
Whenever a word consists of a prefix and/or suffix, these parts are likely to be unstressed, and the root of the word is very likely to hold the stress. Note that prefixes need not be obvious, like sub, pre, an, in or im. Word beginnings like be and de featured in such words as beware and destroy can also be considered prefixes, and, as in the cases just mentioned, the root of the word rather than the prefix is stressed. Say aloud to yourself the following words, and try to hear where the stress rests: demented, rejected, beginning, unwritten, bespoken, unworthy. It should come as no surprise that, in each case here, the middle of the word, which contains the root, is stressed, while the prefixes and suffixes are unstressed, supporting syllables.
Another useful rule of thumb to consider when determining stress is that monosyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives are usually stressed. This makes sense, as they are the most important and memorable words in any given speech act. It is easy to keep this in mind if you learn and remember the general rules for capitalization in English titles. Important words like those just mentioned are always capitalized, whereas the "little words" are not. In the title "Guns Fire in the Harsh Times of War," we can see that the nouns Guns, Times, and War are all capitalized, as is the verb Fire, and the adjective Harsh, while the little words in and of (both prepositions) as well the (a definite article) are not. If this were a poetic line, the stress would line up directly with the capitalization we see here; read the line over several times, in your mind and aloud, and you will see that this is the case. The line contains an unusual preponderance of stressed syllables (not for a title, but certainly for a poetic line) making it seem weighty, not to mention solemn. The number of stresses produces slow reading and (relatively) frequent pauses, which is appropriate for its subject matter, dealing with serious and important matters. This is but one of the many, many effects which meter manipulation can produce, and as we continue this extensive sub-series, we will have opportunity to enjoy many of them first hand.
For the purposes of this introduction to poetic meter, we can consider all syllables either stressed or unstressed, in a relatively straightforward binary on/off system. It should be noted that there are degrees of stress, and that there are complex systems for dealing with such variation; however, such fine points go beyond the goals of this series, which are introductory rather than specialized. It also needs mentioning that certain syllables that are more or less neutral can be stressed in some contexts and not others, and a powerfully established metrical pattern can pull these words into either direction, depending on their position in a line. Again, for the purposes of this outline, I will keep things as basic as possible, with obvious stressed and unstressed syllables, so that the basic principles stand out as clearly as possible.
Now that we have discussed a number of strategies for picking out stressed and unstressed syllables, let's look at a previous example and try to apply what we have been discussing:
In times of loss the healer must be time
For speed and soothing share no common ground
The wounds inflicted shun a rapid close
The poison needs to drain before the cure
If you guessed that the bolding in the example above was indicative of some metrical property, you guessed right. Now, read through the lines and consider whether the bolded syllables are stressed or unstressed. In specific instances, this may be harder to determine than others, but taken as a whole, it becomes clear that the bolded syllables indicate stressed syllables. Thinking back to the guidelines we have been discussing, as well as the natural flow with which you find yourself reading the line, it becomes evident that every second syllable, beginning on the second, is stressed. Taking the first line as exemplary, we can see that the nouns, the important verbs, and roots of words are all stressed, whereas the little words like the prepositions, articles, and the verb be are all unstressed.
It is obvious that a regular metrical pattern is established in the first line and maintained with unfailing regularity throughout the stanza, and noticing this is a vital step towards labeling the verse according to its metrical properties. Now that we have identified the stressed and unstressed syllables, and found a regularity, it is time to determine how many feet each line has. As we discussed previously, a foot is the smallest indivisible measure of meter, and its size and composition are determined by the pattern of stresses in a line. As a general rule, a foot is the smallest repeated pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables across a single line of poetry. Keep this well in mind, because it is a statement that many students find difficult to remember and apply. In the example provided, the smallest repeated pattern is unstressed/stressed. This layout repeats itself four more times across each line, and so we have a total of five feet in each line. This is a very common arrangement in English poetry, and you will likely encounter it many times, regardless of what kinds of English classes you find yourself in.
It is tempting to try to divide the lines into other patterns, and there is no doubt that other configurations are possible. However, when you remember that you are looking for the smallest repeated pattern, unstressed/stressed is the only foot that fits. From here on, all stressed syllables will be bolded, as in the above example, and all feet will be described using the symbols / for stressed, and - for unstressed. So, the foot which we see in the example above will be described simply as - /.
Now that we have determined how many feet the line has, and what type of foot we are dealing with throughout, we have what we need in order to name the line according to its metrical properties, and if you have studied meter at all in the past, you will already have determined that our example stanza is a classic example of iambic pentameter. This is the most common regular metrical arrangement in English poetry, and has been used from before Shakespeare through the present day. This is all well and good, you might be saying, but how on earth did you come up with a name like that to describe a series of five - / (unstressed/stressed) feet? This is where the nomenclature of meter comes in, and while it may seem random or arbitrary at times, there is a definite logic to its application.
The names of all regular metrical configurations contain two terms. The first of these terms indicates the kind of feet, and is reported in adjective form; we will cover this somewhat later, as it is the more complex, least intuitively systematic of the two parts of the metrical descriptor. The second term, which we will delve into first, indicates the number of feet contained in the regular metrical line in question. This second term is easiest to identify because it follows a predictable pattern of naming, based on its prefix. Many of us, through common use or through various science courses, are familiar with a host of Greek prefixes which designate number. It is these prefixes which are used to label the number of feet in a line of poetry, making this second term of the set very easy to remember. Monometer indicates a one-foot line, dimeter a two-foot line, trimeter a three-foot line, tetrameter a four-foot line, pentameter (as in our example) a five-foot line, hexameter a six-foot line, heptameter a seven-foot line, and octameter an eight foot line. This could obviously continue on almost into infinity, but anything beyond eight feet is hardly useful, for very few indeed are the poems which employ lines of such length. In fact, there seems to be a natural tendency among poets and readers of poetry to "naturally" want a line to end before it hits seven feet, and although no rules govern this, even lines of seven and eight feet are relatively rare in English poetry.
By the same token, certain regular metrical line lengths on the short side of the spectrum are also remarkably rare. Think, for example, of the last time you read a poem in monometer. These do exist, but they tend to be brief, and feel somewhat experimental. It is difficult, after all, to establish a rhythmic flow over the course of such a short line, and while monometer may be used at times over the course of a poem for emphasis, it is seldom the regular governing meter of an entire poetic work, and certainly not a long poem. Dimeter, especially when composed of feet with only two syllables, is similarly rare, primarily for the same reasons. It is not until we get to trimeter that we see significant, extended use in regular metrical arrangements, as even six syllables is enough to establish a sense of rhythm within and across lines.
Having said all this, it is important to note that within a given governing regular metrical structure, poets will sometimes use odd-sized lines to produce given effects. For example, if iambic pentameter is the overarching meter, a poet may include some lines that stretch into hexameter, or even heptameter. The effect here is often to conclude a section of verse with a more substantial, fuller feeling line. It also slows down a given section of the poem, and this can be effective for providing a reflection on what has come before, or for emulating a slowing sense within the content or events of the poem.
Similarly, poets will sometimes introduce surprisingly small lines into an otherwise "normal" metrical flow, again for the express purpose of creating some effect. We mentioned earlier that this device can be used for emphasis, and you can imagine that including a monometric line in a predominantly pentametric structure would cause the reader to take definite notice of the anomaly. As opposed to the introduction of a noticeably longer line, the introduction of monometric or dimetric lines serves not to sum up or reflect, but rather to end or begin a line of thought abruptly. The effect is brief but powerful, causing you to screech to a halt unexpectedly in the middle of a regular flow. The individual words in these small lines all gain a greatly increased significance, and unless they are pivotal to the poem in question, they will really have no place in such an emphasized line.
So, the systematic labeling of lines according to the number of feet they contain is now child's play to you, and you will soon find it as easy as counting syllables, that most basic of poetic exercises. Now, however, comes the tricky part, which is naming all of those pesky little feet of which there are many, many possible variations. Unfortunately, there is no simple Greek system for labeling the kind of foot a line possesses; it has Greek roots all right, but the terms are far more colorful, terribly unsystematic, and often seemingly arbitrary. You will need to memorize these, but fortunately the number you will commonly come across in English represents only a fraction of the possible total.
To get you off and running, you already know one type of foot, which is the iamb of our most recent example stanza. An iamb is a two-syllable foot structured - / (unstressed/stressed), and is the most common foot in English meter. Its partner, also quite common though not as popular as his famous cousin, is the trochee, which is another two-syllable foot, but arranged in the opposite stress pattern, / -. Knowing these two foot types alone will take you a long way, and if you decide to read nothing further in this series, please make sure to at least be able to identify these. Each of these is most commonly employed in serious poetry, with the iamb being considered the most serious, solemn, and somber, while the trochee tends to create a more insistent, hammering, aggressive sounding line.
Since we are traveling in the order of highest utility, we move next into the realm of the most common three-syllable feet, the first of which is called the anapest. The anapest is structured --/, and while it looks like it might be a near relative to the iamb, a reading of any line in this meter will quickly show that its impression on the ear is far different. Its antithesis is known as the dactyl, and as we would expect, it is structured /--. These meters are far less common in English than their two-syllable rivals, but when they are used they create effects that are even more distinctive. The anapest is a favorite of all kinds of comics, and every poetic form from the nursery rhyme to parody to the lewd song gains something from the use of this form. The dactyl, on the other hand, creates a thundering, galloping momentum, which tends to move the reader rapidly from one line to the next in a nearly breathless fashion.
If you are a fan of combinations and permutations, you will no doubt be aware that there are several other possible three-syllable feet, and I will describe them here not because they are common regular governing meters in English (they are not), but because they come up often enough as variations that they are worth being able to identify. The first of these is the amphibrach, structured - / -. This foot type is most commonly employed in lighter verse, and sees significant use in the short, humorous limerick, though it is seldom employed in a regular, strictly structured manner.
The amphimacer is the mirror image of the amphibrach, structured / - /, and is so infrequently employed in English verse that its effects are unremarkable. The bacchius, named for the Greek god of wine and revelry, runs - / /, while its opposite is appropriately titled the antibacchius, quite a mouthful to say and a mindful to remember, running / / -. I am well aware that by now, if you have been following closely, your head might well be spinning (I know mine is, and I deal with meter most days of the week). However, if you identify any of the metrical arrangements mentioned on this page, your professor will likely credit you in front of the class for being an exceptionally bright spark, and if you identify these feet for your teacher, she will immediately send you to the next grade, or interrogate you for hours about where you copied your paper.
As you can imagine, the combinations grow larger and larger for every additional syllable that is added to a metrical foot, and for this reason we will not proceed into the realm of four-syllable feet or any number beyond that. English poetry employs such meter only on very, very rare occasions, and if you are studying and labeling such complex metrical arrangements, chances are that you know where to go to get the appropriate terminology for the task at hand.
Those among you who are keeping track will have noticed that I have conveniently decided to skip over various possibilities at both the two- and three-syllable levels, and I admit that this is the case. I did not do so through oversight, laziness, or because of some difficulty inherent in those possibilities, but rather because they simply cannot serve as the dominant ordering meter of a given line. They are all employed from time to time in English poetry, and certainly deserve mention, but only as accentual feet which contribute to an overall effect, not as ordering feet in regular metrical arrangements.
The first and most common of these is known as the spondee, and this handy little foot is structured / /. As you can see, a line arranged in this manner would be very difficult to compose indeed, and would likely have to be made up of a series of monosyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in what would likely be an ungrammatical sequence. The opposing two-syllable possibility, the dibrach, faces similar difficulties in becoming the regular meter of a poetic line. Its - - form means that no words in the line would have a stress, and anyone who has attempted to create a poem like this is aware of how difficult that is to do. Both of these foot types can be employed to shift a regular meter into a variation, or to add or remove emphasis from given words, but cannot stand alone as regular metrical structures.
For the same reason the spondee and dibrach are untenable feet in a regular metric pattern, so too are their longer three-syllable cousins. The molossus, (yes, that is its name; I am not making any of this up) is a spondee that does strength training, weighing in at / / / (three consecutive stressed syllables). On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a foot that eats even less than the dibrach, predictably called the tribrach. This unassuming foot is structured - - - (three unstressed syllables), and does not appear in English very often at all, even as an accent to a regular metrical pattern. In the presence of any stressed syllables, the shy, modest tribrach tends to break off into different metrical configurations, making it difficult to locate at any time.
So, now that you have memorized all of the foot types, having already memorized the terms to describe the number of feet in a given line, you are ready to tackle almost every line of verse the English language can throw your way. Once you have identified the foot type, whether that be an iamb, an anapest, or an amphibrach, simply add an adjectival ending to it (usually just ic, though you may have to alter the ending of the stem slightly to accommodate this), hit the space bar, record the correct term for the number of feet per line without any modification, and you have successfully identified the meter of the line (and perhaps even the poem) in question. It is as easy as that! This skill you have learned, by the way, is known as scansion, (the verb is simply to scan), and it is one of the cornerstones of any advanced type of poetic analysis.
To test your newfound skills, try scanning the following stanza and determining the correct metrical terms:
At the end of the night,
On the train to delight,
With your soul you can see,
Why this love has to be.
Read this over several times, to yourself and aloud, and see what rhythm naturally emerges; is there a certain way you find yourself reading the lines that is regular and musical? Hopefully there is, and what follows next will merely help you to formally confirm your intuition.
Beginning with a syllable count, we see that each line contains six of them, which from the outset creates a quick, choppy effect. Next, we move into the identification of stressed and unstressed syllables, and we notice right away that the number of unstressed syllables is far greater than the number of stressed. In the first line we have four little words, including at, the, of, and the, two propositions and the same article twice. End and night are both nouns, and both significant to the line. The stress then falls on the middle and end of the line, giving us the arrangement - - / - - /. Looking at the rest of the lines, we can see this pattern holds true in a very regular way, and so it is safe to say this is the dominant, regular metrical pattern of the stanza.
Next, we need to find the shortest repeating pattern, and the only possibility here is - - /, which occurs twice in each line. So, we now know we have two feet in each line, making the lines dimetric, and thinking back to our foot types, we remember the name for such a foot is an anapest. Although we have been presented with a relatively rare verse form in English, we can confidently state that this stanza is written in completely regular anapestic dimeter. I encourage you to seek out and scan as much poetry as you can, putting into practice all we have been discussing, and developing an ear for meter, both in its regularities and in its exceptions.