Metre (poetry)

The metre (American English: meter) of a poem is the basic, recurring pattern of some countable attribute of the lines of the poem. Some systems of metre count syllables (e.g., in French); some count patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., in English and German); some count patterns of long and short syllables (e.g., in Latin); some count alliterating words (e.g., in Old English); and some, in languages like Chinese in which words have formalized tones, count patterns of tone.

Not all poetry is metrical; nonmetrical poetry is often called "free verse." Metre is only one aspect of prosody, which Charles O. Hartman defines as "the poet's method of controlling the reader's temporal experience of the poem" Line breaks, line length, word length, pauses, patterns of consonants and vowels, are among the many prosodic devices available to poets in addition to metre.

Even in metrical poetry, not every line of a poem will necessarily have a rhythm that conforms exactly to the poem's overall metrical pattern. In English poetry, for example, over the centuries poets and readers have worked out a generally-accepted set of expectations about how much variation from strict metrical regularity, and of what kinds, is "permissible"; but of course these "rules" are flexible, and there are many examples of poets' deliberately "breaking" them to achieve a particular effect.

Although the features of different languages lend themselves to different metrical systems -- it would be difficult to use a system relying on tones or syllable length in English, in which tones are not as formalized as in Chinese nor syllable length as formalized as in Latin -- it is possible to use more than one metrical system in many languages. Although in English, the dominant system is the accentual-syllabic (which takes both stress and syllable count into account), many English-language poets have used syllabic metre (which counts only syllables and ignores the variable of stress) and other systems.

An Example: Iambic Pentameter

One specific metre that is familiar to many English speakers is iambic pentameter, a member of the accentual-syllabic family, used by William Shakespeare in most of his plays and poems, by John Milton in Paradise Lost and other poems, and even by E.E. Cummings in many of his otherwise experimental and avant-garde sonnets.

In the accentual-syllabic system, each line of a poem is considered to be made up of small units of speech called feet, a certain number of which make up a line. The word "pentameter" comes from the Greek for "five measures," so an iambic pentameter line contains five feet.

A foot consists of one stressed syllable and either one or two unstressed, in a specific pattern; the pattern "unstressed, stressed" (ta-TUM) is called "iambic"; so five such feet (ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM) make up the pattern of an iambic pentameter line. Several other types of foot are of course possible: TUM-ta, ta-ta-TUM, etc.

An example of a strictly iambic-pentameter line is the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 65:

Sǐnce bráss, | nǒr stóne, | nǒr éarth, | nǒr bóund- | lěss séa...."  

(The acute accent mark, as in á, indicates a stressed syllable; the breve accent, as in ǎ, an unstressed one; and the vertical line, the division between two feet. The process of analyzing and marking the pattern of stress in a line is called scanning or scansion.)

But most of the rest of that poem's lines do not stick strictly to the regular pattern. Line 3, "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea," begins with the opposite of an iambic foot -- Hów wǐth -- though the rest of the line adheres to the metre. Line 10,

Whěre tíme's | bést jéw- | ěl frǒm | Tíme's chést | líe híd, 

only the first foot is an iamb; the second, fourth, and fifth all contain two stressed syllables and no unstressed ones, while the third foot contains only two unstressed syllables. Yet even such a line is generally considered to be within the limits of iambic pentameter. (Different readers may scan a line differently. It could be argued that the fourth foot here is an iamb. Scansion is not an exact science.)

Some lines in an iambic-pentameter poem may be missing a syllable, or have an extra one. One of Shakespeare's most famous lines, from Hamlet, has eleven syllables, with an extra unstressed one tacked on at the end; the last foot, then, has three syllables, not two:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

The many different ways poets can depart from strict metre, and the uses of such departures, will be discussed below under "Variation."

Metrical Systems

Accentual-Syllabic

The most commonly-used category of metre in modern English, the accentual-syllabic system organizes the poetic line into a recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Each two- or three-syllable repeated unit is called a metrical foot; each of the possible types of feet has its own technical name, although in practice some of them rarely occur. Each line of a poem using this system, moreover, contain a specified number of feet. For example, iambic pentameter contains five (penta-) repetitions of the type of foot called an iamb, which is one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable.

Some accentual-syllabic metres exhibit even more complicated patterns; "common metre" or "ballad metre," for example, alternates lines of four and three iambs. (This is the metre used in many ballads and hymns, many of Emily Dickinson's poems, and popular songs such as the theme song to the television series "Gilligan's Island" -- the interchangeability of whose lyrics with Dickinson's poems is often the source of hilarity.)

As noted above, though, not every line in an accentual-syllabic metrical poem must strictly follow the exact pattern of the metre; many variations (see below) have long been generally recognized as acceptable within the metrical system.

Accentual

Accentual meter counts only the stressed syllables in a line, ignoring how many unstressed syllables occur between them. In Old English poetry (for example, Beowulf), there were also rules requiring some of the stressed syllables to alliterate, that is, to begin with the same sound (or phoneme). In modern English, accentual verse is found in many folk ballads and popular songs, intentionally or unintentionally humorous doggerel, and the chants of crowds at sporting events and political rallies.

Syllabic

Syllabic metre counts the number of syllables (or, in some languages such as Japanese, similar units) in a line. The modern American poet Marianne Moore frequently wrote in syllabic metre, not necessarily with the same number of syllables in every line, but often with the same pattern of syllables-per-line in each stanza.

It is often found in languages that rely less on differences in stress levels than English does; the French alexandrine meter, for example, contains twelve syllables per line. Traditional Chinese poetry is also, in a sense, syllabic, although it often follows additional rules involving patterns of word tones (see "Chinese Systems," below).