Teaching metrics - background

I'm working on another section of the workshop presentation.

Just a bit of background, which I won't be giving in the paper, since everyone involved in the workshop probably has at least an MA in English or a related field. (It's worth mentioning in passing that many English verse terms are taken from Classical Greek, though they measured vowel length in ways we don't. So the whole terminology thing isn't perfect, but it's what we use anyway. Jack Lynch at Rutgers has a helpful page on terminology.)

In English metric verse, we measure by stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress is when you say a syllable or part of a word with a little more emphasis or loudness. As a native speaker of English, when you say the word "important," for example, you're likely to stress the second syllable, "port." If you speak Spanish, and say "Importante," you'll stress the "tan" syllable. Unlike Spanish, which has pretty regular rules for stresses, English is all over the place; that's one of the things that makes it a hard language to learn as a second language.

Say "important." Now say "impotent." In "impotent," you get a pattern of stress, unstress, and either another unstress or slightly stressed final syllable. (In my accent, I pretty much swallow the end "tent" syllable. Your accent will probably be different. This is one of the reasons why reading verse aloud to feel it in your mouth is so very important.) When you say "important," you have an unstressed, stressed, and unstressed pattern.

English tends to rarely stress two syllables in a row, but fairly often has a couple unstressed syllables between stressed syllables. The easiest patterns in English involve two syllables, one stressed, one unstressed. And, probably 90% of metrical verse in English falls specifically into the pattern of iambs: an unstressed followed by an stressed syllable.

Here's an example:

If she should write
Some verse tonight
This dimeter
Would limit her. (John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason)

We could also write this:

If she / should write
Some verse / tonight
This di / meter
Would li/ mit her.

The slash marks (aka virgules) separate each foot. (A foot is a measurement, as in inches, feet; it's easier to think of in terms of a musical measure. So when you see poetry talking about tripping over feet, or making "pedestrian" jokes, you know they're joking about meter.)

This example being iambic, when you read it aloud, you'll probably feel the second syllable in each foot stronger in your mouth.

So, iamb: unstress, stress
Trochee: stress, unstress

And because we sometimes see a foot with two stresses, we have a name for that:
Spondee: stress, stress

English verse is sometimes written in three syllable feet, with one stress and two unstressed syllables.

Anapest: unstress, unstress, stress
Dactyl: stress, unstress, unstress

(Want a mnemonic? An anapest is "all the BEST"; the word "anapest" is itself a dactyl.)

We also talk about the lengths of line using Greek-originated prefixes.
Monometer = one foot in a line
Dimeter = two feet in a line (the joke in Hollander's verse above)
Trimeter = three feet in a line
Tetrameter = four feet in a line
Pentameter = five feet in a line
Hexameter = six feet in a line (Also called an Alexandrine, because we LOVE our terminology.)

Most English metrical verse is in iambic pentameter, with a fair minority in tetrameter, trimeter, and hexameter.

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The temperature outside, according to the NWU website, has reached 45F, so I'm cutting this short to go take a bike ride, get some fresh air, exercise, all that good stuff.

If you see someone wending along on an old ten speed in several layers of long johns and sweats, wave to me! (I'm actually thinking of getting a pair of those long biking tight things so I won't be so cold, but the idea of wearing ANYTHING remotely spandex makes me tense.)

The background stuff took me LOTS longer than I'd planned, so I'll come back in a separate post to add what I'm really going to talk about. I wonder at myself typing all that in because it's not at all what I'm really after.

Edit: Thanks to Dr. Virago for correcting a typo!