Mark Forsyth On Poetic Meter

Chapter Twenty​-​one of The Element of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth has the best explanation of poetic meter that I’ve encountered. I strongly recommend the full book as a delightful toolbox for the refining one’s understanding of prose style and figures of speech. (And I do mean delightful: each chapter goes down like a piece of intellectual candy. Or better yet, a potato chip — because you can’t have just one.)

Anyway, here is the text of the chapter:

Chapter Twenty​-​One

English verse is a reasonably simple business. Each English word has a stress on it. When a beggar starts work, he needs to begin beggin’. Begin has the stress on the second syllable—beGIN—and beggin’ has the stress on the first—BEGgin’. The same thing goes with the verb to rebel and the noun a rebel. A REBel reBELS. When you give a gift, you preSENT a PREsent. The only difference between the words is the stress.

Every word in English has a particular stress, and when a foreigner gets it wrong we notice, and we snigger. There’s an old joke with many variations, all of which involve a Frenchman in pursuit of a penis, rather than happiness. That’s partially because the French don’t pronounce their Hs, but mainly because HAPpiness and a PEnis are stressed differently.

Some words even get two stresses. Antidote goes TUM​-​te​-​TUM. UNDerSTANDing goes TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te. And sometimes the stress is optional. You usually say HAPPiness, but you can, if you like, say HAPpiNESS.

Also, even when a sentence is made out of words of one syllable, some will be stressed and some won’t. “A cup of tea” will always be stressed “a CUP of TEA.” (Unless, I suppose, you’re asked whether you wanted two cups next to tea, in which case you might reply, “No, I want A cup OF tea.”)

So “a lovely cup of tea” goes te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM. “I want a lovely cup of tea” goes te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM. “I really want a lovely cup of tea” goes te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM. And now you’ve got a rhythm going.

“Compare” is a te​-​TUM. “Summer” is a TUM​-​te. So “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” goes te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM​-​te​-​TUM. And the next line, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” goes exactly the same way. “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” is the same. “And summer’s lease hath all too short a date” is the same. Five te​-​TUMS in a row. Try reading those lines out while tapping your finger on something to keep time.

In verse a te​-​TUM is called an iamb, and five in a row is called a pentameter (that’s the same pent as pentagon). So five te​-​TUMs are called an iambic pentameter.

Of course, there are lots of other ways that you can write. The iamb is just one of the four basic feet:

1. Iamb—te​-​TUM
2. Trochee—TUMty
3. Anapaest—te​-​te​-​TUM
4. Dactyl—TUM​-​te​-​ty

And the pentameter is one of the three basic meters:

1. Pentameter—five in a row
2. Tetrameter—four in a row
3. Trimeter—three in a row

So you can pick one from each list, and you’ve got yourself a verse form. Choose anapaest and tetrameter and you’ve got:

te​-​te​-​TUM te​-​te​-​TUM te​-​te​-​TUM te​-​te​-​TUM

Which Byron used for:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

There are only twelve combinations, and they’ve all been tried a few times. And people have even gone off into the more obscure feet and lengths. Obviously the meters don’t have to be just three, four and five. You can do anything from one up to infinity, if you feel like it. And there are all sorts of other strange feet like the choriamb (TUM​-​te​-​te​-​TUM) and the molossus (TUM! TUM! TUM!). But these strange ones have never really worked well in English apart from the amphibrach (te​-​TUM​-​te), which is the basis of the limerick:

There was a young man from Calcutta

But I digress. The point is that even with the basic feet and the basic meters there are still only two or three combinations that actually get a lot of use. Anapaests and dactyls tend to sound a bit silly. Byron made the anapaest serious, but that’s because he was an absolutely bloody amazing poet. If you try it yourself you’ll probably end up with something that sounds like a nursery rhyme, because anapaests and dactyls are the nursery rhyme feet and they tend to sound rather higgledy piggledy wiggledy woo. “Little Miss Muffet, she sat on a tuffet . . .”

The trochee doesn’t sound silly, but it does sound a bit like a hammer, banging away. So Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem, The Song of Hiawatha, which is all in trochees, goes like this:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big​-​Sea​-​Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine​-​trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big​-​Sea​-​Water.

I mean it’s effective. But it’s a bit obvious. And remember that Hiawatha is an epic poem. After a while it feels as though there are builders working in your head.

Hiawatha actually made the trochee fashionable, something that doesn’t ordinarily happen to metrical units. In November 1855 the gossip column of the New York Times claimed: “The madness of the hour takes the metrical shape of trochees, everybody writes trochaics, talks trochaics, and thinks in trochees,” which would drive me mad. Mind you, it’s possible that everybody was talking in trochees. It’s insanely simple once you get the rhythm in your head. Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It’s just that you lose all your friends if you do.

And that, as the bishop remarked to the crocodile, leaves us with only one foot: the iamb. The soft and lovely iamb. The humble te​-​TUM. Because the TUM falls on the offbeat, as it were, the rhythm is gentler. It never has the primeval power of the trochee, nor does it have any of its primeval coarseness. The iamb is just the gentle rhythm, the waves lapping in the background.

The only question that remains is how many? The simplest answer is the greedy one. Four and three alternating: the tetrameter and the trimeter. This is called the ballad meter and it sounds wonderfully traditional.

There is a house in New Orleans
They call The Rising Sun
It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
In God, I know I’m one.

You probably noticed that the third line there isn’t quite right. There are three soft syllables between man​-​ and boy. That’s all right for two reasons. First, there’s slurring. Many a can be pronounced as men​-​yer. Give it a go. Men​-​yer poor boy. So that brings it down to only two soft syllables. What’s poor doing there? Well, the truth is that once you’ve established a rhythm you can vary it a bit. It even makes the ballad meter sound more traditional. Rather like wonky timbers on an old building. They look good, and as long as it’s all structurally sound, the more wonk the better. Here’s the opening of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

It’s so damned folksy, and it’s those extra syllables here and there that make it seem so rough and ready. You can, of course, write in pure ballad meter, and it sounds a lot more respectable.

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

But it still has something of the nursery rhyme:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing​-​wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

It can always be sung to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Nonetheless, you’ll be even more dignified if you move up to the straight iambic tetrameter: te​-​TUM te​-​TUM te​-​TUM te​-​TUM.

The iambic tetrameter can do all sorts of things, but it’s best at being sad and lyrical.

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils;

Which has the same sort of feel as:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

It’s beautiful and melancholy and loving. One thing about it, though, is that it has to rhyme. There’s an odd thing about English verse that when you have an even number of feet in a line, it doesn’t seem right to pause. When you have an odd number of feet, people just naturally take a breath at the end of the line. Why this should be is a complete mystery, but it’s almost always true. Try reading this aloud:

I wandered like a cloud
That floats o’er vales and hills
And then I saw a crowd,
A host of daffodils.

Do you hear how you’re pausing? If you try tapping your finger along to the beat, you’ll find that the little pause at the end of the line is exactly one beat long. It’s as though you’re filling in the missing time and making it up to the nearest even number.

The important thing here is that there are two ways of marking the end of a line. You can do it with a rhyme, or you can do it with a pause. And in the tetrameter that second option is out the window. So all tetrameters have to rhyme.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a host
Of many dancing buttercups.

Is just nonsense. Of course you can rhyme it in different ways. These ones have been alternating, but you can do the straight couplet, which makes the tetrameter a lot jauntier:

The grave’s a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Or you can go the other way entirely and write in the most beautiful and most melancholy form of tetrameter: the In Memoriam stanza. Alfred Tennyson’s best friend went on holiday and died. This was a bad thing for Tennyson, but a good thing for English poetry, because Tennyson settled down to write 133 short poems about his dead chum, or one long poem in 133 sections, if you want to look at it like that. The entire thing was in iambic tetrameters and they all rhyme the same way:

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

“And eet eet and.” What’s so lovely about this is that it takes four lines for the whole thing to make structural sense. If you write in couplets, it’s all over in two lines. If you write in alternating rhyme, you’re wrapping up after three. But with the In Memoriam stanza that first line doesn’t make poetic sense until you come to the last syllable of the fourth. It holds and holds, and then completes. So it’s rather unfortunate that the most famous lines from the whole poem are usually quoted out of context:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Perhaps we should pause here a moment. Perhaps you think that I’m going on about verse too much. Perhaps you think the stresses don’t matter. So to show you that what I’m saying is half true, let’s go back and rewrite that in anapaests.

So I know it is true that whatever befall;
And I feel it whenever I sorrow the most;
That ’tis better to truly have loved and have lost
Than never to truly have loved one at all.

Quite aside from some little changes in meaning, you can hear how the anapaest changes the feel of the verse. You can also see how easy it is to write verse. It’s so easy to throw in a syllable here and there to make up the rhythm. That’s why poets are so fond of words like “Oh” or “and.” It’s not that they keep saying the word in real life, it’s just that you can throw it in anywhere. “And thou art dead, as young and fair.” It’s not that Byron usually started sentences with “and,” he just knew the quickest way to make an iambic tetrameter. If you’re really stuck you can just repeat a word: “My love is like a red, red rose.” Or, if you need to lose a syllable, you can do what Tennyson did above and change whatever to whate’er. The really cheap method is to add an “a​-​” to the beginning of a word. The syllables, they are a​-​changeable.

The Renaissance poet Ben Jonson said that when he wanted to write poetry, he just wrote prose and then mucked around with the word order and banged it with a verbal hammer until it fit nicely into a verse form. Or:

Ben Jonson in Renaissance claimed
That when a verse to write he aimed [word order mangled for rhyme]
He wrote the whole thing down in prose;
And when a meter problem rose, [arose wouldn’t fit]
He banged it with a verbal hammer,
With clever cut or stammer​-​stammer,
Until it fitted into verse [Until because till wouldn’t work]
And reckoned it was none the worse.

But Ben Jonson usually wrote in the king of English verse forms, the iambic pentameter.

The iambic pentameter is the Rolls​-​Royce of verse forms. The others are mere unicycles, tractors, quad​-​bikes and rickshaws. They’re fine for some particular purpose, but the iambic pentameter can do everything. It can do tragic (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”), heroic (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”), motivational (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”), pastoral (“There is a willow grows aslant a brook”), romantic (“If music be the food of love, play on”), casual (“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”), or witty:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

Shakespeare almost never used another verse form. He didn’t need to. It was the iambic pentameter or it was plain prose. Because the pentameter has an odd number of feet, it doesn’t need to rhyme. So Shakespeare could write conversations in it that sounded natural and normal. Yet still it always had that subtle beat tapping away underneath. It had a rhythm. Shakespeare could even cut up a pentameter and give each actor half. So Antony says to Cleopatra: “Command me!”

And Cleopatra replies: “O, my pardon!”
And Antony replies: “Now I must.”

And you stack ’em all together and get “Command me! O, my pardon! Now I must.” So the conversation can keep going without Shakespeare ever breaking the rhythm. The rhythm would get broken after a while, though. In general, Shakespeare has his heroes and his aristocrats natter away in iambic pentameters, but whenever the working classes come on stage they are forced to love, laugh and die in prose, because they’re common.

Shakespeare did write one play entirely in prose, but if you’ve ever seen or read The Life and Death of King John, you have my condolences.¹ Like all truly beautiful things, and people, the iambic pentameter gets boring after a while. That’s why the prose peasants are such a welcome relief. But on the smaller scale you break it up with variations. Just like the drum fill in the middle of a song, you can have a deliberate metrical break, just for the fun of it. Indeed, there are standard ways to do it. First, you can always add an extra syllable on the end:

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

The soft syllable simply slides into the pause at the end of the line. The other standard trick is to replace one of the iambs with a trochee, usually the first:

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

Or you can do both:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

But you can put the trochee anywhere really, especially if you’re trying to sound all cracked and emotional. You just have to remember to get back in the rhythm afterwards.

For God’s| sake, let| us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

When he was in his twenties, Shakespeare was very careful about his pentameters. A little trochee here and there; an extra syllable there. By the time he was in his forties, he’d relaxed and would shuffle things around all the time. He even occasionally added an extra iamb onto the end of the line. That’s the sort of wildman, Devil​-​may​-​care versifier he was. But generally, his was a lifelong love affair with the iambic pentameter and almost all his most famous lines, from Romeo to Prospero, from nights Twelfth to Midsummer, go te​-​TUM te​-​TUM te​-​TUM te​-​TUM te​-​TUM.

Shakespeare didn’t invent the iambic pentameter. It had been the English standard ever since Geoffrey Chaucer began his crafty rhyming in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare simply leapt on a bandwagon and took charge. The iambic pentameter is the most natural form of English. It’s how the English language wants to be. And, in all seriousness, I didn’t even notice that that last sentence was one until I had typed it. ²

The iambic pentameter remained the gold standard of English poetry. It’s reckoned that about three quarters of all English poetry is written in the meter. Milton used it for Paradise Lost. Pope used it for The Rape of the Lock. Wordsworth used it for The Prelude. Byron used it for Don Juan. And . . . well . . . everybody used it. Half the great lines you know are iambic pentameters.

Procrastination is the thief of time (Edward Young, 1742)

They also serve who only stand and wait. (John Milton, 1655)

To err is human, to forgive divine. (Alexander Pope, 1711)

That last being an example of zeugma.

Which, of course, you’ll have to read the book to learn about :p