Meter and feet in poetry
Metre is the part of poetry that people either learn as a list of Greek names or avoid entirely. Neither is much use at the desk.
What follows is the working half: what a foot is, what English does with it, and what the vocabulary is actually for.
Syllable, foot, metre
English verse is measured in feet: groups of stressed and unstressed syllables. The iamb is weak-strong (a-BOVE), the trochee strong-weak (GAR-den), the anapaest weak-weak-strong, the dactyl strong-weak-weak.
The metre names the foot and how many of them: iambic pentameter is five iambs, so ten syllables with five accented.
This system is called accentual-syllabic, and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is careful to file it separately from syllabic metre, which is what French uses. A French alexandrin has twelve syllables and no feet at all; an English pentameter has ten syllables and five feet. The two look comparable in arithmetic and are not comparable in anything else.
Knowing the distinction saves you from looking in English for a structure that belongs to another language, and the reverse.
The line English actually built
Iambic pentameter is the default line of English verse for a reason that has nothing to do with prestige: it is often about the length of a spoken sentence, and its alternation is close to unmarked English rhythm.
Shakespeare's sonnets are fourteen lines of it. So is most of the blank verse in the plays — pentameter without rhyme — and Milton's Paradise Lost.
A shorter line does something different: tetrameter, four feet, is the line of ballads and hymns, and it moves faster because the pattern completes sooner.
Substitution is where the metre lives
A perfectly regular metre stops being heard within a few lines. What a reader actually notices is the departures.
Replacing the first iamb of a line with a trochee — a strong syllable where a weak one was expected — is the commonest of these, and it lands a word hard at the start of the line. Paul Fussell's point in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form is that this is the whole interest of writing in metre: the pattern exists to be departed from, and a poet who never departs has built a metronome.
A metre nobody varies stops being heard.
Free verse is not the absence of rhythm
Free verse abandons the fixed foot count, not rhythm. Line length still creates expectation, stress still falls where the words put it, and a line that suddenly scans as regular inside free verse is doing something on purpose.
Knowing how many syllables your line carries, and where its accents fall, stays useful even when you are writing in no fixed form. The syllable counter gives you that count as you write.
The point of metrical vocabulary is to make visible the gap between what you decided and what the text is doing. What you do about it is an artistic decision.
If you write words to be sung, see how to count syllables in a song, where the voice redistributes the measure.
Sources
- Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, McGraw-Hill — feet, substitution, and why departure is the point. Internet Archive.
- The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition, Princeton University Press — the entries on metre, foot, and syllabic versus accentual-syllabic systems. press.princeton.edu.
- Merriam-Webster, entries for iamb and pentameter.
- William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609); John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), for blank verse. Poetry Foundation.
Work the form without leaving the text
Ilena shows the measure of each line beside the poem, with rhymes, definitions and successive versions.