How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

Thomas C. Foster

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062684066
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles.

No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn't need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more.

From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers:

• How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning.
• The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries.
• How to listen for a poem's secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up.
• How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs!

With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

How Is Poetry?

3

Redeeming the Time

WHAT’S THAT? YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS WHOLE “METER” thing? As far as you can tell, Iambic’s last name is Pentameter? And you think rhythm should be followed by blues? Welcome to the club. There is perhaps nothing about poetry that is as disconcerting as the whole business of meter and rhythm. What about all those terrible things we call lines of poetry in English? You know, trochaic trimeter and dactylic hexameter, that sort of nonsense. Another linguistic accident: an unholy marriage of Greek terminology filtered through Latin. That sort of thing begets monsters. But it is the terminology, not the lines, that are monstrous. Here’s the basic fact: for most of its history, poetry in English has been built on a foundation of lines that in turn are built out of words arranged to form rhythmic patterns. These patterns can—and often do—find their way into songs. And once we know the basic patterns, we have only to count how often they repeat in a line to name it.

Forget Greek; think music. With a little arithmetic. Find the beat, then count it off.

Let’s move a little slowly here; this stuff can make heads spin. First, the one word you might know: “iamb.” Which, for the record, isn’t one; it’s a trochee (more in a moment). An iamb is a metrical foot (which means a repeatable pattern of stresses) composed of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, which we can denote as “da-DUM” (as in “weak-STRONG”). “Succeed” is an iamb. So is “elect.” Its paired opposition, metrically, is “trochee,” which unlike “iamb” is the thing it designates, a pair of syllables in which the first is stressed—“DUM-da,” or, in this case, “TRO-chee.” Or “I-amb.”

Here’s the thing to remember: the metrical foot is independent of the word. That is to say, sometimes the poetic line may use “succeed” as a complete metrical foot, in this case an iamb, but it is just as likely to split it, so that “suc-” is the second syllable of a trochee, while “-CEED” is the first syllable in another one. In that particular line, the poet might have options to use “FLOUR-ish” or “TRI-umph,” but the meter dictates a word with the second syllable accented, so “suc-CEED” would be the choice. Is it any surprise that we get confused about all of this? Try to remember this: In metrical counting, words don’t matter; syllables do.

METER AT WORK

LET’S PUT THIS newfound knowledge into practice. Here is the opening quatrain of a fairly famous poem. Good news here—there’s not one word in it that you don’t know, and only one funky ending:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Even if you don’t know about the poet, you know that the poem is old, right? Not a lot of poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have gone around using “thou” or “may’st,” although the number isn’t quite zero. This sonnet has a number, 73, and it belongs to Shakespeare, which puts it back a spell (the original book of his sonnets appeared in 1609). We’ll come back to it as a poetic statement later on, but for now we’re just talking about rhythm and meter. And the meter here is iambic pentameter, or five of those little “da-DUM” iambs laid end to end to make a line: “Thăt tíme ŏf yéar thŏu máy’st ĭn mé bĕ-hóld,” with syllables 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 stressed. Same thing in the next two lines—stresses on the even syllables. But then something different in line four: “Báre rúin’d chóirs, whĕre láte thĕ swéet bĭrds sáng.” Whoa! That’s not iambic or pentameter. Two things stand out here. First, we have that hammering effect of three consecutive stressed syllables, after which we can hardly find our bearings to see if any iambs remain (they do). And after we get over that rhythmic shock, we discover that somebody stole a syllable; it’s tough to have five iambs with only nine syllables. So we have only nine, but six of those are stressed. Is that even legal? Yes, it is. Meter isn’t law; it’s framework. If it is slavishly followed as law, moreover, the result is monotonous and more often than not unintentionally funny. We actually need relief from the pattern every once in a while, at least where lyric poetry is concerned.

NARRATIVE POEMS ARE ANOTHER STORY. THIS ONE HAS A DIFFERENT pattern at work. True, it has a few squirrelly words, but they’re either made up or borrowed from Native American lore, and in any case, they don’t get in the way of the meaning:

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

At the doorway of his wigwam,

In the pleasant Summer morning,

Hiawatha stood and waited.

All the air was full of freshness,

All the earth was bright and joyous,

And before him, through the sunshine,

Westward toward the neighboring forest

Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,

Passed the bees, the honey-makers,

Burning, singing in the sunshine.

This is music of a different sort. And compared to Shakespeare, practically brand-new. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in 1855, produced one of the great American epics, The Song of Hiawatha, of which this is the beginning of the final chapter, “Hiawatha’s Departure.”

The first thing you will notice, especially if you’ve just read Shakespeare’s sonnet opening, is that somebody moved the stresses. They are in front of their unstressed partners, giving us “DUM-da, DUM-da.” Or maybe you notice that the lines are shorter; you see that change even before reading it. Don’t discount cues like this, which tell us simply by taking up less of the page that the count of metrical feet will be smaller. Here, there are four feet per line. We call that one tetrameter, meaning “four feet” (think of it as four bounces, “UP-down”). And the feet themselves? Trochees. Put them together and you get trochaic tetrameter, or “trochees times four.” So why this particular arrangement of stresses for this long poem? For one thing, there’s a touch of cultural appropriation here: Longfellow is aiming for a drumbeat pattern. And as we know from our classic Western movies, drumbeats never arrange themselves into iambs.

On top of that, the comparatively short lines and symmetry (four feet split evenly in a way that five feet never do) encourages readers to march along, line after line for a very long time, four beats and forward, four beats and forward. For Longfellow in this poem, the goal is to drive us down the page and over to the next page and the next and the next. Which is important because there are a lot of next pages.

The third of these elements is what’s called the “feminine” ending. All that means is that the last syllable of the line is unstressed. Stressed final syllables are called “masculine.” We will just have to get past the inherent sexism—strength is manly, and so on—and agree that neither you nor I chose the names. While I don’t find unstressed syllables particularly gendered one way or another, I do find them slightly unfinished when they end a line. I suppose my ear is attuned to the cadences of iambs and lines ending on the beat. We can return to the matter of line endings and sex another time, but this discussion is enough trauma for now.

So there you have it. Two poems, two different meters with stresses reversed and line lengths varied. There are lots more options where those came from. One of these is pentameter, the other tetrameter. So just how many meters are there? There is theoretically no limit, although practically the number is small. Thank goodness! One can hardly imagine a single-foot line: just two syllables, and then on to the next line of just two, and so on, marching the metrical order down the page. A two-foot line is slightly more likely, which is why there is actually a word for it, “dimeter,” although I have yet to see one that doesn’t take frequent liberties with both meter and number of syllables. Here are the usual suspects:

• Dimeter: two metrical feet (of whatever shape, as with all of these)
• Trimeter: three metrical feet
• Tetrameter: four
• Pentameter: five
• Hexameter: six
• Heptameter: seven
• Octameter: eight
• Beyond here there be monsters . . .

This isn’t so tough. If we ignore the “meters,” we recognize those prefixes from “di-” (as in “dichotomy”) to “tri-” (as in pretty much everything) and “penta-” (as in the Pentagon) to “hepta-” (as in the once every four years the heptathlon women’s track multievent). True, “tetra-”doesn’t come up much in everyday speech, so that one you may have to commit to memory; the rest, however, you can mostly figure out. Better still, the shortest one and the longest two don’t occur very often in nature, so we really only have recourse to trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter on a regular basis.

So that’s how lines count off their feet, but how do we reckon the feet themselves? Because there are names, although, alas, they are all Greek. And their number for our purposes is five:

• Iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable— “da-DUM,” as in “de-LAY” or, pronounced correctly, “de-TROIT”
• Trochee: the opposite, a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable—“DUM-da,” as in “THOM-as FOS-ter”
• Spondee: two stressed syllables in a row—“DUM-DUM,” as in “DUMB-DUMB”
• Anapest: a three-syllable foot, two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed—“da-da-DUM,” as in “in the HOUSE”
• Dactyl: the reverse, one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones: “DUM-da-da,” as in “NOT a ch...