Anapest
An anapest is a metrical foot in poetry consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by a long or stressed syllable. It is a rhythmic pattern commonly used in poetry and is often associated with a flowing and upbeat feel. Anapestic meter is frequently used in lighthearted or humorous poetry due to its lively and bouncy rhythm.
5 Key excerpts on "Anapest"
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...ORDER III.—AnapestIC VERSE. In full Anapestic verse, the stress is laid on every third syllable, the first two syllables of each foot being short. The first foot of an Anapestic line, may be an iambus. This is the most frequent diversification of the order. But, as a diversification, it is, of course, not regular or uniform. The stated or uniform adoption of the iambus for a part of each line, and of the Anapest for the residue of it, produces verse of the Composite Order. As the Anapest ends with a long syllable, its rhymes are naturally single; and a short syllable after this, producing double rhyme, is, of course, supernumerary: so are the two, when the rhyme is triple. Some prosodists suppose, a surplus at the end of a line may compensate for a deficiency at the beginning of the next line; but this I judge to be an error, or at least the indulgence of a questionable license. The following passage has two examples of what may have been meant for such compensation, the author having used a dash where I have inserted what seems to be a necessary word:— "Apol | -lo smil'd shrewd | -ly, and bade | him sit down, With 'Well, | Mr. Scott, | you have man | -aged the town; Now pray, | copy less— | have a lit | -tle temer | - ~it~y — [And] Try | if you can't | also man | -age poster | - ity. [For] All | you add now | only les | -sens your cred | - it ; And how | could you think, | too, of tak | -ing to ed | - ite? '" LEIGH HUNT'S Feast of the Poets, page 20. The Anapestic measures are few; because their feet are long, and no poet has chosen to set a great many in a line. Possibly lines of five Anapests, or of four and an initial iambus, might be written; for these would scarcely equal in length some of the iambics and trochaics already exhibited. But I do not find any examples of such metre. The longest Anapestics that have gained my notice, are of fourteen syllables, being tetrameters with triple rhyme, or lines of four Anapests and two short surplus syllables...
eBook - ePub- Philip Hobsbaum(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 METRE AND RHYTHM English verse is a succession of syllables. Some are strongly emphasized, some are not. The pattern of metre is set up by the way in which heavily stressed syllables are interspersed with more lightly stressed syllables. The metrical patterns are termed ‘feet’. The main types of feet are as follows. The iamb: this consists of one lightly stressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. ‘Revolve’, ‘behind’, ‘before’, ‘aloud’ are all iambs. The trochee is the iamb reversed. It consists of one stressed and one lightly stressed syllable. ‘Forward’, ‘backward’, ‘rabbit’, ‘orange’ are all trochees. These two metrical feet, iamb and trochee, each consist of two syllables. But it is possible to have three syllables in a foot, as follows. An anapaest consists of two lightly stressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. ‘Repossess’ and ‘understand’ are examples. A dactyl is an anapaest reversed. It consists of one stressed syllable followed by two lightly stressed syllables. ‘Pulverize’ and ‘agitate’ are dactylic feet. The intermediate pattern, when a stressed syllable is flanked fore and aft by two lightly stressed syllables, is called an amphibrach: ‘redouble’, ‘confetti’. Such examples as are given here should not be taken to be fixed, as a mathematical quantity would be. They should be regarded rather as indicators. The weight of stress can vary appreciably according to context, especially when that context departs from a metrical norm. What is a metrical norm? In order to form a line of verse, each foot is repeated several times. The more times the foot is repeated, the longer the line becomes. It should be emphasized that one rarely comes across a line that is entirely anapaestic, or entirely dactylic, or entirely amphibrachic. Usually, with a line made up of trisyllabic feet, there is a mixture of patterns. A dimeter is what we would call a line consisting of two feet. An iambic dimeter would be ‘The passive heart’...
eBook - ePub- G. S. Fraser(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Stress – Syllable Metres THE IAMBIC PENTAMETER Most of the greatest and most ambitious English poetry is written in a five stress line of, at its most regular, ten syllables, which can be divided into five feet in which the syllable of minor stress precedes the syllable of greater stress. The most common name for this line is the iambic pentameter. It need not be a line of merely ten syllables. If it has a weak or feminine ending, but is otherwise regular, it is a line of eleven syllables like It is possible to substitute in some feet, though not in too many, a three syllable foot for a two syllable foot, and this license occurs even in very regular early blank verse: Måde gló / r oůs súm/m r b / th s sún/ f Yórk The two final syllables of ‘glorious’, in the line from Richard III quoted above, could be considered as contracted into something like ‘gloryous’, and in the printed texts of poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth century there are often marks of elision that suggest they felt uneasy about having three syllable feet. But by the early eighteenth century, what Pope thought (rightly to my mind) his most melodious line has no elision in the foot that gives the line its peculiar melody: See where/ Maeot/is sleeps/ and hard/ly flows Th fréez/i g Tán/å s thróugh/ å wáste/ f snóws. A reader who ignorantly pronounced, or contracted, ‘Tanais’ to ‘Tana’s’ or ‘Tan’is’ would utterly destroy the beauty of this line. These three syllable feet in iambic lines are sometimes called anapaestic substitutions. They scan in the same way as the anapaestic foot, a three syllable rising foot which is scanned thus ° °’. But proper anapaests move at a kind of coarse gallop, as in Byron’s Th ssỳr/ iån cåme dówn/ l ke å wólf/ n th fóld, whereas Pope’s trisyllabic foot ‘-å s thróugh’ helps to slow down the line. Trisyllabic substitution is therefore a better term than anapaestic substitution...
eBook - ePub- Derek Attridge(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But the choice of a basic foot here would be an arbitrary one, not reflecting anything in the reader’s experience, and the impression which such an analysis would give of a highly complex and deviant metre would be quite false. The rhythm is bold and strong, with the firm four-beat structure of the ballad or nursery rhyme. Some theorists would argue that such verse is not in the accentual-syllabic tradition in which the bulk of English poetry is written, and which imposes restrictions on both the placing of stresses and the number of syllables, but in a quite distinct form, closer to the strong-stress metre of medieval alliterative verse in its indifference to the number of syllables in the line; but to argue this is to drive a wedge between metrical types which shade into one another, and, by denying English literary verse its intimate links with the popular tradition, to ignore one of its great sources of vitality. We need a way of talking about poetic rhythm which will be useful for all varieties of English verse, which will reflect their interconnections and their dependence on the rhythmic characteristics of the language itself, and which will make sharp distinctions only where these are genuine perceptions experienced by the reader. Even in its analysis of the type of metre most amenable to foot-prosody, in which the number of syllables in the line is strictly controlled, the classical approach and the theory of two distinct ‘levels’ is apt to be misleading. Consider the following lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, shown with both the basic metre and substitutions: If metrical analysis is to be a valuable part of the criticism of these lines, it must show the contribution of the rhythm to the shifting emotional colours; it must capture, for instance, the heavy regularity of the second and fourth lines, with their inward-turning grief, and the contrasting rhythmic dislocation that accompanies the outburst of violent despair in the third line...
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But because the line lengths are now very irregular we do not feel that the rhythmic properties of each line are parallel to one another. It is this extra regularity which makes metre what it is. Metred poems, then, are poems where the line lengths and rhythmical patterns within the lines are close enough for us to feel a basic pattern of equivalence from line to line. This is why explaining how the different poetic metres work is an important aspect of explaining rhythm in poetry. 5.4 Different kinds of metre Metre in English verse is a level of organisation which is based upon a two—term contrast between positions in a line which should contain strong and weak syllables. Let us use the traditional terms ictus (/) and remiss (X) to refer to these strong and weak positions respectively. If we restrict ourselves for the moment to a situation where these two positions are only allowed to contain one syllable each, we can see that there are two possible patterns of weak and strong events, X /('di dum') and / X ('dum di'). These two elementary patterns are essential to an understanding of English metrics. The first pattern, X / ('di dum') is traditionally called the iamb and the / X ('dum di') pattern is called the trochee. The basic metrical unit of one strong plus one weak (ictus plus remiss) position is traditionally referred to as the metrical foot. Thus we can find iambic feet, trochaic feet, and also other combinations when the basic unit is expanded to include more than two syllables in the remiss of the foot (the metrical foot must have one and only one ictus syllable, but can normally have from zero to three remiss syllables). Below I list, with illustrative examples, the major foot structures that can be found with any regularity. Some are much more common than others, the iambic foot being by far the most widespread in English verse...
