Literature
Meter
Meter in literature refers to the rhythmic structure of a poem, determined by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. It creates a pattern of beats or accents, contributing to the overall musicality and flow of the poem. Common meters include iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, and dactylic hexameter, each with its own distinct rhythm and effect on the reader.
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10 Key excerpts on "Meter"
4 Metre and rhythm Here are two words with the same meaning:‘prosody’ and ‘metrics’. Both mean the study of the art of versification, in particular the analysis of metre, rhythm, rhyme and stanza. Rhyme and stanzaic form are discussed elsewhere in this book, so this chapter confines itself to the study of metre and rhythm, the sound-patterns evident in the aural reception of poetry. In fact, as far as poetry is concerned, rhythm and metre are difficult concepts to differentiate one from another, and many critics use them as synonymous or as easily interchangeable terms. This is not to deny that the two concepts are distinguishable in the overall literary context: ‘metre’ is a term which is confined to the study of poetry, whilst ‘rhythm’ is a looser concept, with a significance outwith the formal boundaries of verse. One can certainly analyse the rhythm of a poem, but one can also speak of the rhythm of a prose essay, of a piece of oratory, or, for that matter, of the ‘rhythmical’ sound made by a moving steam engine. Poetry is but a specialised form of language, and all language has rhythm; the difference is that poetry – free verse excepted – has a discernible rhythmic regularity. What sets poetry apart is the consistency of its patterning. Poets can – and do – deviate from their ‘base metre’ for poetic effect (as discussed below), but it is this regularity of sound effect which is one of the key distinctions between poetry and prose. It is helpful to think of metre as a subset of the larger concept of rhythm and, consequently, to consider formal rhythmical analysis of recurring poetic sound-patterning as indistinguishable from metrical analysis. Thus metre is a specific form of rhythm, and might best be defined as ‘the measurable sound-pattern evident, in varying degrees of regularity, in a line of poetry’.
eBook - PDF- Peter Robinson(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Fur- ther, hearing and responding to their rhythms, we do not simultaneously hear their Meters as distinct (which may be why the two terms, Meter and rhythm, tend so frequently to be confused, or confusingly substituted for each other, in writings on prosody). Rather we remember regularities and irregularities from previous instances in the poem being read, or in other poems already known. Meter in poetry is not, as it were, a bass line existing under the treble of the speaking voice. To illustrate the Meter of a poem, if there is one, it will be necessary to exaggerate the stressed syllables, giving them a prominence equally different from the similarly weakened syllables. Doing this, the line’s sound sense is thoroughly denatured to make a point. There is usually, as I say, when reading a poem, only one instrument producing a single stream of naturally sounded human phonemes. This is why poems in regular or regularly varying Meters often place guide versions of the metrical scheme in lines that come next to expressively discrepant variations on it. But the regular pattern is not heard simultaneously behind an irregular variation; rather, tension is produced by comparing and contrasting in memory temporally distinct verbal experiences of theme and variation. To hear and experience the rhythm you have to read the poem out loud (or attentively listen to it being read), monitoring while you do what you are hearing and feeling in body-and-mind. Rhythm is experi- enced as muscular, aural and conceptual. The rhythm of a poem is an experience of the patterned sound it makes when read aloud; any identifiable pattern, regularised in hinted at binary alternations of stress, is its Meter. As already noted, the Meter is an abstract template that can, with varying degrees of plausibility, depending on the complexity of the cases, be identified by analyzing a poem’s lines and phrases.
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
metre. As we will see below, this level of rhythmic structuring is indicated by the fact that lines of poetry, unlike prose, do not extend out to the right-hand edge of the page. Because the possession of metre is one of the basic ways in which poetry can be distinguished from prose, it will be important to examine it in some detail. Some traditional treatments of metre have tended to assume that rhythm and metre are the same thing. But as we saw in 5.2, all language has rhythm, and so although metre is an extremely important aspect of poetic rhythm, it is not the only factor involved.The study of metre has had contrasting receptions by poets and students of poetry. Many of my students find metrics tedious to study. This is probably because metrical structure is the level of poetic organisation which is least directly connected with meaning, and because the study of metre is a complicated, and at times difficult, matter. Indeed, there are still a number of disagreements among experts on rhythm and metre about fairly basic aspects of their study. Poets, on the other hand, appear to find the study of poetic rhythm fascinating and central to their art. An indication of this is the number of well known poets who have written essays or longer works on the subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Bridges and T. S. Eliot, for example. D. H. Lawrence, though not an analyst of metre, eloquently captures its rhythmic regularity and his feeling for its importance in the following extract from a letter:I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre. (Letter to Edward Marsh, November 1913)Why is poetry metred? Firstly, metrication is one of the formal features which sets poetry off from other kinds of writing; and in earlier times particularly, when poetry was reserved for special subject matters like love and nature, metrication was a formal signal of importance. Even today, when the subject matters of poetry are much more various, writing a text in metred lines appears to say 'I have something significant to tell you'. But a more interesting reason is the one mentioned at the beginning of this section: the addition of a background metrical scheme to a text adds a new rhythmical dimension, not generally found in prose,2
- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
5.3 Metre Poetry has more marked, and more complex, rhythmic effects than ordinary language because it has an extra layer c.if rhythmic structuring, which is usually called metre. As we will see below, this level of rhythmic structuring is indicated by the fact that lines of poetry, unlike prose, do not extend out to the right- hand edge of the page. Because the possession of metre is one of the basic ways in which poetry can be distinguished from prose, it will be important to examine it in some detail. Some traditional treatments of metre have tended to assume that rhythm and metre are the same thing. But as we saw in 5.2, all language has rhythm, and so although metre is an extremely important aspect of poetic rhythm, it is not the only factor involved. 128 Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose The study of metre has had contrasting receptions by poets and students of poetry. Many of my students find metrics tedious to study. This is probably because metrical structure is the level of poetic organisation which is least directly con- nected with meaning, and because the study of metre is a complicated, and at times difficult, matter. Indeed, there are still a number of disagreements among experts on rhythm and metre about fairly basic aspects of their study. Poets, on the other hand, appear to find the study of poetic rhythm fascinating and central to their art. An indication of this is the number of well known poets who have written essays or longer works on the subject, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Bridges and T. S. Eliot, for example. D. H. Lawrence, though not an analyst of metre, eloquently captures its rhythmic regularity and his feeling for its importance in the following extract from a letter: I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre.
eBook - PDF- Andrew Hodgson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The system of arranging these patterns of emphasis is known as metre. ‘Metre’, as Timothy Steele says in one of the most helpful surveys of the subject, is ‘organized rhythm’. 32 ‘So what?’ we might think. Let’s pause over a short example to think about what metre – the organisation of stress into patterns of rising and falling emphasis – actually does. Below is an impish little poem by What Are the Rhythms within the Lines? 75 Matthew Prior (1718), arranged according to the four beats to the line pattern we mentioned above: A True Maid ‘No, no; for my virginity,’ ‘When I lose that,’ says Rose, ‘I’ll die:’ ‘Behind the elms, last night,’ cried Dick, ‘Rose, were you not extremely sick?’ The stressed and unstressed syllables fall into a regularly alternating sequence. What does this regularity bring? First, it tells us that we are reading a poem. Metre is a way of priming us to respond to the writing in a certain way: the words are not presenting themselves as a historical record but as an imagined conversation; they have been elevated out of the randomness of everyday speech into artistic order. That order purges the extraneous detail which might characterise prose: the above exchange is so funny because it is so snappy – we are presented with two voices cutting against one another, and no other supporting information; the metrical framework makes the voices self-sufficient; it shows, rather than tells us, that Dick’s witty retort was promptly delivered and perfectly matched. We are left to imagine, too, the various actions or utterances prior to the beginning of the poem which Rose’s ‘No’s might answer to. In disciplining the language into a regular pattern, the metre also intensifies its suggestive- ness.
eBook - PDFRoots of Lyric
Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics
- Andrew Welsh(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
The roots of Meter, he felt, lie in those external rhythms that have always been used to form language to the measures of music: The rhythmic form of verse is the same in its essential principles as that of the music of song, from which it is, in fact, derived in the first instance. In some kinds of verse, it is true, the form is much more remote from that of song than in others. For example, our English blank verse and the French Alexandrine line have been made, more or less deliberately, as unlike song as verse can ever be; and indeed all verse meant to be used in long poems or to be spoken in anything like the level of tone of prose discourse must have been treated in the same way. Still, the changes that have been intro-duced into our spoken verse, as we may call it, have not affected the fundamental principles of rhythm which it derives from song; they are merely additional procedures which restrict the operation of these prin-ciples within certain limits, without changing them in any way or adding new ones to them. Meanwhile a great deal of poetry continues and will always continue to be made as much like song as possible. Dancing and R H Y T H M music are the arts of rhythm; they have nothing to learn about their own business from poetry; poetry, on the other hand, has derived all it knows about rhythm from them. The best way to approach the study of the rhythm of verse, therefore, is by way of the form of song. 1 Poetic Meter is seen here as fundamentally musical meas-ure, and it is best notated by time signatures, bar lines, notes which indicate syllable duration, and rests. Both versions of poetic Meter recognize that a metrical pattern does not tell us the whole story of the rhythm in a line of poetry. In fact, the most valued effects of Meter in poetry occur not when the language corresponds with docile regularity to the metrical pattern, but on those oc-casions when rhythms in the language challenge and con-flict with that regular pattern.
eBook - PDFHow to Write About Poetry
A Pocket Guide
- Brendan Cooper(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
Rhyme is harmony, unity, and connection – not simply the “jangling sound of like endings” that Milton dismissed it as, but a place where meanings can come together, merg- ing in the alchemy of word-sounds. Measuring Rhythms: The Importance of Metre All language has rhythm. The particular sound patterns and weightings of different languages greatly vary, but the patterns are always there. In the English language, we tend to register these patterns in terms of “stress”; more pre- cisely, in poetry, we identify and measure which syllables are stressed, or emphasised, within words and sentences. Let us take, for instance, a simple statement: “I brushed my teeth as usual this morning”. If we pay some attention to the rhythm of syllables here, and note which ones are 42 Chapter 3 naturally emphasised, a pattern quickly becomes clear. “I brushed my teeth as usual this morning”. Brushed is a stressed syllable, as is teeth, as is the first syllable of usual, and the first syllable of morning. These are just the sylla- bles that we naturally stress as we sound out or speak these words (try sounding out the same sentence, stressing only the syllables my, as, and this – you’ll see how unnatural and difficult this feels). When talking about “metre” in poetry, all that is really meant is how the natural stress rhythms of the language might be measured. Careful poets pay care- ful attention to every element of the language they use, including its rhythm; how the rhythm is organised – the metre of the poem – can form a significant part of a poem’s overall meaning and effect. There are many different ways in which poets use metre, but the best place for us to start is with iambic metre. This is, by a very long way, the most common metre in English poetry. It is made up of individual iambs, a term that refers to a two-syllable unit whereby the stress falls on the second syllable: de-DUM. Examples of iambic indi- vidual words in English are today, refer, lament, again, enough.
eBook - PDF- Seymour Chatman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The instruments of percussion play comparatively minor roles in the orchestra, but almost half the English consonants are predominately noises: /f/, /v/, /0/, /d/, /s/, /s/, /z/, /£/, /6/, /j/, and /h/. Music, finally, possesses a propulsive or vector-like quality: one note implies the next, and so on in a string, until some satisfying cadence and conclusion wind all the implications up. 9 It is driven along by self-created rhythmic and harmonic compulsions that demand resolution. Meter, too, is propelled, but in a comparatively simple way. At the third foot of a line which follows a series of pentaMeter lines, for example, there is pressure for two more feet to occur. After the ninth line of a twelve-line stanza we expect three more lines. These are very simple resolutions compared to the complex sets of alternatives or branchings that music engenders. Meter's pressure is too simple to be interesting outside of the poem. * See Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), Chapters I and II. 190 THE FUNCTION OF Meter The significant urgencies in poetry develop from the meaning, or from meaning expectancy conjoined with metrical expectancy. What is chiefly interesting, even exciting, is the tension that develops between the growing pressure of the sense to work itself out, and our knowledge that the Meter has a preassigned limit which must ultimately end it. Can the poet manage to get both things done at the same moment? And even after we have learned in our first reading that he can, we never cease to take pleasure in this demon-stration of getting said what must be said within the proper number of syllables and with ictus disposed in the proper fashion. (I don't mean proper in a prescriptive sense, as an application of rules from without, but rather as the working out of the poem's inner, organic constraints.) It is in this sense, if any, that the musical analogy has some value.
eBook - PDF- Manfred Bierwisch, Karl Erich Heidolph(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
MORRIS HALLE ON Meter AND PROSODY INTRODUCTION The utterances that make up a piece of metrical verse exhibit regularities in the sequen-tial arrangement of their phonetic, morphological or syntactic components which are not found consistently in normal everyday language. In composing a poem in a particular Meter, the author may, therefore, be said to select from among the utter-ances of the language those that conform to the Meter which he has chosen for his poem. By characterizing in this manner the poet's activity — or rather one aspect of this activity — I intend to bring out the distinction between the Meter of a poem, which is a sequential pattern of abstract entities, and the MAPPING or ACTUALIZATION of this Meter by concrete sequences of words, syllables, or sounds that make up the lines of the poem. This distinction is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of metrics and should constantly be kept in mind. In what follows I shall consider each of the two aspects in turn. MAPPING RULES Perhaps the simplest sequential pattern of the type that interests us here is one in which the pattern is constituted by entities of a single type and only their number is subjected to some constraint. Examples of such patterns are XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX It is obvious that there is an infinity of arrangements of physical objects that can be said to exhibit these patterns: flowers in a flower bed, desks in a classroom, windows on the side of a house, etc. The examples just cited are all of spatial arrangement objects, but it is equally easy to visualize the same patterns implemented in temporal sequences : a series of drum
eBook - PDF- Thomas Cable(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
5. The Modes of English Meter 5.1 The Central Rift in English Prosody In a landmark essay that clarified and crystallized some of the most im-portant issues of metrics, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley provided a historical rationale for the major English Meters from the sev-enth century to the present. 1 The logic and symmetry of their explanation (which, as they pointed out, had been stated by others) no less than the force of their writing gave an imposing authority to the idea that there have been two central traditions: the two main alternative principles of English Meter . . . are actually two kinds of stress—strong stress (the Old English, the Piers Plowman tradition) and syllable stress (the Chaucer-Tennyson tradition) (p. 588). The idea is one that gains strength from repetition throughout the essay until it seems almost self-evident to any-one who has read English poetry and reflected on it: The important principle of stress or accent in English verse is, however, a rather ambiguous thing, for there are in fact two main kinds of stress Meter in English: the very old (and recently revived) Meter of strong stress with indeterminate or relatively indeterminate number of syllables between the stresses, and the other Meter, of the great English art tradition (Chaucer to Tennyson), which is a syllable-stress Meter, that is, a Meter of counted syllables and of both major and minor stresses, (pp. 591—92) The recently revived parenthesis refers to nineteenth and twenticth-century poets, especially Eliot, whose form in Four Quartets is something different from the syllable-stress Meter that began with Chaucer. It should be clear from the previous chapters in this book that I do not find the anal-ogy with Eliot relevant to the pre-Conquest verse-form. However, a com-parison of Eliot's line, or Whitman's line, and the line of the fourteenth-century alliterative poets is another matter.
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