Literature
Trimeter
Trimeter is a metrical line in poetry consisting of three metrical feet. Each foot typically contains three syllables, resulting in a total of nine syllables per line. This form of meter is commonly used in various poetic traditions and can create a sense of rhythm and musicality in the verse.
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6 Key excerpts on "Trimeter"
Further more, two people with a similar accent are perfectly capable of disagreeing over the due emphasis which should be placed upon individual words within a given line of poetry. The underlying problem here is that we 74 Poetry expect to find metrical analysis, with its pseudo-scientific jargon, to be an exact science.And it’s not.While it is unlikely that one can generate the same number of metrical accounts of a given line of poetry as the number of readings which critical ingenuity can provide for the meaning of a literary work, it is perfectly possible to generate two – and sometimes more – equally plausible metrical accounts of a line of verse. A contentious line from Paradise Lost will not be interpreted prosodologically from as wide a range of positions as, say, the debates over the significance of Satan in the poem; however, critics can, and do, quarrel over the way in which a particular line can be scanned. Prosodological analysis of metre, like so much else in literary criticism, is to a certain extent a matter of opinion. Metre gestures towards objective scientific analysis but remains an art with a significant degree of subjectivity within it. 4.2 the key metrical units The core terms in the study of metre are syllable , foot and stress . A syllable is a word, or portion of a word, made by a single effort of the organs of speech. It either forms a word or is an element of a longer word; thus, in the previous sentence, ‘a’, ‘is’, ‘word’ are examples of single-syllable words (monosyllables), whilst the two-syllable words ‘portion’, ‘single’ and ‘organs’ are disyllabic and ‘syllable’ itself polysyllabic (that is, a word containing three or more syllables). A line of verse, like all other examples of language in use, subdivides into syllables. It can contain almost any practical number of syllables up to eighteen (though longer lines than this, though freakishly unusual, have been used).
eBook - PDFOur Secret Discipline
Yeats and Lyric Form
- Helen Vendler(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Belknap Press(Publisher)
VII i The Nationalist Measure: Trimeter-Quatrain Poems In Yeats’s poems, Trimeter lines appear by themselves in many stanza forms—as the second and fourth lines of the ballad stanza, for example. In this chapter I examine only entire poems (or segments of sequences) writ-ten in Trimeter, 1 and, within this class, only the subset of seventeen poems that exhibit “perfect” quatrain rhyme, abab. 2 First attempted in 1913 with “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” abab Trimeter-quatrain form acquired for Yeats, I believe, an independent nationalist meaning, first with respect to “aristocratic” women, and then also with respect to “heroic” or “noble” men. The most famous of such poems is “Easter 1916”; other well-known ones are “The Fisherman” and part III of “The Tower,” Yeats’s poetic last will and testament. (The appendix to this chapter gives a com-plete list of the seventeen Trimeter-quatrain poems, with their respective sub-forms—number of stanzas, types of rhymes, and so forth.) Why did Yeats shape one group of his poems in Trimeter quatrains rhyming abab? In casting “raw material” into metrical form, he certainly did not (as this book exists to show) decide on forms at random. In the preced-ing chapters I have tried to explain what some traditional forms meant to him, and how he renewed them. Now I turn to the Trimeter quatrain, to see what it is possible to say about how Yeats used this form, and what sort of material invited or required it. Iambic Trimeter poems in alternately rhymed abab quatrains (hence-forth, for brevity, “ abab Trimeters” or “Trimeter quatrains”) have no distin-guished history in English verse before Yeats. Hundreds of ballads, hymns, and lyrics exist in the form of alternating tetrameter and Trimeter (“God rest ye merry gentlemen / Let nothing you dismay”), but rhyming iambic Trimeter is rare. 3 When, as a girl, I first read a poem in sustained Trimeter, I found it thrilling; I had never before encountered this striking rhythm.
eBook - PDF- John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst, John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst(Authors)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Triple falling rhythm, created by dactyls (xuu xuu etc.), is so rare in English that its effects, while unpredictable, tend to sound very contrived. Experiment with it, to see and hear for yourself, but be warned that most people find it unwieldy, and success at any length elusive. In conclusion -in the session(s) of this workshop you've been learning to describe poetic rhythms and metres, and modulat-ing them by manipulating the basic foot and the line length. Before about 1900 most poems in English were written fairly strictly, in accordance (within conventional limits of variation) with a prescribed metre and/ or form; and before the Jazz Age both professional and public opinion located much of a poet's skill in the dexterity with which they observed prescription. In this century free combinations of metres and the exploration of variant forms have been powerful and popular -which means WRITING VERSE 177 a new way of using metre formally, but commonly uses the same basic elements as before. By considering the proportions of duple and triple, rising and falling rhythms in your own work -however it got itself written in the first place -you will gain access to one of your poem's main technical control-boards. 3 Limericks Besides the quatrains of songs, the limerick is probably the best known and most widely composed poetic form. Almost always comic, often obscene and/ or witty, and trippingly memorable, it was popularised by Edward Lear (1812-88; see N942 for examples); and in the twentieth century has gone from strength to strength.
- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Now let us restrict our discussion for a moment to lines of poetry with iambic ·('di dum') feet. Normally, iambic lines will consist of more than one iamb, and poets can choose how 132 Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose many iambs to have as the basic line-template for particular poems. One particular form has dominated English poetry since the fifteenth-century, however, namely a line with five iambs, as in the following example: Example 2 X I X I X I X I X I Then tooke the angrie witch her golden cup X I X I X I X IX I Which still she bore, replete with magick artes; (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 14) This kind of line is found throughout the verse of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, for example, and is called iambic pentameter (literally 'iambic five metre'). We might call the iambic pentameter line the metrical norm for English poetry from the fifteenth-century onwards. Other possibilities can, of course, be found: 1. Manometer 2. Dimeter 3. Trimeter 4. Tetrameter 5. Pentameter 6. Hexameter one foot line two feet lines three feet lines four feet lines five feet lines six feet lines These 'number of feet' combinations can in principle involve any kind of foot as the basic unit, and various stanza forms can have patterns involving differing numbers of feet from line to line (for example, Keats's 'Song', which we analysed in 2.2. 7, has tetrameters in the first and third lines of each verse and Trimeters in the second and fourth lines). But it is the iamb in units of five which is the dominant English verse form. Exercise 1 (a) Re-examine Keats's 'Song' in 2.2.7. What is the rhythmical effect created by having a 'missing foot' in the second and fourth lines? (b) Below are a series of extracts from poems. Work out, for each example, what the basic foot unit is and how many feet there are to the line.
eBook - PDFFormal Approaches to Poetry
Recent Developments in Metrics
- B. Elan Dresher, Nila Friedberg, B. Elan Dresher, Nila Friedberg(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The ancient iambic Trimeter: a disbalanced harmony* Maria-Kristiina Lotman 1. The origin and the metrical structure of iambic meters There is a general understanding that there were no iambic structures in Indo-European metrics: in those meters the con guration of accents had no role at all; quantity was regulated only at the end of a verse (the so-called quantita-tive verse-end), and, accordingly, the smallest symmetrical unit was not a verse foot, but a verse line. Iambic meters did not evolve until the gradual regulation of long and short syllables in Ionian quantitative metrics (see White 1912: IX), whereby iambic Trimeter became the most important meter. Its creator (or at least the rst classic author to use it) is traditionally thought to be the 7th century lyri-cal poet Archilochos, but already in the archaic period it was associated with quite different themes: from the serious politics to the satirical and even scur-rilous poetry, which, supposedly, has also given the meter its name. Trimeter appears occasionally as the meter of epitaphs and dedicatory inscriptions (West 1982: 39–40). The metrical structure of iambic Trimeter is based on the alternation of short and long syllables, whereby long (and later also short) syllables can be resolved into two short ones. The result of this license is an unusual verse with complicated structure, where not only the number of syllables, but also the number of moras is unstable: the duration of the unresolved iambic foot is three moras, the dactylic foot which is the result of a resolution of a strong position is also tri-moraic, and the “anapaestic” foot resulting from the resolution of a weak position has a duration of four moras. By the clas-sical period the variations of the iambic Trimeter are already so free that, for example, in the case of comic Trimeter it is often dif cult to nd any iambic basis at all. Thus, the schematic representation of the meter involves several complications.
eBook - PDF- Peter Robinson(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
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. In all but the simplest of jingles, the meter and rhythm, template and performance, are by no means the same. This is because there are more Richard Wollheim draws a distinction between knowing a language and having an artistic style in Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . His distinction, if applied to poetry, is complicated by language speakers having prosodic style in their usage informed by knowledge of lullabies, chants and other folk poetry with what he calls ‘psycho-motor reality’. Seymour Chatman takes it as axiomatic ‘that meter is a species of rhythm’ in A Theory of Meter (The Hague: Mouton, ), . Though he does not confuse the terms, I prefer them separated for clarity of exposition. For an account of why the terms meter and rhythm can be contrasted and where the contrast is inherited from, see John Hollander’s account of the Greek metrikoi and rhythmikoi in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. The Sound Sense of Poetry than two levels of stress in naturally pronounced English. Even in jingles the distinct characters of the individual syllables will give variety to the simplification of such sounds into the abstractly alternating ‘ti tum ’ of, in this instance, iambic metrical feet. These feet are similarly abstract inter- pretations attributed to formed phrasings. Intuiting a meter may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient to hearing the poem.
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