Poetic Meter

So if it isn’t completely obvious to my half a dozen readers, I have a thing for poetry.  I go wild reading it; although prose makes up the bulk of my reading, there is music in poetry that transcends time.  Even when the subject grows old and unfamiliar, the right placement of words can still speak to you, and if the message is not clear in your mind the words will still sing in your heart and remain with you for hours, days, weeks, or years.

Sadly, while isn’t dead in these modern days, it has been crippled in our generation.  It’s not really taught in schools, and even when it is, modern poetry tends to try and be the complete opposite of what the classics were.  Rhyme and meter are talked about, but every English or writing class I took regarded them as nice tools but could be easily set aside and forgotten.  And that’s just sad.  Meter and rhyme are the two elements that make poetry special and give it that music that’s so memorable and meaningful to us.  It is my opinion that good poetry has to have at least one of those elements; otherwise, it’s not really poetry at all.

For me, the more difficult of the two is meter, which is a real shame because meter is what gives rhythm to the body of your work.  For those who may not know what meter is, let me show you by one of the most famous opening lines for a poem ever:

“Once u/pon a/ midnight/ dreary,/ while I/ pondered,/ weak and/ weary,” (“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe)

If you study carefully this poem, you’ll see that the entire poem follows a certain rhythm, or a pattern of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.  This stressed-unstressed meter is called a trochee.  Most of the poem is written in trochaic octameter, which means that there are eight trochees in a line, as I’ve tried to show with the slashes above.

“Shall I/ compare/ thee to/ a sum/mer’s day?” (“Sonnet XVIII” by William Shakespeare)

This is a whole new type of meter called iambic pentameter.  An iamb is the opposite of a trochee, in that it follows an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern.  Pentameter means the iamb occurs five times in a line.

As I said, this is much harder for me in crafting poetry, and it’s something I hope to work on in the coming months.  Rhyming is simple for me; I’ve been doing it for years.  But for now, that’s become secondary because I really want to master this particular element, as you might observe from yesterday’s poem, in which I didn’t bother to rhyme at all but I was trying to establish a rhythm using an iambic hexameter.

Just a note for anyone who cares: I really liked how I did with iambs.  Just reading over it again, there’s one or two spots where it feel apart, but overall, I kept to the rhythm pretty well.  If I could do it over again, though, I would not have done a hexameter.  Doing a straight pentameter, or even a mix of pentameter and tetrameter, would have tightened my sentences and helped me convey a more focused idea with fewer words.  The thing I’m learning is that longer meters are good for telling stories, while shorter meters seem to help in conveying ideas or simple images.