The Everything Writing Poetry Book by Tina D. Eliopulos Page B

appear in two-syllable words, so consulting a dictionary would tell you which of the syllables is stressed.

    The names of the feet come from ancient Greece, and some actually have to do with hands and feet. For example, dactyl means finger and pyrrhic is a form of dance. However, in Greek, stresses have to do with the length of the syllable. For example, the one-syllable word strength is long, or “stressed,” and the syllable in the word pip is short, or “unstressed.”
    Now, look at the stressed and unstressed syllables of the second line: “And DIG DEEP TRENCHes in thy BEAUTy's FIELD.” The same rules seem to apply to the stressed syllables here—all but one belong to nouns and verbs, with that one ( deep ) being an adjective. The unstressed syllables in both lines seem to be the least important syllables—suffixes, prefixes, or words like conjunctions, helping verbs, and prepositions.
    Finding Patterns
    At this point, you should be able to detect any patterns in the stressed and unstressed syllables. For one thing, if you count the number of syllables in the first two lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, you come up with ten in each. Noticing this pattern, you find that Shakespeare deliberately chose this arrangement. Now, go back and reference the chart of all the different feet for a moment. All of the feet listed have either two or three syllables. Since two goes evenly into ten five times, you can use lines to mark the divisions as follows:
    When FORT|y WINT|ers shall | besiege | thy BROW,
And DIG | DEEP TRENCH|es in|thy BEAUT|y's FIELD ,
    You should be able to see that most of the syllable pairs (seven out of ten) contain an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed. To confirm this pattern, take a look at the next two lines:
    Thy YOUTH'S | PROUD LIV | ery | so GAZED | on NOW,
Will be | a TAT| ter'd WEED| of SMALL | WORTH HELD:
    In these lines, too, six out of ten syllable pairs follow the unstressed/stressed pattern. On the chart, this pattern of unstressed/stressed syllables is called an iamb . The dominant foot pattern for the poem, as analyzed so far, is therefore iambic .

    In English verse, though the language itself fights regularity, the most widely used foot pattern is the iamb. Many of the older forms still used in English poetry, such as the sonnet and the ballad, lend themselves most easily to this foot pattern. Even blank verse operates with it.
    Shakespeare has used other two-syllable foot patterns here: spondees and pyrrhics. The reason is that English does not lend itself to a regular foot pattern. Forcing the entire poem to hold to a single foot pattern would make it sound unnatural. Shakespeare therefore allowed the spondees and pyrrhics to remain so the poem would approximate spoken English.
    Measuring Meter
    Once you have found the stressed and unstressed syllables, and once you have found the foot patterns of a poem, you can begin to look for a meter. Meter is another word for measure . So when you are looking for a poem's meter, you are measuring its lines by the number of feet they contain. Therefore, measuring the lines of a poem is much like measuring the walls of a room. But it will be much easier once you become familiar with the tools you are using. To do this, go back to the four lines that you have analyzed from Shakespeare's poem so far:
    When FORT | y WINT | ers shall | beSIEGE | thy BROW,
And DIG | DEEP TRENCH | es in | thy BEAUT | y's FIELD,
Thy YOUTH'S | PROUD LIV | ery | so GAZED | on NOW,
Will be | a TAT | ter'd WEED | of SMALL | WORTH HELD:
    Each line has been divided into five feet. This five-foot meter has a special name, which, like the names of the feet, comes from Greek. In Greek, the word penta means “five,” so any line with five feet is written in pentameter . The following chart names the meters most commonly used in English poetry:
    â€¢ Monometer: one foot in a line
    â€¢ Dimeter: two feet in a line
    â€¢ Trimeter: three feet