Companion to the Thread "On Meter"

[Angeline]

Perhaps you've looked at Tzara's new thread On Meter (and if you haven't check it out: it's a great addition to the forum's poetry resources). I made the thread sticky so it doesn't get lost, but I also thought it'd be helpful to have a companion thread where we can apply the information he provides and practice writing metered poetry.

This thread is not intended to supplant On Meter in any way: if you have questions or comments I'm sure they're welcome in the original thread. I just wanted to offer a space where we can practice together, learn and help each other. Much of what Tzara addresses is a lot for me personally to take in and apply. Writing accentual verse is a struggle for me, but I believe it's an important skill for a poet to have, plus I know if I practice I'll improve. Also I don't want to be on this struggle bus alone!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

A personal observation: I have always found pentameter to be a bit of a contrivance. Quadrameter/tetrameter seems to fit my talking cadence more accurately.

 

[Angeline]

A personal observation: I have always found pentameter to be a bit of a contrivance. Quadrameter/tetrameter seems to fit my talking cadence more accurately.

I agree about tetrameter. I find when I write blank verse I almost always gravitate to tetrameter. It's just the way the lines occur to me.

 

[Angeline]

So here's my first practice of accentual verse. I screwed it up (of course lol), but im learning.

So I tried to use "star light star bright" as a model but change the words to my own. First I wrote this:

Deep sea, blue sea
Dark wave that rolls to me
I hear your call, I feel your spray
Upon sand where I stand this day

Well that's not right. It doesn't mirror "star light star bright." I messed up the last two lines. First off they should have the same end rhymes as lines 1 and 2. Why did I screw that up? I started trying to write a poem instead of thinking about where I want stresses to fall. Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive: you can learn to think about rhythm and poetry simultaneously. Right Tzara? Waeponwifestre?

I do not normally think that way when I write, except when I struggle to produce a form that requires it. That may not seem a big deal, but for me it's a revelation. I can learn to do this. I think.

Anyway one small step for Angeline; one giant leap for...ok nevermind.

 

[Waeponwifestre]

So I tried writing an elegiac couplet in quantitative verse. I thiiiiink it works. It is not easy though and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason it never really caught on in English because it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Here’s what I got though. Here’s the couplet and how I intended the scansion.

Oh Mars, you rage, you fight, you crave strife. “Glorious” strife.
Venus though, loves you still. Love, not war, Mars, is the key.

| Oh Mars, | You rage, | you fight, | you crave | strife. “Glori- | ous” strife. |

| Venus though | loves you | still. | Love, not war, | Mars, is the | key |

I actually tried to teach myself Latin at one point and I can very easily hear how those classical meters work very well in that language. The long vowels in Latin are pronounced exactly the same as short vowels you just say them twice as long. English, though, what we call long vowels and short vowels are actually just completely different phonemes so it’s just way more up to interpretation and subtle.

Fun experiment, but I think English poetry works a lot better utilizing stuff like alliteration and stress as opposed to vowel length.

Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive: you can learn to think about rhythm and poetry simultaneously. Right Tzara? Waeponwifestre?

You know my gut instinct reading this was to say - aren’t they the same thing? Which is kind of a glib answer and maybe not exactly true but I don’t think there’s a clear separation between the two.

Rhythm is just part of sound - and if you’re reading poetry there’s rhythm happening regardless. I think by thinking about it you’re just making yourself more conscious of what you’re already doing and able to control it better.

 

[Tzara]

So here's my first practice of accentual verse. I screwed it up (of course lol), but im learning.

So I tried to use "star light star bright" as a model but change the words to my own. First I wrote this:

Deep sea, blue sea
Dark wave that rolls to me
I hear your call, I feel your spray
Upon sand where I stand this day

Well that's not right. It doesn't mirror "star light star bright." I messed up the last two lines.

This is actually a pretty good example of accentual verse. I think you made a couple errors in marking the accents, but otherwise it is four strong beats per line. First, though, let me note that whether the lines rhyme or not (and the pattern of rhyme) is not relevant to it being accentual verse. "Star light star bright" does rhyme, but that has nothing to do with it being accentual verse.

The actual errors of marking the stressed syllables (at least to my ear) are in lines two and four. I'd mark it this way:

Deep sea, blue sea
Dark wave that rolls to me
I hear your call, I feel your spray
Upon sand where I stand this day​

So, four lines each with four strong beats. I'm thinking maybe you forgot to bold the first word in line two, so you had only marked three stresses. Note that, rhythmically, the first three lines follow the stress pattern of ""Star light star bright." So, so far so good.

The fourth line is a little different. For one thing, accents tend to fall on "significant" words (nouns, verbs, etc.) rather than words of less significance (articles, conjunctions, oftentimes prepositions). So I would move your accent from "where" (preposition) back to "sand" (strong basic noun). But if you're trying to mimic the stress pattern of "Star light star bright," it doesn't match either the starting stressed syllable or its subsequent alternating stressed and unstressed syllable pattern. To fix that, you'd need to alter the line a bit, for example like this:

Deep sea, blue sea
Dark wave that rolls to me
I hear your call, I feel your spray
Here on sand I stand this day​

I started trying to write a poem instead of thinking about where I want stresses to fall. Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive: you can learn to think about rhythm and poetry simultaneously. Right Tzara? Waeponwifestre?

As Waeponwifestre implies, it's just another thing to think about when constructing the poem—another aspect of sonority. Probably because you normally write free verse, the rhythm of what you are writing is of less importance to you than other aspects of the sound of the poem. For example, if you look at your example, there is considerable use of assonance (deep/sea/feel) and consonance/alliteration (deep/dark, rolls/call, sea/spray/sand/stand). You've probably worked with these literary devices so much that their use is kind of automatic when writing the poem. Rhythm seems harder because you haven't focused on it.

 

[Angeline]

This is actually a pretty good example of accentual verse. I think you made a couple errors in marking the accents, but otherwise it is four strong beats per line. First, though, let me note that whether the lines rhyme or not (and the pattern of rhyme) is not relevant to it being accentual verse. "Star light star bright" does rhyme, but that has nothing to do with it being accentual verse.

The actual errors of marking the stressed syllables (at least to my ear) are in lines two and four. I'd mark it this way:

​

Deep sea, blue sea​

Dark wave that rolls to me​

I hear your call, I feel your spray​

Upon sand where I stand this day​

So, four lines each with four strong beats. I'm thinking maybe you forgot to bold the first word in line two, so you had only marked three stresses. Note that, rhythmically, the first three lines follow the stress pattern of ""Star light star bright." So, so far so good.

The fourth line is a little different. For one thing, accents tend to fall on "significant" words (nouns, verbs, etc.) rather than words of less significance (articles, conjunctions, oftentimes prepositions). So I would move your accent from "where" (preposition) back to "sand" (strong basic noun). But if you're trying to mimic the stress pattern of "Star light star bright," it doesn't match either the starting stressed syllable or its subsequent alternating stressed and unstressed syllable pattern. To fix that, you'd need to alter the line a bit, for example like this:

​

Deep sea, blue sea​

Dark wave that rolls to me​

I hear your call, I feel your spray​

Here on sand I stand this day​

As Waeponwifestre implies, it's just another thing to think about when constructing the poem—another aspect of sonority. Probably because you normally write free verse, the rhythm of what you are writing is of less importance to you than other aspects of the sound of the poem. For example, if you look at your example, there is considerable use of assonance (deep/sea/feel) and consonance/alliteration (deep/dark, rolls/call, sea/spray/sand/stand). You've probably worked with these literary devices so much that their use is kind of automatic when writing the poem. Rhythm seems harder because you haven't focused on it.

I started to reply to Waeponwifestre but then saw your message and your last sentence summarizes what I was about to say. I haven't focused on rhythm when I write so for now it's a struggle. Practice will help that. I hope!

Your exegesis of my four lines is very helpful. Thinking about this is a process for me. I want hard rules I can apply and move on, but it doesn't work that way.

 

[Angeline]

Those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive: you can learn to think about rhythm and poetry simultaneously. Right Tzara? Waeponwifestre?

You know my gut instinct reading this was to say - aren’t they the same thing? Which is kind of a glib answer and maybe not exactly true but I don’t think there’s a clear separation between the two.

Rhythm is just part of sound - and if you’re reading poetry there’s rhythm happening regardless. I think by thinking about it you’re just making yourself more conscious of what you’re already doing and able to control it better.
______

I've been reading this morning and realizing how some imprecise assumptions are misleading me. For example (a big, bad one) I tend to think of sound and rhythm as the same thing. They're not. Rhythm is the beat. It dictates the movement across a line and (to some degree) the pace. Sound has to do with devices like alliteration (e.g., big bold beautiful) and assonance (e.g., seal, queen, repeat). So, for me, a musical metaphor might be that rhythm is a drum, sound a violin. They are intertwined and work together but are different things.

This is probably obvious to many of you but I need to write these things down to help myself understand them

 

[Waeponwifestre]

@Angeline I’m a big proponent of just saying things out loud and trying to reframe them in our own words. I think it really aids in understanding and a lot of times what’s obvious to one person isn’t to another.

This is how I see it - and bear in mind I have no real credentials in any field, I’m just someone that likes to read a lot. And I’m gonna step away from metaphors a bit and just talk about sound but also perception.

So, sound is essentially just vibrations traveling through air, right? If you say something, you’re basically just pushing air out of your lungs and out of your mouth (and nose) and depending on the movement of your throat, tongue and lips etc as you do that, it creates different variations in how the air is being pushed out, which makes the molecules in the air vibrate slightly differently as they go out into the world. The other end of that, though, is that we have ears with tiny cilia in them that are picking up these vibrations and your brain is then interpreting how these cilia are vibrating as sound.

So that’s kind of like how sound (in the context of speech) is working on a physical level. It doesn’t really say anything about poetry though, which is where the other end of this comes in.

There’s nothing inherent in the meaning of any of those vibrations, it is essentially just unorganized chaotic movement of molecules through air. But because we as humans are so good at pattern-recognition, even to the point of making patterns up out of pure chaos, we hear these mouth sounds as human speech and language and as we listen to it and learn it as we grow we derive meaning that we assign to it and hopefully the meaning we’re getting out of it is something close to what the speaker intends (but we can never really be sure), and that’s where I think the poetry part comes in.

Every aspect of poetry is just a pattern in that sound. Alliteration being a pattern in the sound we are creating in one aspect, rhyme in another and also rhythm as well. And by listening to people intentionally creating patterns that line up with those techniques and by practicing them, we can begin to consciously think about how we are formulating these sounds we’re making and organize them into a poem.

But I think the key takeaway is that nothing we are doing is separate from the sound (or the poem) - the sound is just there, whether we pay attention to it or not. It’s just more a question of whether we hear certain aspects of that sound as being organized in some fashion or not.

And then this kind of parlays into a larger point of like, realizing how you can manipulate these aspects of the sound to emphasize certain concepts or emotions that we as humans attach to these vibrations.

I hope this is kind of a helpful way to think of it?

Rhythm and meter in particular is just organizing the sounds we’re already making into these different patterns and just being more aware of the idea that we may hear things as being faster or slower and that carries a certain emotional weight just as a metaphor would or using alliteration to emphasize that certain words are linked.

But it’s also important to just kind of recognize it’s all cultural and learned. And as people of a certain culture we internalize a lot of the usual cultural associations with patterns in sound (and other mediums) and will recreate them unconsciously. And sometimes that makes for some really great art when divine inspiration hits. But learning to conform to (or break) these cultural assumptions we have about certain patterns in sound just helps us make better art when the divine inspiration isn’t hitting imo.

 

[Angeline]

Waeponwifestre you remind me of me. Interesting that, eh? We both love a good tangent.

I get what you're saying. It makes perfect sense and it occurs to me that we are well on the yellow brick road of what is poetry?. Uh oh!

I'm commenting based on explanations of reading I did today at The Poetry Foundation and a few other resources. So I could be wrong but my understanding is that sound in poetry does refer to devices we use that employ it like alliteration and assonance and that distinguishes it from rhythm (which yes is also sound but I'm referring to the explanations I've read). My understanding of rhythm in poetry is it means the beat. Obviously there are other qualities that make a poem a poem like the importance of the line, for example. But my way of differentiating those two qualities of rhythm and sound is like a beat versus a melody. They're separate things that come together to make music (ok Ornette Coleman might have disagreed lol, but you get my point).

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I agree about tetrameter. I find when I write blank verse I almost always gravitate to tetrameter. It's just the way the lines occur to me.

Exactly. That seems to be the way that I hear them, and it is certainly - when I pay attention to meter - the way they come out. It's a more natural sounding cadence, if you will. At least to me.

 

[Tzara]

So I tried writing an elegiac couplet in quantitative verse. I thiiiiink it works. It is not easy though and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason it never really caught on in English because it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Here’s what I got though. Here’s the couplet and how I intended the scansion.

Oh Mars, you rage, you fight, you crave strife. “Glorious” strife.
Venus though, loves you still. Love, not war, Mars, is the key.

| Oh Mars, | You rage, | you fight, | you crave | strife. “Glori- | ous” strife. |

| Venus though | loves you | still. | Love, not war, | Mars, is the | key |

I actually tried to teach myself Latin at one point and I can very easily hear how those classical meters work very well in that language. The long vowels in Latin are pronounced exactly the same as short vowels you just say them twice as long. English, though, what we call long vowels and short vowels are actually just completely different phonemes so it’s just way more up to interpretation and subtle.

Fun experiment, but I think English poetry works a lot better utilizing stuff like alliteration and stress as opposed to vowel length.

It is really hard. I tried writing the following as an example (scansion included):

​

Awkward Example in Elegiac Couplets,​

Trying to Mimic Quantitative Verse​

​

Rain falls in | sheets like some | cum·ber·some | art·i·fact | bleed·ing its | Life out,​

So that my | spir·it can't | last. || Love is con | sol·ing, but | hard·ly so | sweet.​

​

Would that the | weath·er was | more to my | lik·ing so | I could be | cheer·ful,​

Leav·en the | stress that I | feel. || Cher·ish my | place at your | feet.​

​

Slav·ish? Im | pos·si·ble! | Slur on de | vot·ion, the | hon·est per | fect·ion​

Ten·der·ness | brings in·to | love. || Still, I'm de | ject·ed by | rain.​

The biggest problem is, of course, that it doesn't make much sense. I was focusing so much on the meter that the literal meaning of the poem suffers. Secondly, despite my trying to hear long and short durations, I'm almost certainly basing this on stress—except for the truncation of the last foot of each line and the required caesura in the second line of each couplet, the poem is (as one might expect) pretty straightforward dactylic hexameter.

Ah well! An interesting thing to try, and it gives me something to post on the poem-a-week thread.

 

[Waeponwifestre]

Secondly, despite my trying to hear long and short durations, I'm almost certainly basing this on stress

So I ran into this problem when I was writing mine - because stress is so prominent and length so obscure and honestly kind of ambiguous in English its just really hard to unhear the stress patterns in favor of vowel length.

When I was writing mine I spent a few hours looking up resources for quantitative verse and found this essay I thought was pretty interesting. They proposed some rules for determining vowel length and how additional phonemes in a word can modify the length - I think what they said made a lot of sense and made it easier to hear and sound out when I was writing my couplet.

I think “Mars” makes for an interesting example I used. Because the “ah” vowel is considered a short vowel, you would think “Mars” would only count as having a short quantity - and it’s worth noting “mar” would definitely be short. But the addition of the /z/ phoneme at the end of the word lengthens it considerably in my opinion, so I opted to treat it as having a long quantity in my couplet.

I really tried to overpronounce and over-enunciate every word when I was writing my couplet, and even though honestly I’m still not sure if it works well as an example of quantitative verse, I feel like reading through it like that gives me the impression it does and helps me hear beyond the accentual stress pattern.

 

[Tzara]

So I ran into this problem when I was writing mine - because stress is so prominent and length so obscure and honestly kind of ambiguous in English its just really hard to unhear the stress patterns in favor of vowel length.

When I was writing mine I spent a few hours looking up resources for quantitative verse and found this essay I thought was pretty interesting. They proposed some rules for determining vowel length and how additional phonemes in a word can modify the length - I think what they said made a lot of sense and made it easier to hear and sound out when I was writing my couplet.

I think “Mars” makes for an interesting example I used. Because the “ah” vowel is considered a short vowel, you would think “Mars” would only count as having a short quantity - and it’s worth noting “mar” would definitely be short. But the addition of the /z/ phoneme at the end of the word lengthens it considerably in my opinion, so I opted to treat it as having a long quantity in my couplet.

I really tried to overpronounce and over-enunciate every word when I was writing my couplet, and even though honestly I’m still not sure if it works well as an example of quantitative verse, I feel like reading through it like that gives me the impression it does and helps me hear beyond the accentual stress pattern.

I had glanced at the essay, but was trying to read it on my phone rather than my laptop and my eyesight isn't so great anymore, making it hard to focus on the small print. It is an interesting discussion about the subject and how one might approach a quantitative verse in English.

Your "mars" example is a good one. I can easily see how sibilant phonemes would lengthen the pronunciation of a syllable (e.g. "bet" to "best", "cat" to "cast"). I think, though, that stress still so overpowers our sense of English that we can't really, or at least readily, hear verse as quantitative. Perhaps with a lot of ear training one might improve, but at most I think one would end up as part of a very specialized linguistic community, say like people who can converse in Lojban.

 

[Waeponwifestre]

So I’m fairly comfortable writing in iambic and trochaic meters at this point; but I still haven’t written a lot in dactylic and anapestic meters. I think they’re a little more awkward generally. Here’s an attempt at writing something in anapestic tetrameter (and if nothing else I think it’s kinda funny)

So today I embark on a metrical quest
Where all meters are mastered and put to the test
And my poetry writing so filled with stress
And of syllables counted with nary a rest
Till my head is all blank, only verses are left
And I’m left just a quivering, hollowed-out mess
For with trochees, iambic and more I’m obsessed
You could say it’s a fetish for feet now confessed
Or a doggerel poem all arranged anapests
(So I hope)

 

[Angeline]

Tzara your nerd rant is my learning experience, so please keep going (as is your wont).

My big takeaways so far:

1. A poetic foot and a syllable are not the same thing.

2. A meter is not absolute. I was reading about trochaic lines and an example from Poe's The Raven:

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door

the last syllable ("door") is stressed. But the trochaic pattern is stressed/unstressed. So I was always confused as to why an example like this would still be considered a trochaic line. But I now know this is also a catalectic line, where the last syllable is different from the norm for (in this case) trochaic (i.e., unstressed), in this poem because it allows Poe to rhyme.

I know Tzara and Waeponwifestre understand this but for me it's revelatory. There are exceptions to the rules.

So please keep nerding out. It's helping!

 

[Tzara]

So I’m fairly comfortable writing in iambic and trochaic meters at this point; but I still haven’t written a lot in dactylic and anapestic meters. I think they’re a little more awkward generally. Here’s an attempt at writing something in anapestic tetrameter (and if nothing else I think it’s kinda funny)

So today I embark on a metrical quest
Where all meters are mastered and put to the test
And my poetry writing so filled with stress
And of syllables counted with nary a rest
Till my head is all blank, only verses are left
And I’m left just a quivering, hollowed-out mess
For with trochees, iambic and more I’m obsessed
You could say it’s a fetish for feet now confessed
Or a doggerel poem all arranged anapests
(So I hope)

The only flaw (if it is a flaw, as it assumes you've intended each line to be perfectly anapestic) is line three

And my po / e·try writ / ing so filled / with stress​

where the last foot is missing an unstressed syllable. This is easily "fixed" (i.e. made anapestic) by replacing "stress" with "distress" or something like that, though that somewhat mucks up the double meaning of "stress" (that the writing is focused on stress and that the focus on stress is itself stressful).

Otherwise I think it's in perfect anapestic tetrameter. (And rather funny.)

 

[Tzara]

Tzara your nerd rant is my learning experience, so please keep going (as is your wont).

My big takeaways so far:

1. A poetic foot and a syllable are not the same thing.

Correct, if you mean "poetic foot" to refer to accentual-syllabic meter. In fact, accentual-syllabic feet are, with rare exceptions, multisyllabic by nature—iambic, trochaic, spondaic, and pyrrhic feet are all disyllabic, and anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic feet are all trisyllabic. Really rare feet like the choriambic may have even more syllables per foot.

2. A meter is not absolute. I was reading about trochaic lines and an example from Poe's The Raven:

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door

the last syllable ("door") is stressed. But the trochaic pattern is stressed/unstressed. So I was always confused as to why an example like this would still be considered a trochaic line. But I now know this is also a catalectic line, where the last syllable is different from the norm for (in this case) trochaic (i.e., unstressed), in this poem because it allows Poe to rhyme.

Trochaic verse is often catalectic (think of Blake's "The Tyger," for example.

I'll also point out that "The Raven" is, as you've rendered it here, in trochaic octameter (i.e. eight feet per line) which is very unusual in English verse. Here it almost sounds as if it should be rendered as two tetrameter lines, which would be a much more common meter in English.

You can see this particularly by looking at a complete stanza:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,​

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”​

where lines one and three rhyme on the fourth and eighth feet, and line four rhymes as well on its fourth foot:

Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered,
“tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”​

Rendering it as octameter, though, allows Poe to make considerable use of internal rhymes and link these to the end rhymes, which along with the insistence of the trochaic meter gives the poem a driving, obsessional quality.

 

[goldytheGoldfish]

So I tried writing an elegiac couplet in quantitative verse. I thiiiiink it works. It is not easy though and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason it never really caught on in English because it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Here’s what I got though. Here’s the couplet and how I intended the scansion.

Oh Mars, you rage, you fight, you crave strife. “Glorious” strife.
Venus though, loves you still. Love, not war, Mars, is the key.

| Oh Mars, | You rage, | you fight, | you crave | strife. “Glori- | ous” strife. |

| Venus though | loves you | still. | Love, not war, | Mars, is the | key |

I actually tried to teach myself Latin at one point and I can very easily hear how those classical meters work very well in that language. The long vowels in Latin are pronounced exactly the same as short vowels you just say them twice as long. English, though, what we call long vowels and short vowels are actually just completely different phonemes so it’s just way more up to interpretation and subtle.

Fun experiment, but I think English poetry works a lot better utilizing stuff like alliteration and stress as opposed to vowel length.


You know my gut instinct reading this was to say - aren’t they the same thing? Which is kind of a glib answer and maybe not exactly true but I don’t think there’s a clear separation between the two.

Rhythm is just part of sound - and if you’re reading poetry there’s rhythm happening regardless. I think by thinking about it you’re just making yourself more conscious of what you’re already doing and able to control it better.

I find overly accentual writing annoying, although it seems to appeal to a lot of people. You really have to listen to not just what, but how they're saying it, at which point, you should probably be at an open mic night or something, not scanning text like you need to solve a math problem. I always impressed myself the most when I could do mostly syllabic meter and the accentual components would fall into place. Just keeping your fingers crossed for a poetic miracle can be exhausting though, I'm sure.

 

[Waeponwifestre]

I find overly accentual writing annoying, although it seems to appeal to a lot of people. You really have to listen to not just what, but how they're saying it, at which point, you should probably be at an open mic night or something, not scanning text like you need to solve a math problem. I always impressed myself the most when I could do mostly syllabic meter and the accentual components would fall into place. Just keeping your fingers crossed for a poetic miracle can be exhausting though, I'm sure.

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of accentual writing and writing in poetic forms.

I see it much like learning music theory. Many musicians I’ve met and know don’t know any music theory - they’re still great musicians (most of them are way better than me, honestly) and can write great songs without it. Which kind of begs the question - if you don’t need to know any theory, why even bother learning it in the first place?

A. It gives you access to a shared technical language with other people who know it, which can come in handy when you’re talking shop or writing together.

B. You don’t really need it to write, and sometimes divine inspiration hits and really cool stuff seems to come right out of the aether. But there’s plenty of times when divine inspiration isnt anywhere to be found, and that’s when the theory comes in handy. All of a sudden you’re aware of how countless people before you have approached their own art, and used X technique to Y effect, and then you’ve got this metaphorical toolbelt you can pull from to create a composition that either conforms or bucks different genre conventions.

I think poetry is much the same way.

Writing in strict meter can turn into kind of a sudoku type exercise, yeah. But in my opinion it helps you internalize how different meters have their own unique qualities and flavors that you can then bring to your own art. And when things aren’t coming together how you like or expected it helps you troubleshoot or come up with alternatives that help you create the desired effect with your own poetry.

Just my two cents.

 

[goldytheGoldfish]

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of accentual writing and writing in poetic forms.

I see it much like learning music theory. Many musicians I’ve met and know don’t know any music theory - they’re still great musicians (most of them are way better than me, honestly) and can write great songs without it. Which kind of begs the question - if you don’t need to know any theory, why even bother learning it in the first place?

A. It gives you access to a shared technical language with other people who know it, which can come in handy when you’re talking shop or writing together.

B. You don’t really need it to write, and sometimes divine inspiration hits and really cool stuff seems to come right out of the aether. But there’s plenty of times when divine inspiration isnt anywhere to be found, and that’s when the theory comes in handy. All of a sudden you’re aware of how countless people before you have approached their own art, and used X technique to Y effect, and then you’ve got this metaphorical toolbelt you can pull from to create a composition that either conforms or bucks different genre conventions.

I think poetry is much the same way.

Writing in strict meter can turn into kind of a sudoku type exercise, yeah. But in my opinion it helps you internalize how different meters have their own unique qualities and flavors that you can then bring to your own art. And when things aren’t coming together how you like or expected it helps you troubleshoot or come up with alternatives that help you create the desired effect with your own poetry.

Just my two cents.

I see it much like working on cars. You're going to drop deez nuts behind a fender and have to make an extra trip to the hardware store. But there is a point: it gets you where you need to go, and secondly, you learn there are things which are simply out of your control. The advantage in bitching to an engineer instead of an artist is that the former isn't going to deduct any points for remaining objective. I've avoided a lot of arguments being able to hold the subject in my hand.

I suppose I see that as a formative experience. I'd also say a lot of my life has had written documentation as a requirement that I adapted to, maybe even resentfully. Would you like to... write something together?

 

[Angeline]

And I thought I knew the iambic meter.

I am feeling like a summary of what I understand about meter thus far is: so many rules; so many exceptions. Sigh. It put me in mind of conversations I had with my mentor who trained me in line editing. Like now I had a bazillion questions, many (many!) about comma usage particularly in restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses in complex sentences. She looked at me over her rimless spectacles (she was a proper old Quaker lady) and said "sometimes it depends on what you had for breakfast that morning."

So a line of poetry is in a meter except when it isn't or is still in a meter in spite of a catalectic end word, a promoted or demoted syllable and/or the context of the poem. And that's not even getting into differences in pronunciation, accents, etc. Oy!

That context thing is important. Yesterday I decided I'd take some random lines from Beatles songs (yes I know but I The Beatles) and try to figure out the meter. I'd been reading about trochees and the line

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

popped into my head cause Lucy is most definitely a trochee. Does that make it a trochaic line? Well no because "in the sky" is an anapest right (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed) and "with diamonds" is an iamb (with dia-) followed by an unstressed syllable (monds) that is demoted?

At this point I asked Waeponwifestre what meter that line is and she said well you can't take it out of context and also a song isn't a poem. Never mind that that particular song has a chorus that's totally different from the verses.

Otoh we did agree that "goo goo ga joob" is a spondee followed by an iamb. Then I took some Tylenol and a nap.

 

[12oclocktales]

And I thought I knew the iambic meter.

I am feeling like a summary of what I understand about meter thus far is: so many rules; so many exceptions. Sigh. It put me in mind of conversations I had with my mentor who trained me in line editing. Like now I had a bazillion questions, many (many!) about comma usage particularly in restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses in complex sentences. She looked at me over her rimless spectacles (she was a proper old Quaker lady) and said "sometimes it depends on what you had for breakfast that morning."

So a line of poetry is in a meter except when it isn't or is still in a meter in spite of a catalectic end word, a promoted or demoted syllable and/or the context of the poem. And that's not even getting into differences in pronunciation, accents, etc. Oy!

That context thing is important. Yesterday I decided I'd take some random lines from Beatles songs (yes I know but I The Beatles) and try to figure out the meter. I'd been reading about trochees and the line

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

popped into my head cause Lucy is most definitely a trochee. Does that make it a trochaic line? Well no because "in the sky" is an anapest right (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed) and "with diamonds" is an iamb (with dia-) followed by an unstressed syllable (monds) that is demoted?

At this point I asked Waeponwifestre what meter that line is and she said well you can't take it out of context and also a song isn't a poem. Never mind that that particular song has a chorus that's totally different from the verses.

Otoh we did agree that "goo goo ga joob" is a spondee followed by an iamb. Then I took some Tylenol and a nap.

And I thought having a “foot fetish” (I’m still smiling over that line in Waeponwifestre’s fantastic poem posted on 3/21/26) was a good, fun thing! I need more than just Tylenol. My take on Lucy in the sky with diamonds is a trochee (Lucy) followed by an anapest (in the sky) followed by an amphimacher (with diamonds). Trying to recall the song in my head, I seem to remember sky was sung with like 3 syllables in it, though my memory might be playing tricks on me due to what I took rather than Tylenol.

 

[Angeline]

And I thought having a “foot fetish” (I’m still smiling over that line in Waeponwifestre’s fantastic poem posted on 3/21/26) was a good, fun thing! I need more than just Tylenol. My take on Lucy in the sky with diamonds is a trochee (Lucy) followed by an anapest (in the sky) followed by an amphimacher (with diamonds). Trying to recall the song in my head, I seem to remember sky was sung with like 3 syllables in it, though my memory might be playing tricks on me due to what I took rather than Tylenol.

Believe me if I'd had something stronger than Tylenol I'd give this whole subject a rousing Bronx Cheer and go listen to Sgt Pepper (or maybe this song from my favorite Beatles album)!

 

[Tzara]

And I thought I knew the iambic meter.

I am feeling like a summary of what I understand about meter thus far is: so many rules; so many exceptions. Sigh. It put me in mind of conversations I had with my mentor who trained me in line editing. Like now I had a bazillion questions, many (many!) about comma usage particularly in restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses in complex sentences. She looked at me over her rimless spectacles (she was a proper old Quaker lady) and said "sometimes it depends on what you had for breakfast that morning."

So a line of poetry is in a meter except when it isn't or is still in a meter in spite of a catalectic end word, a promoted or demoted syllable and/or the context of the poem. And that's not even getting into differences in pronunciation, accents, etc. Oy!

That context thing is important. Yesterday I decided I'd take some random lines from Beatles songs (yes I know but I The Beatles) and try to figure out the meter. I'd been reading about trochees and the line

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

popped into my head cause Lucy is most definitely a trochee. Does that make it a trochaic line? Well no because "in the sky" is an anapest right (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed) and "with diamonds" is an iamb (with dia-) followed by an unstressed syllable (monds) that is demoted?

At this point I asked Waeponwifestre what meter that line is and she said well you can't take it out of context and also a song isn't a poem. Never mind that that particular song has a chorus that's totally different from the verses.

Otoh we did agree that "goo goo ga joob" is a spondee followed by an iamb. Then I took some Tylenol and a nap.

First off, I would agree with Waeponwifestre that a song is not a poem, nor is a single line in isolation necessarily representative of a poem in total. But having said that, I'll go ahead and treat the line as if it were characteristic of a complete poem. Start with marking what you are pretty sure are stressed syllables:

Lu·cy in the sky with dia·monds​

Note that the last syllable of "Lucy" and the next two syllables "in the" are all normally unstressed or lightly stressed syllables, so by promotion, one would increase the stress on the middle syllable of the three ("in") for intelligibility, leaving

Lu·cy in the sky with dia·monds​

Now you have consistently alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, beginning with a stressed syllable, so marking the feet gives you

Lu·cy / in the / sky with / dia·monds​

which is trochaic tetrameter.

At least that's how I would analyze it.