Reading a Poem: Sound, Meter and Form

This unit is about reading a poem before naming anything in it, and this first part works on the line. Poetry is close to half of the English Literature exam, and most poetry questions are reading questions: what a passage says, what attitude it takes, how its sound works. The governing idea is that form is evidence. Meter and rhyme are not decoration to be labelled; they are clues to meaning, and the labels matter only because they help you read. We move in three steps: who speaks and how the words sound, then meter and how to scan a line, then rhyme and the repeated sounds that bind lines together. Part two takes these lines into stanzas and fixed forms.

We begin where every poetry question begins: with the voice in the poem and the way its sentences move across lines.

First, what the exam actually asks of a poem.

ENL 0001 What This Exam Asks of a Poem

Poetry is forty-five percent of the CLEP English Literature exam, and most poetry questions ask you to read: what a passage means, what its tone is, which images it builds, and how its form works. The rest ask you to recognize a poet, a period or a term. Read the poem first; name its parts second. Most questions reward reading, not memory.

The voice in a poem is not its author.

ENL 0002 Speaker and Poet

The speaker is the voice inside the poem; the poet is the person who wrote it. They can differ sharply: a dramatic monologue gives the whole poem to an invented character. Exam questions ask about the speaker's attitude, so answer from the words on the page, not from the poet's life. The voice is not the author. Biography never overrides the text.

Next, tone: the attitude the words project.

ENL 0003 Tone: The Attitude Toward the Subject

The glossary defines tone as the attitude or personality a literary work projects, for example serious and solemn, or lighthearted and amusing. Tone belongs to the speaker's stance toward a subject or a listener, and it is built from word choice, rhythm and image rather than announced. Attitude, read from the words chosen. A sad subject can carry an ironic tone.

Mood is the feeling the reader receives.

ENL 0004 Mood: The Feeling a Poem Creates

Mood, or atmosphere, is the feeling the language evokes in the reader, created through setting, the speaker's attitude and description. Tone is the speaker's attitude; mood is the effect on the reader. The exam asks you to identify both, so keep them apart. Tone is the speaker's; mood is the reader's. The two can differ in the same passage.

Word choice comes from two stocks of English.

ENL 0005 Diction: Latinate and Anglo-Saxon Words

Diction is a writer's distinctive choice of words. English draws on two stocks: short, concrete words from Old English, and longer, abstract words from Latin and French. Milton's "Of man's first disobedience" sets one Latin word among plain English ones. Short and concrete, or long and abstract. Word choice is evidence for tone and period.

Verse often rearranges its sentences.

ENL 0006 Syntax and Inversion in Verse

Syntax is the order of words in a sentence, and verse often rearranges it. Inversion, called anastrophe or hyperbaton, moves words out of normal order for meter, rhyme or emphasis. Pope puts the cause before its verb: "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs." Put the sentence back in order first. Inversion is not an error.

Where a line ends shapes how it reads.

ENL 0007 The Line, Enjambment and the End-Stopped Line

A line that ends where its phrase ends is end-stopped; a line whose sentence runs on into the next is enjambed. Milton ends a line on "the fruit" and begins the next with "Of that forbidden tree," so the sentence pulls the reader across the break. Stop at the line end, or run past it. Enjambment delays meaning on purpose.

Pauses can fall inside a line, too.

ENL 0008 The Caesura

A caesura is a pause or break inside a line, where one phrase ends and another begins, often marked by punctuation. Its placement varies the rhythm. In Old English verse, a caesura splits every line into two half-lines, as unit three shows. A break in the middle of a line. Punctuation usually, but not always, marks it.

Now the beat itself: how English poetry measures its lines, and how you can hear and name that measure.

Meter starts from stressed and light syllables.

ENL 0009 Meter: Stress, Foot and Line

Meter is the rhythm and measure of a line of poetry. English meter counts stressed and unstressed syllables, grouped into feet, the small repeating units of a line. A line is named by its foot and the number of feet, so iambic pentameter means five iambs. Kind of foot, then number of feet. English meter counts stress, not length.

The most common English line comes next.

ENL 0010 Iambic Pentameter

An iamb is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in "above." Iambic pentameter is a line of five iambs, about ten syllables, and is the most common meter in English poetry. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is the pattern: five rising beats. Da-DUM, five times. Real lines vary the pattern; the norm still holds.

Four other feet complete the set.

ENL 0011 Trochee, Anapest, Dactyl, Spondee

A trochee reverses the iamb: stressed, then unstressed. An anapest is two unstressed syllables and a stress: Byron's "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold." A dactyl is a stress and two unstressed: Tennyson's "Half a league, half a league." A spondee is two stresses, Hopkins's "shook foil." Falling, galloping, falling, heavy. Anapests rise; dactyls fall.

Line length is named by counting feet.

ENL 0012 Line Lengths: Tetrameter to Hexameter

The number of feet names the line: trimeter three, tetrameter four, pentameter five, hexameter six. Iambic hexameter is called an alexandrine. Byron's "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea" is anapestic tetrameter: four feet of two light syllables and a stress. Count the feet, then name the line. Hexameter in English is usually the alexandrine.

Here is the method for scanning a line.

ENL 0013 Scanning a Line

Scansion means marking a line's stressed and unstressed syllables to find its pattern, and the unit gives a four-step method. Say the line aloud at normal speed and mark the syllables that take natural stress. Look for the repeating unit: light then heavy is the iamb, heavy then light the trochee. Count how many of those units the line holds. Then name the line by its foot and its count, as in iambic pentameter. Two cautions come with it. Scan by how the words are actually spoken, not by the meter you expect, and remember that one reversed foot does not change a poem's meter: an iambic poem stays iambic through occasional substitutions.

Old English poetry counted beats another way.

ENL 0014 Accentual Verse and the Old English Line

Old English poetry does not count feet or rhyme. Each line has four strong stresses, split by a caesura into two half-lines, and alliteration binds them: a sound in the first half repeats in the second. Beowulf is the great example, and alliteration, not rhyme, marks the structure. Four stresses, two halves, one repeated sound. No rhyme, no regular foot.

A Victorian poet built his own rhythm.

ENL 0015 Sprung Rhythm

Sprung rhythm is Gerard Manley Hopkins's name for a meter that counts stresses while letting the number of unstressed syllables vary, to imitate natural speech. Hopkins said he found it in folk songs, Shakespeare and Milton, and he marked stresses with accents where a reader might doubt them. Fixed stresses, free light syllables. Sprung rhythm is Hopkins's, and Victorian.

Some verse keeps meter but drops rhyme.

ENL 0016 Blank Verse

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Its first known use in English was the Earl of Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, about fifteen forty. It became the line of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's longer poems. A passage with regular meter and no rhyme is blank verse. Meter, yes; rhyme, no. Blank verse is not free verse.

Other verse drops both meter and rhyme.

ENL 0017 Free Verse

Free verse is poetry without a set rhyme scheme or regular meter, following the rhythms of speech. It became a major English form in the twentieth century. If a passage has neither steady meter nor rhyme, it is free verse; steady meter without rhyme is blank verse. No fixed meter, no fixed rhyme. Free does not mean formless.

Next, the sounds that bind lines together: rhyme in its several kinds, the lettering of a rhyme scheme, and the repetitions of consonant and vowel.

Rhyme comes in four kinds worth knowing.

ENL 0018 Rhyme: End, Internal, Slant, Eye

End rhyme falls at line endings; internal rhyme falls inside a line. Slant rhyme, also called half or near rhyme, pairs similar but not identical sounds. Eye rhyme pairs words that look alike but sound different, such as good and mood. Where it falls, and how close the sound. An old eye rhyme was often a true rhyme once.

Rhymes also differ by their final stress.

ENL 0019 Masculine and Feminine Rhyme

A masculine ending closes a line on a stressed syllable; a feminine ending closes it on an unstressed one. Masculine rhymes pair stressed syllables, such as day and May. Feminine rhymes pair a stress and a light syllable, as Sonnet twenty rhymes "painted" with "acquainted." Stressed close or unstressed close. The terms describe syllables, not subjects.

Now the method for lettering a rhyme scheme.

ENL 0020 Lettering a Rhyme Scheme

A rhyme scheme writes a poem's rhyming pattern in letters. Give the first line's end sound the letter a, give every later line that rhymes with it a as well, and give each new sound the next letter in turn, so that repeated letters mark rhyming lines; then group the letters by stanza. The unit works Sonnet one hundred thirty this way, its opening quatrain lettered abab. Letter by sound rather than spelling, and expect near rhymes in some poems. A long scheme can answer a form question on its own, which is why the unit tells you to letter it before you guess.

Repeated sounds work inside lines as well.

ENL 0021 Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance

Alliteration repeats a consonant sound, usually opening stressed syllables, as in "storm strewn sea." Assonance repeats vowel sounds, as in Wilfred Owen's "rapid rattle." Consonance repeats consonant sounds anywhere in words, as in coming home; alliteration is its special case. Consonants up front, vowels, consonants anywhere. Assonance is vowels; the other two are consonants.

Some words sound like what they mean.

ENL 0022 Onomatopoeia, Euphony, Cacophony

Onomatopoeia is a word whose sound suggests its meaning, such as bang. Euphony is sound heard as pleasant; cacophony, sound heard as harsh. Hopkins's "seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil" repeats one harsh sound three times, which readers commonly hear as matching the ugliness described. Sound that means, soothes or grates. Harsh sound can be deliberate craft.

This first part treated the line as evidence. We began with voice: the speaker is not the poet, tone is the speaker's attitude and mood is the reader's feeling, and diction, inversion and line endings carry both. We measured the line, naming meter by foot and count and scanning in steps, and we separated blank verse, which keeps its meter, from free verse, which gives it up, with Old English stress and sprung rhythm as other ways to count. And we lettered rhyme schemes and named the repeated sounds of consonant and vowel. Part two builds these lines into stanzas and fixed forms, from the couplet to the villanelle, and ends on the method and the traps.