Poetry 101, The Rhythm of English and American Verse

Poetry in Tempe in the merry Month of May and what a Poetry Party it was! Hosted by Greg Olsen and Lali Breen in their Tempe, Arizona home it was a celebration of poetry with a continuation of the American Realists, 15 minutes of Poetry 101 infotainment, song, food and fun! Thanks to everyone who made the evening memorable with special thanks to our technical crew, Deanna Clement and Nick Nuzzo.

And yes, this time around we had some technical content – a computer monitor, some slides, and a place to project the words of the poems as they were being read. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was better than the last party where I was passing around a laptop for the graphics! And another innovation was the addition of lighting for the readers/performers and a black fabric backdrop. I know, these things seem minor, but they really helped with the presentation, and it was a very memorable performance with special thanks to our readers, Lali, Greg, Robert, and Deanna. We kicked off the festivities with a presentation titled "Poetry 101: The Rhythm of English and American Verse”, presented by your host, Greg Olsen, but in full disclosure, a huge debt is owed to Judson Jerome and his book, “The Poet’s Handbook”, a book I liberally adapted from for this presentation, particularly Chapter 5, Lisping in Numbers. If you’re interested in digging into the mechanics and art of writing poetry, then check out this book. It is very good and very accessible. But having said that, I’m sure there are any number of excellent books that can help with the education and understanding of poetry.

And really, may I just come out and say it – that could be a problem; dissecting and defining what poetry is as opposed to experiencing poetry. But poetry is made of words. And words have meanings, meaning we assign, meanings which can and most often do change over time, words with their meanings, meanings in speech, we talk, words with meanings, we chant, recite, sing, we shout. And meanings we write down and read both silently and aloud. And then we talk about what we write. It’s natural, and it is not going to go away, and isn’t that “talking about something,” say poetry, that very problem stated in the first sentence of this too-long paragraph? Talking about “What is Poetry” instead of simply experiencing it?

The Poetry Problem

Name it, you break it

this is the problem itself:

dissecting what poetry is,

instead of feeling what poetry does.

But poetry’s made of words.

Words but shells we fill

meanings assigned,

meanings that drift,

and shift like sand beneath a tide.

We speak words

in whispers, in chants,

in recitations and song.

We shout to the wind

And write to the void.

We read alone and aloud,

we talk about what?

What we wrote, as if

the echo could explain the voice.

The trap: the more we talk about a poem, the less we experience it, we may gain some understanding but lose the feeling and as we lose the feeling, we lose the point. Words. Elusive things. Poetry vs. Stories. Poetry vs. Prose. Seems like this discussion of Poetry 101 could get technical, involved, and even convoluted and contradictory – isn’t some prose especially great prose, poetic? Aren’t some great poems, storytelling methods – think The Iliad and The Odyssey – we recall the story, not the poetry.

I’m going to make a bold claim based on the 80/20 rule and that is that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. And my claim is that Poetry not only differs from Prose, but fundamentally so; and that that thing that makes it different from prose is simple to define, and furthermore, once this thing is defined and understood, the experience of Poetry is enhanced, even greatly so, and the understanding of Poetry is expanded, even greatly so.

Definition: Poetry is Written Metrically

• Poetry is created from words with an intentional number of accents or beats or stresses per line, (verse) while prose is written without regard to number of beats per line.

Anticlimactic, isn’t it? Poetry is written metrically, prose isn’t. That’s it.

As for many simple theorems, though, this Definition will prove to have powerful explanatory power. First though, for the fun of it, let’s explore the 80/20 rule a bit, sometimes called the Pareto Principle.

It was first dreamed up by the Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto in 1906 because of his economic observation that approximately 80% of the land in the Kingdom of Italy was owned by approximately 20% of the population. Things haven’t changed much since 1906; here are some reasonably modern numbers I got off the internet for who owns how much:

Population Percentage	Owns
Richest 20%	83%
Second 20%	12%
Third 20%	2%
Fourth 20%	2%
Fifth 20%	1%

And for those of you who sell stuff for a living, you know well that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers, for nurses and doctors, (and accident lawyers) 80% of accidents come from 20% of hazards. For computer programmers, 80% of software bugs come from 20% of the code, and so forth.

Mathematicians have had a go at the 80/20 law and found all sorts of interesting properties: could be 90/10 or 70/30 or 50/30 (doesn’t have to add up to 100). Even the legendary Benoit Mandelbrot of Chaos Theory (and the namesake of the fractal graphic the Mandelbrot Set – image on the right) offered a mathematical generalization of it.

To my point – the thing that differentiates poetry from prose is that poetry is metrical. And from this quick review of the Pareto principle, yes there will be portions not considered;

• rhyme,

• alliteration,

• cadences,

• strophes,

• form

• and on and on.

But the big difference between poetry and prose is that poetry is metrical. Prose isn’t. Full stop.

Metrical. Not necessarily rhymed.

Metrical. Not necessarily written with much “feeling”.

Metrical. Not necessarily written by an Englishman in the 19th century who dreamed of coming to American and starting a utopian “free love” commune.

Ahh, you say, “what about ‘free verse’ that is purposefully not metrical, yet is still poetry?”

The American poet Robert Frost once said, “writing poetry free verse is like playing tennis with no net”. But. He wrote great free verse.

Don’t play with words. Free verse doesn’t mean no meter; it means free and varied meter. Much if not most of the poetry we’ve read at the last two parties was free verse as a matter of fact. And the one poem distinctly not in free verse (it even rhymed!) was “A Christmas Card Sonnet” clever doggerel on the esthetic nutritional value-level of cotton candy. But bad as it was, it was poetry. It’s a sonnet, and it strictly follows every “rule” of a Shakespearean sonnet to the syllable. Check it.

“nowadays strictly metrically written poetry is seen in parodies of poetry, poetry meant to conjure a trite aesthetic, outmoded images, light verse on greeting cards”

Here’s the takeaway: nowadays strictly metrically written poetry is seen in parodies of poetry, poetry meant to conjure a trite aesthetic, outmoded images, light verse on greeting cards, and so forth. And some of it isn’t just bad, it’s downright horrible. Today’s poetry is free verse, and it has been for some time. Blame Walt Whitman.

Because of this spirit of anything-goes in meter, we’ve forgotten the basics of poetic meter, the simpler application of meter found in classic poetry. Meter is still there but hidden in the line and because meter is concealed, we don’t always recognize and pick up on the metrical dimension; arguably the poetic part.

We grasp it intuitively, or emotionally as we hear a modern poem, maybe only for a brief instant and then it all slips away. This is why I find myself, as mentioned in passing in our last journal, reading many 20th and 21st century poems over and over again. There’s something there in the poem. I can’t put my finger on it; it’s a puzzle trying to figure the poem out. A song, a sonnet, an ode, a voice in a dream. There can be interpretation, but no conclusion.

Poems drive me crazy (it’s a short drive). Finally, I look for stress, the patterns of stresses, the meter. Then it hits me. The intelligence, the pain, the compassion, the unrelenting all-seeing eye, the inner eye of the poet cast in the musical form words, words without drums, but rhythm, words without tones, but melodies. Poetry.

This is called cracking the outer shell of the poem. How many times have I read a poem written by someone very much not like me about something very much not within my spere of comprehension, and believe me, I’ve run into many things in my short life outside of my comprehension. The pain of Sarah, (Sarai until God renamed her…) Abraham’s wife in the Old Testament, was mightily pained at her infertility. How can a character like me ever feel the pain of female infertility for instance? Fact check: I am not female and I was not infertile.

Here's how. Read a poem written by an infertile woman who happens to be a poetic genius and here’s how it goes, at least for me: I come across it, read it, and note two things – It’s not for or about me and two, it is cool and fascinating in some weird way that somehow speaks to my intuition, so I dogear the poem in the book to come back to it at some later time. At this point, I have found a nut that holds a fruit, but the shell is still intact. But I save the nut knowing its value.

I read it again. And again, until the blind meter of the poem that’s been marching my blunt thick-headed brain thru the meaning behind the words finally takes me to the real meaning, a meaning which penetrates not my brain, but my heart and that’s when the shell starts to crack open and I get to the fruit. But my nut analogy breaks down here because it’s a magical nut. When I return to the poem, the nut is bigger and the shell thicker, but I can crack it easier! Great poetry is the gift that keeps giving.

The shell is the meter. It’s what you run into when you first read a poem and some are like peanuts, some like acorns.

“It is still important to stress meter simply because in the 21st century, we seem to have forgotten it in poetry”

And that’s why I think meter is the 20% of poetry that explains 80%. Or perhaps it’s 90%. Or it could be 73.786% plus or minus 50.632%. Even if this entire analysis is wrong, it is still important to stress meter simply because in the 21st century, we seem to have forgotten it in poetry, except in Hallmark greeting cards and parody. So, for the sake of argument, I’m going to say meter is the thing that distinguishes poetry from prose – it’s also no longer taught and fading into obscurity and is key to understanding and interpreting poetry.

What is meter?

Metrical means measured – a measure forces a poet to put thoughts into a framework. Poetry is usually made of verses: Verse refers to form, poetry refers to content. Prose lies flat on the page, good poetry stands up off it, rounded like a piece of sculpture because of its imposed form.

And stress is simply accent. We’ll start with two syllables. One word I love when describing poetry and poetic stress and meter is the word “because”. The second syllable gets the stress, and boy does it ever! Why? Be-cause!

Not every English word has clear stress, think of the word: “apricot”. The first syllable wins out, but depending on your regional accent, the last syllable also gets a bit of a boost.

There doesn’t have to be one word. Could be two: “I Dream” with the stress on “Dream” based on context because you could stress the “I” but for our example let’s put the stress on “Dream”.

So far, we have two syllables with the stress on the second syllable. It even has a fancy Greek name from ancient poetry; it’s called an “Iamb”. Here’s a little list of iambs for your consideration:

• Because

• I Dream

• Believe

• Alone

• Return

See, this isn’t terribly difficult. And here’s an example iambic line

The sky above so softly calls my name.

It could be a line from a poem, could be a poetic line in a story; in any case if you count the number of iambs there are five, resulting in a line of iambic pentameter. Do you remember “iambic pentameter” from English class in school?

And for the two-syllable example, how about the opposite, the stress on the first syllable. We’ll need a list of words and a clever Greek name for them: Trochee.

• Whisper

• Garden

• Table

• Lovely

• Running

Here’s a line of Trochaic Tetrameter, or four trochees per line:

Golden sunlight filled the valley.

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling a kind of epic old-west story coming to me about the open plains, the empty sky, a checkered history, and a dark past. There’re roundups, and rustlers, and home on the range. (Apologies to Bernie Taupin…).

And people did write entire poems based strictly on iambic and trochaic verse. Here’s an example of iambic pentameter in the classic literature, from the first stanza of “An Essay on Criticism” by the Englishman Alexander Pope, (1711):

Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill

Appears in Writing or in Judging ill,

But of the two, less dangerous is the Offence,

To tire our Patience, than mislead our Sense:

Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,

Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss,

A Fool might once himself alone expose,

Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Iambic pentameter, flexible, powerful, musical. I really love this poem; it has so many great parts. Here’s another verse:

But you who seek to give and merit Fame,

And justly bear a Critics noble Name,

Be sure yourself and your own Reach to know,

How far your Genius, Taste, and Learning go,

Launch not beyond your Depth, but be discreet,

And mark that Point where Sense and Dullness meet.

Pope’s got my number! If I “Launch beyond my Depth” please let me know, okay? I’ve got my own suspicions.

“An Essay on Criticism is a monumental work of genius, a great read, and just about entirely written in iambic pentameter. Amazing”

Yes, this is a marvelous poem, if you haven’t read it do so, it is the very epitome of poetic genius in this genre, and has so many great parts, I’m reading it again right now and have to share one more snippet, the very famous lines:

…Truth breaks upon us with resistless Day;

Trust not yourself; but your Defects to know,

Make use of every Friend – and every Foe.

A little Learning is a dangerous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

And drinking largely, sobers us again…

“An Essay on Criticism” is a monumental work of genius, a great read, and just about entirely written in iambic pentameter. Amazing. It’s punchy, insightful, wise. A great poem. He was 22 years old.

Many great English and American poems rely on iambic pentameter due in large part on the idiosyncrasies of our language. How poetry evolved alongside the historical development of the English language itself is a book-length or more of a topic. For now, hold the thought that iambic pentameter is very important in English language poetry.

What about trochaic poetry? It’s not as common in English as iambic poetry, but it also has a great vibe. Here’s a snippet from “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1855):

And he saw a youth approaching,

Dressed in garments green and yellow

Coming through the purple twilight,

Through the splendor of the sunset;

Plumes of green bent o’er his forehead,

And his hair was soft and golden

Trochaic poetry to my ear has a kind of declaratory or even chant-like sound as opposed to iambic poetry which to my ear is more like normal speech. Since iambic poetry mirrors everyday speech, it feels familiar and grounded. Great for all sorts of storytelling because of its natural, flowing and conversational tone. It is perfect for reflection, thoughtful emotions and even heroic and romantic themes.

And again, this is my ear, trochaic poetry isn’t quite natural or conversational sounding. That strong first syllable sounds like some sort of command (Forward, March!) or even a witch’s incantation:\

Frog’s toes, boiling oil

and tongue of newt,

Morbid magic,

Twilight bloodroot,

Whispered wonder

Fire-dreams darken

Gardens of spoken spells

It is perfect for some things though as in above if you want to be forceful, incantatory, and rhythmic. You can get an urgent emotion, a mystical, ominous feel and it can even be hypnotic. And as in the snippet from Song of Hiawatha, it can be used in powerful scene setting / description and placing the action is a mythical otherworldly dimension. You will also hear it in nursery rhymes and children’s books:

Bunny hopping thru the clover,

Tumbles once then rolls he over.

Wiggling ears, sniffing flowers,

Dancing in the April showers.

In summary, it’s common to denote the strong accented syllable or word with the phoneme DUM and the weak unaccented syllable with the phoneme da, thus an iamb is da-DUM and a trochee is DUM-da. And instead of syllable or word the term in poetic analysis is “foot” as in an iamb or a trochee is a foot of poetry. The naming and counting of feet of poetry is referred to as scanning the poem or scansion. All well and good and believe it or not, you are well on your way to being able to analyze and interpret poetry with these tools. At this point it really is just more of the same.

The feet we have demonstrated so far are made up of two syllables and if we’re to make a musical analogy, iambic and trochaic poetry is in a duple meter like 4/4 or 2/4.

And like music, poetry can be in a triple meter like 3/4 comprised of a foot of three syllables – either a word of three syllables or words. And like two-syllable feet, they’re based on alternating stresses with the most common being the Anapest foot, da da DUM and the Dactyl foot, DUM da da.

• in the dark

• understand

• on the shore

• interrupt

• with a smile

Here is an example of anapestic tetrameter:

In the midst of the storm, when the thunder runs high

The dactyl is an inverted anapest – DUM da da; here are a few examples:

• poetry

• happiness

• elephant

• beautiful

• dancingly

And here’s a line of dactylic tetrameter:

Galloping hooves in the mist of the morning

in the midst of the storm… Galloping hooves… oh my, these wild cousins of duple meter really roll off the tongue! They’re less common in English language poetry and find a place in duple meter poetry as means of variation – a duple poem will drop in a triple meter foot for emphasis or variety. But there are purely triple meter poems and very famous ones at that:

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

Anapestic poetry is energetic and can be whimsical, light-hearted and playful, but can also be dramatic. The overall effect is forward motion with building momentum think chase scenes or even marching. Common uses are narrative verse like in The Night Before Christmas, all sorts of comic doggerel and children’s stories. It’s a closely related to iambic poetry and is used within iambic poetry for effect and variation.

Here’s an example of an anapestic insertion from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 2 Scene 1)

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

This fragment is iambic until we get to “Come, let me clutch thee.” DUM da da DUM (anapest) da. The anapest injects a sudden burst which breaks the rhythm of the iambic line mirroring Macbeth’s urgency and mental unraveling. Injecting an anapest in a dramatic scene is sometimes described as “a heart skipping a beat”.

Now admittedly, to our ears the language of Shakespeare can seem a bit archaic – I used this example though because he was another of those marvelous genius’ of the English language, so let me come up with another example in modern English, a somewhat contrived bit of verse but it makes the point:

The wind was cold upon the moor that night,

It whispered low through branches, bare and bent.

I walked alone, and in the hush I heard

A cry – too faint, too near to be ignored.

Can you find the anapest… “(too) far to be”. “Far to be = da da DUM after a string of da DUMs. You’ll get the sense by reading this snippet out loud in your best super exaggerated tone of voice. If you read it silently, you don’t really get what the anapest does to the line. When I read it aloud, “too far to be ignored” I feel like I’m being slammed into the word “ignored” with tremendous velocity – the anapest in this example serves to speed up the line and heightens the psychological tension of the scene.

Oh, there’s more, so much more but let’s get back to meter in poetry now that we’ve established a bit more understanding of tempo as it works with the narrative arc as we tackle the mighty Dactyl.

A dactyl is an inverted anapest scanned out as DUM da da. It is rare in English language poetry, but it is powerful when in the hands of a master:

Half a league, half a league

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Stanza I of The Charge of the Light Brigade”, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1854)

HALF a league, HALF a league → DUM da da, DUM da da

We are in dactyl territory starting strong and falling away like galloping horses fading in the distance with relentless driving energy invoking a sense of impending doom. Heavy stuff.

Trochaic poetry employs dactyls similarly to how iambic poetry uses anapests to introduce variations in rhythm:

Whispering branches bend and beckon,

Moonlight filters through the leaves.

Ancient spirits softly speaking,

Calling dreamers from their sleep

Mystical melodies echoing endlessly,

Shadows dancing in the deep.

That was very cheesy. I am so sorry. Let’s scan it and search for deeper meaning. No guarantees.

WHISpering BRANches BEND and BECKon → DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da

Trochaic tetrameter, no doubt. It goes on and we hit a bump:

MYS-ti-cal MEL-o-dies → DUM da da DUM da da (dactyl)

ECH-o-ing END-less-ly → DUM da da DUM da da (dactyl)

“Dactylic poetry isn’t too common in English as noted above, but can be epic, stately the perfect thing for solemn grandeur and military cadences.”

and then back to trochees. I get a lift when I read the dactyls in this example, and the alliteration also helps move the line forward. We’re seeing an example of tempo control to focus the narrative. These embellishments aren’t fundamental, but they are good to know, especially if you are working on getting a deep and detailed understanding of a poem. (Crack that nut!)

Dactylic poetry isn’t too common in English as noted above, but can be epic, stately, the perfect thing for solemn grandeur and military cadences. And I realize this isn’t an essay on form but thinking about dactyls I couldn’t help but think about American Civil War Odes and English Odes in general since odes are the very embodiment of seriousness, formality, and ceremonial elevation perhaps a couple of examples of dactyls in odes is in place.

English language odes are written primarily iambic and trochaic like most other English language poetry but do have a scattering of dactyls dropped in for emphasis or grandeur rather than sustained meter. They can be used to underscore solemnity, urgency, or reverence.

Just for a handful of silver he left us,

Just for a rib and to stick in his coat—

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,

Lost all the others she lets us devote; …

“The Lost Leader” by Robert Browning

The first line, three dactyls and a trochee. The next line, three dactyls and a spondee. Spondee is a new term and all it means is a single strong syllable – if in an iambic surrounding an iamb and if trochaic a trochee. Three dactyls in a row here creates a driving, accusatory rhythm – perfect for moral outrage or lament. Dactyls are serious.

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking…

Walt Whitman

And finally, a faux American Civil War Ode

Gallantly marching, they carry the flag,

Thunder the cannons and cries of despair,

Honor unbroken, though torn by the sword,

Sleep now in silence, the brave and the fair.

In Summary

Meter in poetry. Poetry is metric. The meter refers to the stresses we place on words as we speak the English language. Not all languages are strictly stress and accent oriented, but English is. Iambs and trochees are in twos or duple meter like 2/4 or 4/4 time. Anapests and dactyls are in threes or triple meter like 3/4 or 9/8 time. Spondees are a count of one and take on the characteristic of context; either iamb or trochee. There are two more to round out a fundamental understanding of meter. The molussus, three strong syllables in a row and function like an iamb:

“Meter is poetry. Poetry is metric. Meter refers to the stresses we place on words as we speak.”

Hot wet night

and

Want those treats

And at the other extreme the pyrrhic, a foot with no stress at all, made up of all those little syllables that hold lines together.

Let’s review and summarize:

Iambic Meter (da-DUM)

Structure: Unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one

Example: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” – Tennyson

Trait	Description
Vibe	Natural, flowing, conversational
Emotion	Reflective, thoughtful, often heroic or romantic
Effect	Mirrors everyday speech - feels familiar and grounded
Use	Shakespearean drama, sonnets, epic poetry. English is iambic

Trochaic Meter (DUM-da)

Structure: Stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one

Example: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright” – Blake

Trait	Description
Vibe	Forceful, rhythmic, incantatory
Emotion	Urgent, mystical, sometimes ominous or hypnotic
Effect	Feels like a chant or spell – less natural, more stylized
Use	Gothic or ritualistic poetry, Nursery rhymes, ballads

Contrast iambic and trochaic

Meter	Rhythm	Vibe	Best for
Iambic	Da-DUM	Flowing, introspective	Drama, romance, philosophy
Trochaic	DUM-Da	Punchy, mystical	Ritual, folklore, incantation

Anapestic Meter (da-da-DUM)

Structure: Two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed

Example: “Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house…”

Trait	Description
Vibe	Galloping, energetic, whimsical
Emotion	Light-hearted, playful, sometimes dramatic
Effect	Builds momentum, feels like a chase or march
Use	Narrative verse, comic poetry, children's stories

Dactylic Meter (DUM- da-da)

Structure: One stressed syllable followed by two stressed

Example: “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward…”

Trait	Description
Vibe	Majestic, formal, sometimes mournful
Emotion	Solemn, dramatic, ceremonial
Effect	Feels heavy and deliberate – like a drumbeat or dirge
Use	Epic poetry, elegies, classical verse

Contrast anapestic and dactylic verse

Meter	Rhythm	Vibe	Best for
Anapestic	da-da DUM	Playful, fast	Narrative, comic, whimsical
Dactylic	DUM-da-da	Grand, solemn	Epic, mournful, ceremonial

Whew! From such simple concepts we get a universe of poetry. But. We’ve only just begun.