Metre (poetry)
In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
Characteristics
An assortment of features can be identified when classifying poetry and its metre.Qualitative versus quantitative metre
The metre of most poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called qualitative metre, with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals. Many Romance languages use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable needs to be fixed. The alliterative metre of the old Germanic poetry of languages such as Old Norse and Old English was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns.Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as quantitative metre, where patterns were based on syllable weight rather than stress. In the dactylic hexameters of Classical Latin and Classical Greek, for example, each of the six feet making up the line was either a dactyl or a spondee : a "long syllable" was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit, Persian, Old Church Slavonic and Classical Arabic.
Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrin, with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone, classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules, such as thematic parallelism or tonal antithesis between lines.
Feet
In many Western classical poetic traditions, the metre of a verse can be described as a sequence of feet, each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types – such as relatively unstressed/stressed or long/short.Iambic pentameter, a common metre in English poetry, is based on a sequence of five iambic feet or iambs, each consisting of a relatively unstressed syllable followed by a relatively stressed one –
˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This approach to analyzing and classifying metres originates from Ancient Greek tragedians and poets such as Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, and Sappho.
However some metres have an overall rhythmic pattern to the line that cannot easily be described using feet. This occurs in Sanskrit poetry; see Vedic metre and Sanskrit metre. It also occurs in some Western metres, such as the hendecasyllable favoured by Catullus and Martial, which can be described as:
If the line has only one foot, it is called a monometer; two feet, dimeter; three is trimeter; four is tetrameter; five is pentameter; six is hexameter, seven is heptameter and eight is octameter. For example, if the feet are iambs, and if there are five feet to a line, then it is called an iambic pentameter. If the feet are primarily dactyls and there are six to a line, then it is a dactylic hexameter.
In classical Greek and Latin, however, the name "iambic trimeter" refers to a line with six iambic feet.
Caesura
Sometimes a natural pause occurs in the middle of a line rather than at a line-break. This is a caesura. A good example is from The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare; the caesurae are indicated by '/':In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word.
Each line of traditional Germanic alliterative verse is divided into two half-lines by a caesura. This can be seen in Piers Plowman:
Enjambment
By contrast with caesura, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Also from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale:Metric variations
Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation is the inversion of a foot, which turns an iamb into a trochee. A second variation is a headless verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. A third variation is catalexis, where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof – an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci:Modern English
Most English metre is classified according to the same system as Classical metre with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively. The most common characteristic feet of English verse are the iamb in two syllables and the anapest in three.Metrical systems
The number of metrical systems in English is not agreed upon. The four major types are: accentual verse, accentual-syllabic verse, syllabic verse and quantitative verse. The alliterative verse found in Old English, Middle English, and some modern English poems can be added to this list, as it operates on somewhat different principles than accentual verse. Alliterative verse pairs two phrases joined by alliteration; while there are usually two stresses per half-line, variations in the number of stresses do occur. Accentual verse focuses on the number of stresses in a line, while ignoring the number of offbeats and syllables; accentual-syllabic verse focuses on regulating both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in a line; syllabic verse only counts the number of syllables in a line; quantitative verse regulates the patterns of long and short syllables. The use of foreign metres in English is all but exceptional.Frequently used metres
The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the iambic pentameter, in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations are practically inexhaustible. John Milton's Paradise Lost, most sonnets, and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse. Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson and Wordsworth also make notable use of it.A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a heroic couplet, a verse form which was used so often in the 18th century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect. The most famous writers of heroic couplets are Dryden and Pope.
Another important metre in English is the common metre, also called the "ballad metre", which is a four-line stanza, with two pairs of a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter; the rhymes usually fall on the lines of trimeter, although in many instances the tetrameter also rhymes. This is the metre of most of the Border and Scots or English ballads. In hymnody it is called the "common metre", as it is the most common of the named hymn metres used to pair many hymn lyrics with melodies, such as Amazing Grace:
Emily Dickinson is famous for her frequent use of ballad metre:
Other languages
Sanskrit
Versification in Classical Sanskrit poetry is of three kinds.- Syllabic metres depend on the number of syllables in a verse, with relative freedom in the distribution of light and heavy syllables. This style is derived from older Vedic forms. An example is the Anuṣṭubh metre found in the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which has exactly eight syllables in each line, of which only some are specified as to length.
- Syllabo-quantitative metres depend on syllable count, but the light-heavy patterns are fixed. An example is the Mandākrāntā metre, in which each line has 17 syllables in a fixed pattern.
- Quantitative metres depend on duration, where each line has a fixed number of morae, grouped in feet with usually 4 morae in each foot. An example is the Arya metre, in which each verse has four lines of 12, 18, 12, and 15 morae respectively. In each 4-mora foot there can be two long syllables, four short syllables, or one long and two short in any order.
Tamil
The versification in Tamil is of four types: ', ', ' and '.- hails for, literally means "speaking metre". It is characterized by four words per line, except the last which gets only three. Thirukural was written in this metre.
- also called hails for, literally means "shouting metre" or "mourning metre". It is characterized by four words per line. It is versified so that the poem reads like prose. It has a minimum of three lines. Asiriyapa is classified into and.
- hails for, literally means "jumping metre" or "joyous metre".
- hails for, literally means "sleeping metre" or "dull metre".
Metre variants have been identified for all four metres:,,.