Meter is the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the sequence

of speech-sounds of a language.

In all sustained spoken English we sense a rhythm; that is, a recognizeable

though varying pattern in the beat of the stresses, or accents (the more

forcefully uttered, hence louder syllables), in the stream of speech-sounds. In

meter, this rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular—-that is, approximately

equivalent—-units of stress-pattern. Compositions written in meter are

also known as verse.

We attend, in reading verse, to the individual line, which is a sequence of

words printed as a separate entity on the page. The meter is determined by the

pattern of stronger and weaker stresses on the syllables composing the words

in the verse-line; the stronger is called the "stressed" syllable and all the

weaker ones the "unstressed" syllables.  

A foot is the combination of a strong stress and the associated weak stress or stresses which make up the recurrent metric unit of a line. The relatively stronger-stressed syllable is called, for short, "stressed"; the relatively weaker-stressed syllables are called "light," or most commonly, "unstressed."

The four standard feet distinguished in English are:

(1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed syllable followed by a

stressed syllable.

The cur/ few tolls/ the knell/ of par/ ting day./

(Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard")

(2) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed

by a stressed syllable.

The As syr/ ian came down/ like a wolf/ on the fold./

(Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib")

(3) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed

syllable.

There they/ are, my/ fif ty/men and/ wo men./

(Robert Browning, "One Word More")

Most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable—-in the technical term,

such lines are catalectic. So in Blake's "The Tiger":

Ti ger!/ ti ger!/ burn ing/ bright/

In the/ fo rest/ of the/ night./

(4) Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two

unstressed syllables.

Eve, with her/ bas ket, was/

Deep in the/ bells and grass./

(Ralph Hodgson, "Eve")

Iambs and anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called "rising

meter"; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning, are

called "falling meter." Iambs and trochees, having two syllables, are called

"duple meter"; anapests and dactyls, having three syllables, are called "triple

meter." It should be noted that the iamb is by far the commonest English

foot.

Two other feet are often distinguished by special titles, although they

occur in English meter only as variants from standard feet:

Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately

equal strong stresses, as in each of the first two feet of this line:

Good strong/ thick stu/pe fy/ ing in/cense smoke./

(Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb")

Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): a foot composed of two successive

syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second and fourth feet in this line:

My way/ is to/ be gin/ with the/ be gin ning/

(Byron, Don Juan)

This latter term is used only infrequently. Some traditional metrists deny the

existence of a true pyrrhic, on the grounds that the prevailing metrical accent—-

in the above instance, iambic—-always imposes a slightly stronger stress

on one of the two syllables.

A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it:

monometer: one foot

dimeter: two feet

trimeter: three feet

tetrameter: four feet

pentameter: five feet

hexameter: six feet (an Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet)

heptameter: seven feet (a fourteener is another term for a line of seven

iambic feet—-hence, of fourteen syllables; it tends to break

into a unit of four feet followed by a unit of three feet)

octameter: eight feet

To describe the meter of a line we name (a) the predominant foot and

(b) the number of feet it contains. 

In the illustrations above, for example, the line from Gray's "Elegy" is "iambic pentameter," and the line from Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" is "anapestic tetrameter."

To scan a passage of verse is to go through it line by line, analyzing the

component feet, and also indicating where any major pauses in the phrasing

fall within a line. 

The prevailing meter is iambic pentameter. As in all fluent verse, however,

there are many variations upon the basic iambic foot; these are sometimes

called "substitutions." Thus:

(1) The closing feet of lines ending with an extra unstressed syllable,

and are said to have a feminine ending. The closing feet, because they are standard iambs, end with a stressed syllable and are said to have masculine endings.

The pause in the reading—-which occurs naturally at

the end of a sentence, clause, or other syntactic unit—-coincides with the end

of the line; such lines are called end-stopped. 

The other lines carrying over to the next lines are called run-on lines (or in a term derived from the French, they exhibit enjambment—-"a striding-over"). 

(2) When a strong phrasal pause falls within a line, it is called a caesura. 

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