The scansion of this quatrain from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 shows the following accents and divisions into feet (note the following words were split: behold, yellow, upon, against, ruin’d): ^įrom this, we see the rhythm of this quatrain is made up of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, called an iambic foot. The commonly used names for line lengths are: monometer Pentameter is one name for the number of feet in a line. This is a meter especially familiar because it occurs in all blank verse (such as Shakespeare’s plays), heroic couplets, and sonnets. But inserted now and then, they can lend emphasis and variety to a meter, as Yeats well knew when he broke up the predominantly iambic rhythm of “Who Goes With Fergus?” with the line, ^Ī frequently heard metrical description is iambic pentameter: a line of five iambs. They are never used as the sole meter of a poem if they were, it would be like the steady impact of nails being hammered into a board–no pleasure to hear or dance to. Spondee and pyrrhic are called feet, even though they contain only one kind of stressed syllable. In the twentieth century, the bouncing meters–anapestic and dactylic–have been used more often for comic verse than for serious poetry. Iambic and anapestic meters are called rising meters because their movement rises from unstressed syllable to stressed trochaic and dactylic meters are called falling. Thus, when we describe the rhythm of a poem, we “scan” the poem and mark the stresses (/) and absences of stress (^) and count the number of feet.
Scansion: Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables. Rhythm: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. The sources I cited below were very helpful, especially X.J. I created this page as a quick reference for my students when studying rhythm.
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