As a general rule, it can be helpful to treat metre in poetry as you would a time signature (or set rhythm) in music. In both cases, different metres and different time signatures conjure up different emotional states. For this reason, they are sometimes also associated with specific topics (the rhythm of troops marching, for instance, would seem to provide a natural vehicle for conveying scenes of war).
So, just as in music the rhythm of 2 beats to a bar conveys connotations of marching, a rhythm of 3 beats to a bar is associated with dancing the waltz, while 4 beats to the bar is far more open and susceptible to conveying just about anything at all, the same is (loosely speaking) true of the number of stresses (or beats) one finds in lines of poetry. At one end of the scale, 2 beats to the line is likely to convey a sensation of constraint, 3 and 4 of song, while 5 beats to a line traditionally features in poems that present somebody talking, either in the form of a set speech or as a part of a conversation.
(Some scholars have argued that the tetrameter – i.e. four-beat metre – is the dominant form of popular and oral poetry in English. What this means is that if a poem sounds as if it could be sung or if its metre is so audible that you know you are listening to a poem that has a sing-song quality and could not possibly be an example of everyday prose speech, it is most likely to be a tetrameter or a metre that functions like a tetrameter. The only metre that does not sound anything like this is the pentameter – i.e. five-beat metre – which has a much less sing-song quality and sounds much closer to regular speech).
The particular emotional state conjured up by the metre depends too on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables contained in each line. Whereas a sequence of dactyls (DUM de de) can convey a sensation of running, skipping or speed in general (and therefore a wide range of emotions to boot, be it, say, joy or trickery), a sequence of trochees (DUM de), by contrast, suggests something much heavier, more insistent and perhaps more threatening – but in any case quite different – despite the fact they differ only in the presence of an additional unstressed syllable in the dactyl.
Compare, for instance, the emotional quality of the following, primarily dactylic, lines from the poem ‘The Lost Leader’ by Robert Browning
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
with these trochaic lines from William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’
As these two examples illustrate, a metre identifies the general pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that characterise a given line, passage or poem. This pattern is rarely adhered to in a rigorous and unbending manner all the way through, though, for this would feel mechanical, lifeless and uninteresting. Not one of the lines I have quoted from Browning’s ‘The Lost Leader’ ends with a dactyl, for instance, while the stanza I have quoted from Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ shifts in its final line from trochees to iambs. These examples illustrate how a poem’s metre, including variations in that metre, both contribute to the poem’s music and affect the manner in which we respond to the words these lines contain.
You should be aware that even literary scholars do not always agree either on what they think is the predominant metre of a poem or on how the metre expresses itself in individual lines. As with the meaning of a poem, then, metre is not necessarily something that resides objectively in the poem independent of the person reading it; rather, it can be something individual readers find – and thus bring to life – for themselves in their reading of the poem. Like the meaning, that is, metre can be a matter of interpretation: the rhythms we experience as we read the poem inform our understanding of the poem, just as our understanding of the poem is likely to inform the rhythms we hear as we read the poem.
Exercises for interpreting metre
Ask yourself the following questions of the poem you are reading and consider whether the way in which you answer them is relevant for the manner in which you interpret the poem as a whole:
- Does the poem have a regular metre?
- If it does have a regular metre, what kind of metre is it and how does its particular patterning affect the emotional state in which you find yourself responding to the poem?
- Also, if the poem has a regular metre, how do individual adaptations of or breaks from the predominant metre affect your reading of particular moments in the poem?
- If the poem does not have a regular metre, how does this affect the manner in which you respond to the words it contains?
One of the poems we are using as a case study in this unit is Emily Dickinson’s poem 657 (‘I dwell in Possibility’). My discussion of this poem here (the first of the two videos included on that page) includes (from the 2 minute 27 seconds mark on) a consideration of the poem’s metrical ballad form.
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