Tell me | not, in | mournful | numbers ( A Psalm of Life, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables).

That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold ( Sonnet 73, by William Shakespeare)

Iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables).

How deeply you get into metrics depends upon your level of interest and the type of poetry you write. This short discussion just gives the barest essentials.

' Yet this very faltering, laboring for consistency seems to emphasize Pope's points about effort and struggle, about sound echoing sense.īy now we can recognize a dominant meter:Īnd knowing that meter helps us fit the doubtful syllables into the established pattern, in this case iambic pentameter. This second line is more difficult, partly because of the three lightly stressed syllables '. When you see a repeated pattern, use a /to divide the line into feet. First check the syllables two at a time then if no pattern is evident, three at a time. Mark unstressed syllables with a and stressed syllables with a. Then mark the syllables as being stressed or unstressed. The line too labors, and the words move slow

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, First read it aloud to get a feel for where the stressed and unstressed syllables fall. Here, very briefly, is how to scan a line. Besides helping with such quick rhythmic tune ups, metric awareness is essential for writing in traditional fixed forms, such as blank verse or the sonnet. As has often been pointed out, English sentences naturally tend to establish a dominant beat, usually iambic, so if you have a troublesome line or phrase that 'just doesn't feel right,' you may find that by quickly scanning your line, you can spot and fix the problem, replacing a one syllable word with a two syllable word, or vice-versa. Still, even if you write mostly free verse, understanding some basic metric principles can help. Or as Ezra Pound put it, they 'compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.' Poets who write free verse, generally de-emphasize or ignore meter and focus instead on refining and tuning their natural speech rhythms to suit the poem's tone and content.

Rhythm refers to the overall tempo, or pace, at which the poem unfolds, while meter refers to the measured beat established by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. These are similar but not identical concepts.

Sonnet iambic pentameter checker