Complete guide to meter, rhythm and scansion

In this video, I explain what scansion, meter and rhythm mean, and how you can apply them to your analysis of poetry. I also suggest 4 steps to scanning any line for meter and rhythm, and illustrate with examples from Robert Frost (Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening) and Shakespeare (Macbeth).

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[tolu]

how would you find the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line to find the meter?

[darkengine]

I hope you'll forgive a complete beginner's confusion, but something seems odd to me about analyzing English rhythm in terms of syllables because they aren't fixed-length (in contrast to my native language of Japanese): they're variable-length. It takes substantially longer to pronounce a monosyllabic word like "flown" or "wild" than to pronounce "it" or "but".

For example, the names, "Bo-bby" [/ˈbɑbi/] and "Char-lotte" [/ˈʃɑrlət/] have radically different syllable lengths and therefore different rhythmic patterns despite both being disyllabic words with an accent on the first syllable. "char-lotte and bo-bby" [rougher flow] ends up having a very different rhythm (and seems to tempt a small pause in the middle or an elongation of "and" as a result over), "bo-bby and char-lotte" (smoother flow), because "bo-bby-and" seems to take around the same time to speak as "char-lotte", but "char-lotte-and" takes substantially longer than "bo-bby".

If we think of rhythm at least in terms of the fixed-length beats of music, then English poses the complexity of trying to map/position variable-length syllables to fixed-length beats. The "most stressed" syllables to seem to want to be quantized discretely to land evenly on timed rhythmic beats with subtle pauses or stretching and/or extra unstressed syllables, but syllables don't seem to map one-to-one with a uniformly-timed beat (such as that of a metronome).

"The cat" seems to tightly fit into a dibeat foot/monometer, mapping neatly to the disyllabic foot/monometer, because "the" and "cat" have relatively short and evenly-timed syllables and offers no room for insertion of syllables in between without disrupting the whole rhythm and length of the phrase. However, "The cat went to the schools, " seems to want to stretch to a tetrabeat meter due to the longer length of "schools". "The cat went to | the sch-oo-ls."

The syllabic accents then seem to manifest in something like a secundus paeon against a tetrabeat foot: "the CAT went to | the sch-OOls [tap]." A syllabic analysis seems to suggest an iamb followed by a pyrrhus followed by an iamb ("the CAT | went to | the SCHOOLS.") which seems clumsy and chaotic unless "TO" is considered accented (which seems a bit odd and unnatural to me when spoken at natural speed: "the CAT | went TO | the SCHOOLS"), but when analyzed in terms of beats rather than syllables, it seems to cleanly and uniformly conform to a secundus paeon tetrabeat dimeter rather than a jarring mixture of disyllabic feet, and naturally extends:

>> the CAT went to | the sch-OOLs [tap] | and WAN-dere-d in | the FIE-lds [tap tap].

It seems so much easier to think about this way in terms of fixed-timed beats rather than variable-timed syllables. The above if we attempted a scansion towards a disyllabic hexameter would be:

>> the CAT | went to | the SCHOOLS | and WAN | dered in | the FIELDs.

Iamb, pyrrhus, iamb, iamb, pyrrhus, iamb? Or maybe it's using tetrasyllabic trimeter?

>> the CAT went to | the SCHOOLS and WAN | dered in the FIELDs.

Secundus paeon, ditrochee, quartus paeon? That doesn't seem right. Or maybe it's using trisyllabic tetrameter?

>> the CAT went | to the SCHOOLS | and WAN dered | in the FIELDs.

Amphibrach, anapest, amphibrach, anapest? That seems the most uniform in structure so far using trisyllabic tetrameter, but actually it's showing repeated hexasyllabic patterns:

>> the CAT went to the SCHOOLS | and WAN dered in the FIELDs. [di DA di di di DA | di DA di di di DA]

But thinking about it in terms of hexasyllabic dimeter still doesn't seem anywhere near a true description of its rhythm. Meanwhile, it does seem to map very cleanly to tetrabeat feet (specifically a secundus paeon tetrameter) which doesn't map a syllable one-to-one to a beat and considers the variable-length nature of syllables as well as natural pauses.

>> 1. The cat went to the schools and wandered in the fields.
>> 2. the CAT went to | the sch-OOLs [tap] | and WAN-dere-d in | the FIE-lds [tap tap].
>> 3. [di DA di di | di DA di pi | di DA di di | di DA si pi]
-- ["pi" indicates natural pauses]
-- ["si" indicates natural pauses with syllables half-spilling into them.]

This seems to capture something closest to the true musical rhythm against uniformly-timed beats, including the natural pauses: a secundus paeon (tetrabeat) tetrameter. And it doesn't have a one-to-one syllable mapping because the syllables vary in length: two syllables map to one beat in some cases, one syllable maps to two or more in others, and there are natural pauses in between syllables to ensure 4 beats per foot.

Is this a strange way of looking at it? I'm mostly just hung up on how variable in length English syllables are. That makes mapping them to uniform-length beats so complicated to me unless we start looking further into the lengths of syllables and not just in terms of stress/unstressed syllables, or else our ideas of relative syllabic stress seem to get extremely complicated and contextually-variable with loads of exceptions.

I have some background in musical production and the idea of thinking of rhythm in terms of English syllables is so counter-intuitive to me when the syllable sounds vary so much in length. Yet if we think about "stressed sounds" and the phonetic length of sounds (which decomposes syllables further down into one or more uniform-length sound pieces), there seems to be a much simpler and "atomic" way of "sound scansion" that wants to emerge over the very complex and "compound" way of "syllabic scansion". Variable-length syllables don't seem to be the proper atomic units to analyze rhythm; they seem to want to decompose further, and where speakers tend to pause seems important to factor in as well.