“A foot” in isolation, for example, is iambic. What teenage me knew was that an “iamb” is a two-syllable foot hence a line that is ten syllables long should resolve into five two-syllable feet - iambs - right?Īn iamb is actually a type of two-syllable foot, specifically a foot that goes short-long. “ due to the spoken language’s natural scansion” is dactyl-trochee-dactyl-trochee-trochee natural being trochaic because the spoken language elides it into two syllables: NATCH-rule).
#Poetic scansion free
I would also augur that these “feet” are trochaic ( o-x) or dactylic ( o-x-x), with relatively free alternation between them, due to the spoken language’s natural scansion (e.g.
It should follow - hypothetically - I haven’t done any analysis to support or disprove my hunch - that most English “free verse” is in actuality a loose tetrameter or perhaps pentameter without the alliterative pointers to the beats.
Alliterating the beats guides you to them, as English, like all stress-timed languages, elides all unstressed syllables between beats so that they take about the same time to recite as a single stressed syllable. Germanic stress is word-initial, but this does not mean that the line’s first syllable must be stressed instead, the beat must be on the natural stress of the phrase’s most important word. Each line has four natural beats - phrase stresses. The first widespread English meter wasn’t iambic or end-rhyming it was an alliterative meter common to all Germanic languages. Keep in mind here, I’m no expert I’m just sharing the things I know. To this end, I’m looking to learn about scansion. I want to have better control of rhythm over my work. But, for older and wiser me, subconscious command isn’t good enough, anymore. I am a poet, it turns out my prose draws its power from an almost subconscious command of poetic language. Lately, perhaps under the influence of a significant other, I’ve been getting back into writing poetry. Eventually, I got bored of free verse - as one does - and stopped writing poetry in any sort of “serious” way, mostly because I wanted to focus my effort on work I could get paid for. You can’t just put together a 10-syllable line and call it “iambic pentameter”.īut I was a kid without any real knowledge of line construction or ways to find information about it. This is, of course, not true French poesy is syllabic because French doesn’t have useful stress or syllable timing, but English is a stress-timed language. “Iambic pentameter” and “hexameter” were terms encountered in Lit textbooks, and not really applicable to the practice of poetry, where the only real distinction was between rhymers and non-rhymers (usually angsty teenage males forewent rhyming).Īt that time I thought that just making a 10-syllable line counted as “iambic pentameter”. When I was an angsty adolescent poet (don’t lie, we all were), I free-versed.
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