Syllables and stress
English verse is measured in syllables and stresses. Every word of more than one syllable has a fixed stress: we say SEA-son, never sea-SON. One-syllable words take their stress from the sentence. The and of are almost always light; hope and dark almost always heavy. Many others go either way, depending on the words around them. A meter is a pattern that tells you, roughly, where the heavy syllables should fall.
The marks above the syllables follow an old convention: a slash for a stressed syllable, a small u for an unstressed one. In the reader you can switch these on for any poem with the "Show stress marks" option.
The feet
A foot is the smallest repeating unit of the pattern, two or three syllables long. English uses five regularly. Learn the first two well; the others are mostly variations poets drop into a line for effect.
Line lengths
The line is named by its foot and by how many feet it holds: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), octameter (8). "Iambic pentameter" therefore means five iambs: ten syllables, the even ones stressed. Two lengths dominate English poetry. Iambic pentameter is the line of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Byron. Iambic tetrameter, often alternating with trimeter, is the line of ballads and hymns.
A line may carry one extra unstressed syllable at the end. That is a feminine ending, and it is why so many pentameter lines in Don Juan have eleven syllables rather than ten.
How to scan a line
- Count the syllables. Say the line aloud slowly. Ten or eleven points to pentameter; eight to tetrameter; six to trimeter. Contractions such as o'er and ev'ry are one beat and two beats respectively; the poet spelled them that way to tell you so.
- Mark the words of two or more syllables first. Their stresses are fixed and cannot move. Edu-CA-tion is always stressed on ca. These are your anchors.
- Mark the obvious monosyllables. Articles, prepositions and conjunctions are light. Nouns, main verbs and adjectives are usually heavy.
- Find the pattern the anchors agree on. If the fixed stresses fall on the even syllables, the line is rising (iambic). If they fall on the odd ones, it is falling (trochaic). Then let the free monosyllables follow the pattern.
- Accept the variations. Real lines are never perfectly regular. An inverted first foot (trochee for iamb), a spondee, a light foot: all are normal. If most of the fixed stresses fit, you have found the meter.
- Read it naturally afterwards. Scansion is a diagnosis, not a performance. Once you know where the beat is, read the line as speech and let the beat sit underneath.
The classical metres
Everything above counts stress: which syllables you lean on. Greek and Latin verse counted something else, quantity: how long a syllable takes to say. The difference is not a detail. It is why no English translation of Homer sounds like Homer, and why the argument about how to translate him has run for four hundred years.
A syllable is long if its vowel is long by nature, or is a diphthong, or if two consonants follow it. Otherwise it is short. Two shorts take about as long to say as one long, so they can stand in its place.
That is the dactylic hexameter, the measure of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses and every ancient epic. Six feet: each of the first five a dactyl (– ⏑ ⏑) or a spondee (– –), the last always two syllables. The fifth foot is a dactyl in nineteen lines in twenty, which is what gives the hexameter its familiar falling close.
Other measures you will meet here:
On this site the Latin and Greek texts sit beside their translations, and the scansion is worked out for you: turn on Show stress marks in the reader with the original beside, and the feet appear above each line. About ninety-nine lines in a hundred of the Latin scan automatically, and about three in four of the Greek; the rest are left plain rather than guessed at. The methods page gives the rules, and a poet's course will ask you to mark the longs yourself.
Kinds of rhyme
Two words rhyme when they share their sound from the last stressed vowel to the end: time and clime, nation and station. Beyond that plain case the vocabulary is worth knowing, because poets use every one deliberately.
| Kind | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Masculine | One stressed syllable rhymes. | way / day |
| Feminine | A stressed syllable plus one unstressed rhymes. Often comic. | passion / fashion |
| Triple | Three syllables rhyme. Almost always comic. | intellectual / hen-peck'd you all |
| Mosaic | One word rhymes with two or more. | poet / show it |
| Slant (near) | Consonants match but the vowel does not, or nearly so. | love / prove |
| Eye | Looks like a rhyme on the page but does not sound like one. | now / show |
| Historical | Rhymed when written; pronunciation has since moved. | war / far, were / there |
| Internal | A rhyme inside the line rather than at its end. | "while I pondered, weak and weary" |
| Identical | A word rhymed with itself. Usually a fault, sometimes a refrain. | nevermore / nevermore |
The analysis tool counts every one of these for a work: how many feminine endings, how many mosaic rhymes, which pairs have drifted since the poet's day.
Rhyme schemes
A scheme is written as letters. Lines that rhyme with each other get the same letter, in order of first appearance. ABAB means lines one and three rhyme, and lines two and four. A line that rhymes with nothing is marked with a dash or x. The scheme, together with the line length and the number of lines, defines a stanza form.
The forms
| Form | Lines | Meter | Scheme | In the library |
|---|
Identifying a form
- Count the lines in a stanza. Four says ballad or quatrain. Eight says ottava rima. Nine says Spenserian. Fourteen says sonnet. No stanza breaks at all says couplets or blank verse.
- Count the syllables in a typical line. Ten is pentameter. Eight and six alternating is ballad meter. A twelve-syllable last line inside a nine-line stanza clinches the Spenserian.
- Mark the rhyme scheme. Read the end words aloud. ABABABCC is ottava rima. ABABBCBCC is Spenserian. ABCB is the ballad. AABB is couplets. If nothing rhymes and the lines are pentameter, it is blank verse.
- Check the closing move. A sonnet ends in a couplet that turns the argument. Ottava rima ends in a couplet that lands a joke. A Spenserian stanza slows into its long last line.
- Confirm with the tools. Paste the stanza into the workshop with the form you suspect, or open the analysis page, where the rhyme scheme chart shows what the poet actually did.
Further reading
These handbooks are all in the public domain and will replace the summaries above as they are brought into the site:
- Francis B. Gummere, A Handbook of Poetics (1885). A clear school introduction to meter and form.
- George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910). The standard survey of how English meter developed.
- Paull Franklin Baum, The Principles of English Versification (1922). Concise and modern in method.
- Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse (1880). Treats verse as music; idiosyncratic, still stimulating.
- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). A poet explaining, line by line, how The Raven was built.