INTRODUCTION: Many students today are never exposed to the elementary nuts and bolts of traditional poetry, especially when it comes to meter and verse form. To alleviate this growing ignorance, we offer the following summary of the basics. And then, lest it prove too dry, we illuminate and hopefully exemplify some of it poetically.

RHYTHM: All speech has rhythm. Rhythm is created by the alternation of stressed and unstressed, loud and soft, high and low, long and short. Even prose is rhythmical.

METER: When rhythm is repeated in recognizable and predictable patterns, we have meter (from Lat. metor, to measure). Certain basic identifiable patterns are used in English poetry.

FOOT: The foot is the most basic unit of meter—the smallest repeatable pattern of rhythm. Common feet used in English verse include:

• The Iamb (adj. iambic): Two syllables with the stress on the second. x /
  Example: When I have fears that I may cease to be, Keats
• The Trochee (adj. trochaic): Two syllables with the stress on the first. / x
  Example: Adam / Had ‘em, Fleas, Ogden Nash
• The Anapest (ad. anapestic): Three syllables with the stress on the last. x x /
  Example: The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, Byron
• The Dactyl (adj. dactyllic): Three syllables with the stress on the first. / x x
  Example: Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, Tennyson
• The Spondee (adj. spondaic): Two syllables, both stressed. / /
  Example: And ten low words oft creep in one dull line, Pope
• The Monosyllabic Foot (adj. monosyllabic): Wow!

LINE: Feet are organized into larger units called lines. A certain type of prevailing foot occurring in groups of varying size constitutes the basic metrical patterns of English verse. Lines are categorized by the number of feet they contain:

• Monometer: One foot per line
• Dimeter: Two feet per line.
• Trimeter: Three feet per line.
• Tetrameter: Four feet per line.
• Pentameter: Five feet per line.
• Hexameter: Six feet per line.

Larger groupings are theoretically possible, but they tend to break down into smaller combinations—seven into alternating tetrameter and trimeter, eight into two tetrameters, etc.

The names of the most common meters come from combining the adjective form of one of the feet with the name of one of the lines: e.g., iambic pentameter (five iambic feet per line). Each combination has its own characteristic feel, which connoisseurs of poetry learn to recognize by its very taste on the tongue. Iambic Pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry.

PREVAILING METER: Traditional poetry tends to have a prevailing meter, that is, one that is consistent enough to make classification possible. A poem may be in, say, iambic tetrameter without every single foot being an iamb. This fact leads to

METRICAL VARIATION: Poets will occasionally substitute another foot in the prevailing meter (say, an anapest for an iamb). Failure to do this will create a monotonous, sing-songy effect. A good poet will use metrical variation to avoid monotony- a great one will use it to enhance the meaning being conveyed by the words.

SCANSION: To scan a poem is to analyze its meter. Feet are separated by a vertical line through the line of text, and syllables are marked as stressed ( / ), unstressed ( - ) or as having secondary stress ( \ ).

END-STOPPED: When the line and the sentence (or clause) end together, lines are said to be end-stopped.

ENJAMBMENT: The technique of beginning a new sentence at various places within the line, rather than always at the beginning of the line.

CAESURA: A pause within a line of verse.

FIGURES OF SOUND: The Figures of Speech listed above can be considered figures of thought. There are also other figures of speech that have to do with the way a line sounds to the ear:

• Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
• Consonance: The repetition of consonant sounds in the middle of words.
• Rhyme: The correspondence of vowel sounds, consonant sounds, and stress patterns at the end of words—usually at the ends of lines, but there can also be internal rhyme.
• Slant Rhyme (or off rhyme or half rhyme): A correspondence in which the items listed above are similar but not identical.
• Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in words that do not rhyme. E.g., rhyme rhymes with time but assonates with right.

POETIC FORMS (A Sampler):

• Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter (not to be confused with free verse!).
• Free Verse: Poetry lacking both regular meter and rhyme (not to be confused with blank verse!).
• Royal Couplets: End-stopped lines of iambic pentameter rhyming AABBCCDD, etc.
• Ballad Stanza: Alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, usually in four-line stanzas rhyming ABAB or ABCB.
• Common Meter: Same as Ballad Stanza. This term is used in hymnology because Ballad Stanza is the most common hymn meter (vid. Amazing Grace).
• Rhyme Royal: Seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCC.
• Ottava Rima: Eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABABCC.
• Fourteeners: Iambic heptameter couplets (popular in bad 16th c. verse).
• Poulter’s Measure: Alternating lines of iambic hexameter and heptameter, in couplets (popular in bad 16th c. verse).
• Limerick: Five-line stanza consisting of two lines of iambic or anapestic trimeter, two of dimeter, and one of trimeter, rhyming AABBA (used in light verse).
• Clerihew: Light verse form named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line must be the name of a famous person- this generates a four-line stanza rhyming AABB which makes a snide comment about that person.
• The Villanelle: Nineteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. The first two A lines must be substantially repeated as the alternating last lines of the succeeding triplets, until they come together to form a couplet at the end. The trick is to make the repeated lines seem to fall naturally into place throughout the poem.
• Spenserian Stanza: Nine lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCBCC, with the last line having an extra foot as a hexameter (called the Alexandrine).
• The Sonnet: Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (in French poetry, hexameter) with a particular structure and rhyme scheme (see below). The most popular short poetic form, the sonnet has been taken on as a challenge by many important poets in history. There are three main varieties:
• The Petrarchan (or Italian) Sonnet: Breaks down into two groups of eight and six lines each (the octave and the sextet). The octave must rhyme ABBAABBA. The sextet may have two or three rhymes, e.g., ABABAB, ABCABC, ABACBC, etc.—it should not end in a couplet. The octave may ask a question and the sextet answer it, the octave describe a scene and sextet comment on it, etc. Their content should be related. The effect of the whole should be like an ocean wave, rising in the octave to break and come to rest in the sextet.
• The Shakespearean (or English) Sonnet: Instead of the two movements of the Petrarchan sonnet, we have four units: three quatrains and a couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The quatrains may function as paragraphs—three points and a conclusion.
• The Spenserian Sonnet: Spenser is the only poet to give his name to two verse forms. His sonnet is like the Shakespearean but more difficult in that the quatrains are interlocked by a repeated rhyme: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE.

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A Poetical Miscellany

• Donald T. Williams

  

  Donald T. Williams holds a BA in English from Taylor University, an M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Georgia. He is the editor of The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society and the co-editor of The Journal of Formal Poetry and the author of six books: The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit (Broadman, 1994), Inklings of Reality: Essays toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters (Toccoa Falls College Press, 1996), The Disciple’s Prayer (Christian Publications, 1999), Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Broadman, 2006), Credo: An Exposition of the Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (Chalice Press, 2008). He has also contributed essays, poems, and reviews to such journals as National Review, Christianity Today, Touchstone, The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Philosophia Christi, Theology Today, Christianity and Literature, Christian Scholar’s Review, Mythlore, SEVEN, Christian Educator’s Journal, Preaching, and Christian Research Journal. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America with many years of pastoral experience, he has spent several summers in Africa training local pastors for Church Planting International, and currently serves as Professor of English and Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College in the hills of NE Georgia. More material on the Inklings and other topics can be found at his website, doulomen.tripod.com. He blogs at www.journalofformalpoetry.com.

  

  The Sonnet
  Donald T. Williams

  In Petrarch’s soul there bloomed a song whose name
  Was Laura, so with laurel wreath the Muse
  Crowned song and singer, and to us the fame
  Of both comes down in lines we cannot use.

  But Wyatt and Surrey heard them from afar
  And with bold, though perhaps yet unsure, hands,
  They plucked the laurel, careful not to mar
  Its form and planted it in their own lands.

  In that richer soil it grew full green,
  Tended by husbandmen of highest skill
  Who coaxed it into blossoms yet unseen.
  It withers now, but could yet flourish still

  Were but on gardener left to carry on
  The work of Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Donne.

  
  

  On the Writing of Sonnets
  Donald T. Williams

  A perfect sonnet must have fourteen lines,
     Ten syllable in each, the evens strong
     (In French, the sonnet uses twelve and shines,
     But twelve in English verse is just too long).

  In Italy it rhymes A B B A.
     A B B A again the octave makes.
     The Sextet then has three rhymes which it may
     Arrange diversely when the sonnet breaks.

  Elizabethan sonnets break three times,
     Once after every quatrain, just for fun.
     A B A B and so forth run the rhymes.
     You end them with a couplet; here is one:

  This sonnet is not great, but it is good,
     A perfect sonnet if you’ve understood.

  
  

  To My Predecessors
  Donald T. Williams

  Their glory has not faded. Though the years
  Have been kind to barbarians, and, worse,
  Have yielded to their hands the realm of verse;
  Though students cannot scan; though I have fears
  That Keats will cease to be read by my peers
  Except as an assignment and a curse;
  Yet still this melody I will rehearse:
  I come to sing the English sonneteers.

  Their glory cannot fade! My tongue repeats
  The words with wonder, hour after hour
  Of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats,
  Of Wordsworth, Hopkins—tastes within their bower
  Rich viands, cates, and soul-sustaining meats:
  Each line a world of wit compressed to power.

  
  

  The English Sonneteers: A Villanelle
  Donald T. Williams

  I come to sing the English sonneteers
  (Not worthy, I, to emulate their form).
  Wyatt and Surrey were the pioneers.
  For rules our modern bards have only sneers
  And honor Chaos as their highest norm,
  But I will sing the English sonneteers.
  Show me the free-verse monolog that cheers
  The heart, a battlefield for love forlorn,
  Like Wyatt and Surrey, just the pioneers!
  The dulcet sequences first reached our ears
  From Italy and France, all full of charm,
  But I will sing the English sonneteers.
  For when in Shakespeare's time the thing appears
  We see the first rays of a splendid morn:
  Wyatt and Surrey were the pioneers.
  The great ones—Spenser, Milton, and their peers—
  Would follow and the highest truths adorn.
  I come to sing the English sonneteers;
  Wyatt and Surrey were the pioneers.

  
  

  The Test
  Donald T. Williams

  Perhaps the toughest test of writing well
  Is one that’s hardly ever tried today:
  The daunting challenge of the villanelle.
  The devil’s in the details, I can tell.
  Six triplets linked and rhyming A B A:
  Is that the toughest test of writing well?
  Oh no, there’s more. The trick is in the trail
  The repetitions leave along the way.
  That is the challenge of the villanelle.
  Each one must feel like fate and they impel
  The reader onward, never let him stray
  From, this, the toughest test of writing well.
  When Dylan Thomas’ father died, the yell
  Could not be stifled in its fierce dismay.
  Alone the challenge of the villanelle
  Could hold such anguish to its task, to spell
  Out clearly what the torn heart had to say.
  He passed the toughest test of writing well:
  The daunting challenge of the villanelle.

  
  

  On Spenserian Stanza:
  Donald T. Williams

  For Two Teachers: Edmund Spenser and Frances Ewbank

  When Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, he made
  A brand new stanza up in which to frame
  The glorious knights and ladies he portrayed
  Triumphant over villains full of shame.
  Ever different, yet still the same,
  It had to hold up through the spacious land
  Of Faerie from end to end, and flame
  More bright with virtue there than e&#rsquo;er the hand
  Of author had achieved, in verses quaint or grand.

  Ottava Rima had the flow he needed,
  But seemed in live a lady far too light
  To shadow forth the gallant knights who heeded
  The Code of Maidenheed and served the bright
  And gracious Gloriana truly. Might
  A pensive sonnet cycle then avail?
  But that would never serve to show the flight
  Of narrative events in time. The tale,
  It seemed, must then be dight in wholly different mail.

  Yet if the two could somehow be combined—
  Could move with supple dignity, but yet
  Be not in short, concise quatrains confined
  Nor have its forward movement always let,
  Caught in the closing couplet&#rsquo;s double net;
  And yet still pause for needed contemplation—
  With light impediment, enough to whet
  The reader&#rsquo; appetite for exploration—
  Now that would truly be a gallant innovation!

  Suppose we take Ottava Rima, add,
  To slow its headlong plunge, a single line,
  Rhyming with the last, but subtly clad
  With just one extra foot to be a sign
  Of need to sip with care such heady wine—
  So came The Fairie Queene. And there has been
  No poem in which the Glory seemed to shine
  More brightly since the storied epoch when
  The Sweet Singer of Israel wielded the sword and the pen.

  And thou, doctor mihi carissima,
  Who showed me how to look with eyes undim
  Upon the bright, the ars dulcissima
  Of sacred Poesy, and thence to skim
  Cream, not of just aesthesis, nor of whim,
  But of the Truth well imaged forth, displayed,
  Filling the cup of wisdom to the brim;
  If worthily I now wield Spenser&#rsquo; blade,
  The praise is thine, who long hast labored, taught, and prayed.

  
  
  

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