What is Meter?

Meter is the quality of regular and conventional rhythm in poetic lines. Rhythm means any pattern, whether regular or not, and whether following any conventional pattern or not. But meter means standard conventional and regular pattern of rhythm.

Meter is generally regular repetition of a given pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. The meter of a line of verse is determined by the pattern of stronger and weaker stresses in its component syllables. There are various units of meter that a poet is likely to use. Each individual unit or collection of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a foot. When you read through a poem to see if it is written in meter, and if so what the meter is, that is called scanning a poem. There are four standard meters in English like

Iamb (UI)

Anapest (UUI)

 Trochee (IU)

Dactyl (IUU)

To scan a poem in terms of the feet it contains the following terms

Monometer (one foot or units of meter per line)

Dimeter (two feet)

Trimeter (three feet)

Tetrameter (four feet)

Pentameter (five feet)

Hexameter (six feet)

Heptameter (seven feet)

Octameter (Eight feet)

The most common meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter, in which each line contains ten syllables, or five iambic feet, which individually are composed of an unstressed syllable followed by an accented syllable. Both of the following lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is written in iambic pentameter:

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Meter does not create a mood. The words of the poem do that. It amplifies the feeling or impression. To talk about the metric system of the poem, the reader can mention the general meter of the poem and how that meter contributes to the atmosphere and meaning of the poem. It is perfectly acceptable to use emotive words in describing the effect of the meter as the iambic pentameters give a relaxed and tranquil feeling of the poem or the use of an anapestic trimester adds urgency and a sense of relentless persecution. The readers must see where the poet changes the meter. When the poet does so, there is a good chance to say that he is doing it in order to achieve some especial aim or purpose. As well as putting in slight variations to the meter, a poet will often put a caesura into a line. This is simply a pause, usually in the middle of a line, and marked by a punctuation mark, such as a full stop, comma or semi-colon.

Published on 23 Jan. 2014 by Kedar Nath Sharma

Related Topics

Rhythm: Introduction

Iambic Pentameter: Introduction

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