Syllable-stress metres

It has been shown that the metre of “Vertue” is determined by a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged into feet and that a precise number of feet determines the measure of the line. Such verse is called syllable-stress verse (in some terminologies accentual-syllabic) and was the norm for English poetry from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. A line of syllable-stress verse is made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or three-syllable (trisyllabic) feet. The disyllabic feet are the iamb and the trochee (both can be noted in the scansion of “Vertue”); the trisyllabic feet are the dactyl (′ ˘˘) and anapest (˘˘ ′).

Following are illustrations of the four principal feet found in English verse:

Some theorists also admit the spondaic foot (′ ′) and pyrrhic foot (˘˘) into their scansions; however, spondees and pyrrhics occur only as substitutions for other feet, never as determinants of a metrical pattern:

It has been noted that four feet make up a line of tetrameter verse. A line consisting of one foot is called monometer, of two dimeter, of three trimeter, of five pentameter, of six hexameter, and of seven heptameter. Lines containing more than seven feet rarely occur in English poetry.

The following examples illustrate the principal varieties of syllable-stress metres and their scansions:

Syllable stress became more or less established in the 14th century, in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. In the century that intervened between Chaucer and the early Tudor poets, syllable-stress metres were either ignored or misconstrued. By the end of the 16th century, however, the now-familiar iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic metres became the traditional prosody for English verse.

Strong-stress metres

In the middle of the 19th century, with Walt Whitman’s free verse and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s extensive metrical innovations, the traditional prosody was challenged. Antecedent to the syllable-stress metres was the strong-stress metre of Old English and Middle English poetry. Strong-stress verse is measured by count of stresses alone; the strong stresses are usually constant, but the number of unstressed syllables may vary considerably.

Strong-stress verse survives in nursery rhymes and children’s counting songs:

The systematic employment of strong-stress metre can be observed in the Old English epic poem Beowulf (c. 1000) and in William Langland’s vision-poem, Piers Plowman (A version, c. 1362):

These lines illustrate the structural pattern of strong-stress metre. Each line divides sharply at the caesura (‖), or medial pause; on each side of the caesura are two stressed syllables strongly marked by alliteration.

Strong-stress verse is indigenous to the Germanic languages with their wide-ranging levels of stressed syllables and opportunities for alliteration. Strong-stress metre was normative to Old English and Old Germanic heroic poetry, as well as to Old English lyric poetry. With the rising influence of French literature in the 12th and 13th centuries, rhyme replaced alliteration and stanzaic forms replaced the four-stress lines. But the strong-stress rhythm persisted; it can be felt in the anonymous love lyrics of the 14th century and in the popular ballads of the 15th century.

“Lord Randal” can be comfortably scanned to show a line of mixed iambic and anapestic feet; it clearly reveals, however, a four-stress structure:

A number of 20th-century poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, revived strong-stress metre. The versification of Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) shows the vitality of the strong-stress, or, as they are often called, “native,” metres.

Syllabic metres

Most of English poetry is carried by the strong-stress and syllable-stress metres. Two other kinds of metres must be mentioned: the purely syllabic metres and the quantitative metres. The count of syllables determines the metres of French, Italian, and Spanish verse. In French poetry the alexandrine, or 12-syllabled line, is a dominant metrical form:

O toi, qui vois la honte où je suis descendue,
Implacable Vénus, suis-je assez confondue?
Tu ne saurais plus loin pousser ta cruauté.
Ton triomphe est parfait; tous tes traits ont porté.

Stress and pause in these lines are variable; only the count of syllables is fixed. English poets have experimented with syllabic metres. The Tudor poet Sir Thomas Wyatt’s translations from Petrarch’s Italian poems of the 14th century attempted to establish a metrical form based on a decasyllabic or 10-syllabled line:

The long love that in my thought doth harbour,
And in my heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretense
And there encampeth, spreading his banner.

Most ears can detect that these lines waver between syllabic and syllable-stress metre; the second line falls into a pattern of iambic feet. Most ears also discover that the count of syllables alone does not produce any pronounced rhythmic interest; syllabic metres in English generate a prosody more interesting to the eye than to the ear.