World of All Kinds of Art

White Horse

Appreciating 10 Feet To Meter

All is not lost. One of the things you'll be pleased to discover is that there are a lot of examples of period poetry that do not truly rhyme. 1360 isn't rhymed, but Chaucer's Canterbury Tales published about 20 years later, is. Much of Shakespeare's work is unrhymed. The poetic function you can not duck, however, is rhythm.

Whatever other hallmarks a culture's poetry may have, be it rhyme, alliteration, or fixed structure, they all have rhythm. Rhythm in speech or poetry is produced for the reason that we don't place the same emphasis on every syllable we speak. We stress, or emphasize, certain syllables, while other syllables stay unstressed, or de-emphasized. Lots of earlier poetic forms tended to ignore the placement of unstressed syllables in any line and only dealt using the stresses per line. Piers Plowman begins [1, 2]:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

Though you will find a varying amount of unstressed syllables (placed haphazardly), you will find consistently four stresses per line:

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

The stressed syllables also show alliteration, i.e., they begin with the exact same sound.

Chaucer was a man ahead of his time. This style quickly became the English regular [2, 3]:

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,

Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;

And in his tyme swich a conquerour.

This is often a style referred to as a fixed meter. This unique meter is referred to as iambic pentameter, with 10 syllables per line and five evenly-spaced stresses. This meter was to dominate English-language poetry by way of 1600 and beyond. First we need to have to talk about the revolutionary shift from stress-based verse to lines of a fixed meter, and to complete that, we want to take off our shoes.

The standard unit of any fixed meter is referred to as the foot. " (Notice no 1 thinks that they're meant to hop on their left foot; they have an understanding of that the ideal step is basically unstressed.) Our journey into the amazing planet of feet begins having a single step, and indeed a single syllable, namely the...

Monosyllabic foot: one stressed syllable, like "day. Here's a line of monosyllabic tetrameter (tetra from the Greek for "four", so a line of four monosyllabic feet):

Go. Seek. Find. Kill.

Not very much to work with. I can't consider of a period example of monosyllabic foot poetry.

It's critical to start thinking about feet as opposed to syllables, due to the fact the form of foot forms the rhythm. Lines composed of two-syllable feet are at times called "duple meter. There are 4 types of two-syllable feet:

Iamb: 1 unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, like "today" and "before. Iambic meter is the natural cadence of each English and French, so you'll locate that overwhelmingly most period English and French poetry is iambic. If you are questioning what type of word "iamb" is, it's Greek, like most poetic terms. If you're feeling like all these terms are too high-brow for you, you must know that Iambe was renowned in Greek mythology for entertaining Demeter with bawdy stories, so as an alternative to thinking about High School poetry class, think of what a saucy wench Iambe was and you will feel better.

People frequently doubt that they speak in iambic meter most of the time, since they've been taught that Shakespeare wrote in iambic meter, and they know they don't talk that way. Oh, but you do. We hate having too many stressed syllables in a row. "White horse" is two stressed syllables and sounds jerky to us, but "a milk-white horse" alternates stressed and unstressed syllables and flows additional musically to our ears. Most English words of far more than 1 syllable alternate stressed and unstressed syllables; the couple of words that have multiple stressed syllables together are normally compound words, or words produced by sticking two smaller words together, like "handcuff" and "football."

Once you've identified the sort of foot, like iambic, the name of the meter does nothing more than let you know how quite a few feet are in every single line (it just tells you in Greek).

1, Monometer: A horse! (One foot, two syllables, da-DUM)

(Two feet, 4 syllables, da-DUM da-DUM)

3, Trimeter: I have to have my coffee, please.

5, Pentameter: I think he went to Wal-Mart on his break.

7, Heptameter: You'd believe that I'd have something more essential to relate.

Okay, I had to make use of "relate" rather than "say" to preserve the meter, but you can see how little tweaking ought to be accomplished to standard speech to even out the rhythm. You ought to be in a position to spot the iambic feet in those lines (just break the lines into two-syllable chunks and note that every chunk sounds roughly like da-DUM). Obviously, in usual speech, we do not make quite as much distinction in between stressed and unstressed syllables, as nicely as the longer the statement, the much less distinct we get.

I need my coffee, please.

Without hearing it first, you'd naturally read this written line as three iambs, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Now, you COULD say it like this:

I need to have my coffee, please.

But you'd recognize it as unusual, and realize that I was trying to emphasize the word "I", namely that I have to have my coffee more than the subsequent individual (probably true!).

I think he went to Wal-Mart on his break.

This just isn't necessarily a poor thing. Poetry that never deviates from the pure meter usually sounds like a second-grader wrote it:

I assume that I shall by no means see

A snail that desires to climb a tree

He may fall down and bump his head

Or take so extended he'd still be dead.

Most of Shakespeare's plays are iambic pentameter, unrhymed, so the lines will need to sound like da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glor'ious summer by this son of York.

Whoa! But this is an opening line, and it's meant to have tremendous punch. So it does. To an ear expecting normal iambic, this feels like somebody stripped the clutch. Scansion describes how well the poet stuck to the meter. Here are two ten-syllable lines:

John jumped on the bed, and Susan said, "Hey!"

The first line scans perfectly in iambic pentameter, the second doesn't, which is why the initial sounds rhythmic and poetic as well as the second doesn't. Middling poets can commonly count to ten, but they just can't perceive the difference between a line that scans and one that doesn't, so their poems end up sounding like prose that happens to have lines of the identical length. Just due to the fact you've got 10 syllables per line does NOT mean you could have iambic pentameter. It's all about RHYTHM.

Really powerful deviations from meter are frequently put to use in modern day poems for comic effect.

There was a Young Man of Japan,

Whose limericks in no way would scan.

He replied, "Yes, I know -

"

and

A decrepit old gas man named Peter

While hunting about for the meter

Touched a leak with his light

He arose out of sight

These reptiles lived during the latter part of the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era (from about 96 million years ago to about 65 million years ago), and spent their complete lives at sea. Mosasaurs had been carnivores eating fish, sea urchins, turtles, and shellfish.

You know the rhythm you expect in the last line of a limerick, as well as the unexpected high quality of a line that varies wildly from that expected rhythm gets your attention.

If you felt pleased by this you may also be entertained by learning about Square Feet To Meter as well as 10 Feet To Meter.

Goldfrapp - Ride A White Horse