
Demystifying Poetic Meter - apollinaire
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/24/you-too-can-have-a-viral-tweet-like-mine-demystifying-poetic-meter/
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jacobevelyn
Anyone who finds this interesting might enjoy playing around with the meter
analysis feature of my side project poetry text editor:
[https://versepad.com](https://versepad.com)

(The meter analysis is the most complex part of the codebase, but that doesn't
mean it's perfect. If you find a case that it's not handling well, please let
me know so I can improve it!)

Fair warning: this project is very rough around the edges. But I'll be
releasing some big improvements in the near future.

~~~
pjungwir
Hey this is cool! I tried Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and it thinks only half the
lines have the correct meter---which partly goes to show how flexible real
poems can be but also could highlight places your tool could be refined. I
think line 1 ends in a spondee. Also in sonnets starting a line with trochee-
iamb is so common you might want to accept that as metrical too. Does it use
punctuation as hints? In line 6 the comma at "Featured like him," seems
important to the rythym.

For the ultimate challenge you should see if you can make any sense of
Hopkins. :-)

When I was in Classics grad school I started a metrical search engine project.
The idea was to give scholars a search box with a regex-like syntax for
finding lines in a corpus matching metrical features. For example you could
find all the lines in Homer with feminine endings. With Perseus it's easy to
get lots of Greek & Latin texts. Then you just have to scan everything, but
you can program that. I had an on-paper program to do dactylic hexameter. If
anyone else thinks that might be a helpful tool, let me know. (Also if you
work for Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and want to hire me to write this thing, I
can make availability! ;-)

~~~
jacobevelyn
Wow, your search engine project sounds really neat! What a cool idea.

Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there.
One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his
sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take
the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without
affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that
those be unstressed.

I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day
that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but
if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd
give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my
opinion, though!

~~~
pjungwir
I was an English major in college, so maybe I'm taking some background for
granted here: no one expected that good poetry had 5x14 da-DUMs without
relief. (Certainly you wouldn't want to force Shakespeare to sound that way
when you read it aloud.) But the most common variations were well-known and
tended to feel right, letting the poet vary things enough to avoid sing-
songiness but still not stand out as wrong. So a trochee in the first foot is
very common. Same with a spondee in the last foot. Other feet can flip to
become trochees too, but people have pointed out that it is more common in
some feet than others. For example (IIRC but it's been a long time) I don't
think the fourth foot flips very often, because it's hard to make it not sound
bad. But those changes are "allowed" and so "it's still iambic pentameter." So
it'd be cool if your algorithms could acknowledge those deviations, e.g. maybe
give the line a purple-and-white shading instead of just white, or an
asterisk.

EDIT: A quick Google turned up this article that has a lot of the patterns I
remember: [https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-
pentamete...](https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentameter-
the-principles-of-metrical-variation-part-1-feminine-endings-simple-
variations/)

~~~
FreakLegion
This thread take me back.

> but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others

You might enjoy this:
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149.8792&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

And the follow-up, a longer examination of iambic pentameter:
[http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf](http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf)

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thrower123
Iambic pentameter never made any sense to me when I was in high school
English, or really at any time since. My brain locks up trying to figure out
what in the hell the difference actually is between the syllables in an iamb.
It's probably not helpful that the dialect of English that I grew up with had
some very parochial regional quirks, and most of the material that was trotted
out as examples came from Elizabethan English, which would be somewhat
incomprehensible spoken to most people today anyway. Long/short,
stressed/unstressed, accented/unaccented, none of these descriptions
illuminates much, at least for me.

When I had to write some sonnets in pentameter, I had to find some web pages
that diagrammed out what the "proper" structure of words was, so I could pick
out synonyms that might work...

~~~
jacobevelyn
I feel your pain! I think a big part of the problem is that most of the iambic
pentameter examples taught in school are actually _not_ iambic pentameter (at
least not with modern-day speech patterns). I expanded on this more in another
comment, but I find it much easier to think about meter when not trying to fit
Shakespeare into it.

The best (short) explanation I can think of is: if you were to read the line
like you were saying it in normal, fairly fast speech, which syllables would
have ever so slightly more _oomph ?_ For example, the sentence "I want to go
to the museum." to me sounds most natural as:

    
    
      i WANT to GO to the muSEum
    

then for iambic you just see if that follows a pattern of unstressed/stressed
(it doesn't here). An example that _is_ iambic would be: "You'd rather eat
than see the show?"

    
    
      you'd RAther EAT than SEE the SHOW
    

Hope that's more helpful than hurtful! :)

~~~
kijin
I'm pretty sure you were just trying to showcase the stresses, but your last
example is in iambic tetrameter, not pentameter. Which is another frequent
source of confusion.

For some reason, the fact that "penta" stands for "five" (like the Pentagon!)
seems to get lost in a lot of these discussions. They must be teaching poetry
these days without explaining the Greek/Latin origin of the terms they use.

Word roots are fascinating. Epics were written in dactylic hexameter. Dactyls
mean fingers. You know, as in pterodactyls. They're called pterodactyls
because their wings (ptero-) were supported by their long fingers. A dactyl
has three syllables, DA-da-da, just like the sections of your fingers.

~~~
jacobevelyn
Yes, sorry! I was trying to just discuss the "iambic" part and ignore the
"pentameter," which I'd assumed (maybe incorrectly) was not the source of
confusion. Thanks for the clarification.

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JackFr
A fantastic resource on this is "The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry. He is
very thorough on meter and rhyme schemes, and makes a compelling case for more
people to write and read poetry.

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whiddershins
The author digresses in to casual misandry for no apparent reason fairly early
in the piece.

It’s a distraction from an otherwise interesting piece.

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senderista
I memorized this poem in high school and I refer to it whenever I need to
remember the name of a meter:
[https://www.bartleby.com/360/9/155.html](https://www.bartleby.com/360/9/155.html)

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pdkl95
For a nice overview of the _prosody_ that underlies poetic meter, music, and
most other forms of speech, I recommend this[1] video by Kyle Kallgren, which
includes a lot of practical examples from the Beatles and other well-known
works.

[1]
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x46rxnz](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x46rxnz)

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simplegeek
How do I learn more about the techniques involved in poetry? Any classics or
great books anyone can recommend?

~~~
billfruit
I would recommend getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or the Arthur
Quiller-Couch, or for Americans Robert Penn Warren and working through them.

~~~
simplegeek
Thank you so much, I didn't know about those.

