Meter in poetry: types of meter, metrical feet and scansion

Meter in poetry is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse. It is measured in feet, small units of two or three syllables such as the iamb (da-DUM) or the dactyl (DUM-da-da), and a meter is named by the type of foot and the number of feet per line: iambic pentameter is five iambs, trochaic tetrameter four trochees. Reading a line to find its meter is called scansion.

This page covers the seven feet you will meet, the line lengths from dimeter to octameter, the common meters scanned in public-domain poems from Shakespeare to Dickinson, the variations that keep meter from sounding mechanical, a step-by-step way to scan any line, and a short practice set with answers. In the scanned lines, stressed syllables are in bold and a vertical bar separates the feet.

How meter works

English is a stress language. Every word of two or more syllables has one syllable that is said more strongly than the others: begin, garden, tomorrow. One-syllable words take their stress from their job in the sentence. Nouns, main verbs and adjectives usually carry a stress. Articles, prepositions, conjunctions and most pronouns usually don't.

Meter arranges those natural stresses into a pattern that repeats line after line. From Chaucer to the early twentieth century, most English poetry was accentual-syllabic: it counts both the stresses and the syllables. A line of iambic pentameter usually has ten syllables and five beats, and a reader hears the beat under the sense of the sentence, the way you hear a drum under a song.

Here is one line scanned slowly: the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 (1609), "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It has ten syllables. Two of its words have a fixed stress, compare and summer's, and "day" is a noun, so it takes a stress too. That puts beats on syllables 4, 8 and 10. Fill in the same alternation from the start and the line reads:

Shall I | compare | thee to | a sum | mer's day?

Five iambs. Notice "to": a preposition you would say lightly in conversation sits on a beat here, and a reader gives it just enough weight to keep the pattern going. The first foot is open to choice. Most readers put the beat on "I"; some lean on "Shall" instead, which turns the first foot into a trochee (Shall I). Both are natural English, and the line is iambic pentameter either way.

That is the difference between meter and rhythm. Meter is the abstract pattern, da-DUM five times, and it recurs from line to line. Rhythm is what one particular line sounds like when you say it: the light beat on "to," the choice on "Shall I," the rise of the question at the end. Good metrical verse keeps both audible: the pattern, and the speaking voice pushing against it.

The metrical feet

A foot is one unit of the pattern. Seven are worth knowing. Most English verse is built from the two-syllable feet in the first four rows, with the iamb doing most of the work.

Spondees and pyrrhics almost never run for a whole line. They turn up as substitutions inside iambic lines, where they make a passage heavier or lighter. Iambs and anapests are called rising feet, because they end on the stress. Trochees and dactyls are falling feet.

Line lengths: dimeter to octameter

The second half of a meter's name counts the feet in each line, from the Greek for one to eight.

Common meters, with examples

These are the meters you are most likely to meet in English poetry, each scanned in a public-domain poem. For the form built most often on the first of them, see the guide to writing a sonnet, which goes through Shakespeare's variations line by line.

Iambic pentameter

Five iambs, ten syllables. It is the most common meter in English poetry, used by Shakespeare in his plays and sonnets, by Milton in Paradise Lost and by Wordsworth in The Prelude, partly because ordinary English sentences fall into it so easily. Unrhymed iambic pentameter is called blank verse.

Iambic tetrameter

One foot shorter than pentameter, and noticeably quicker. Eight syllables leave little room for padding, so tetrameter suits songs, narrative verse and wit.

Common meter (ballad meter)

Common meter alternates lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, eight syllables then six. It is the meter of many hymns, including John Newton's 1779 "Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)," and of traditional ballads. Dickinson used it and its variants in many of her poems, which is why so many of them can be sung to hymn tunes, and then unsettled it with dashes, slant rhyme and strange turns. The last line here scans with a light beat on the final syllable: And Im | mortal | ity.

Trochaic tetrameter

Four falling feet in every line, for the whole poem. Longfellow modeled the meter on the Finnish epic the Kalevala, and its chant-like regularity is why the poem is so easy to parody. Hiawatha keeps the final unstressed syllable, but many English poems in trochees drop it, a variation covered below.

Trochaic octameter

Eight trochees, sixteen syllables, with a rhyme in the middle of the line (dreary, weary) that splits it into two halves. Few well-known poems use a line this long. Poe explained how he built the poem, meter included, in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), where he describes it as "octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic": a full eight-foot line, then one with its last light syllable dropped, seven and a half feet long. The second line above is one of those.

Anapestic tetrameter

Two light syllables before every stress give anapests their gallop, which suits a cavalry charge. "Assyrian" has to be squeezed into three syllables (as-SYR-yan) to fit, a small example of elision. The same meter carries comic verse and, much later, a great deal of Dr. Seuss.

Dactylic meter

Dactyls fall hard and fast, like hooves. Notice that the second line ends on "onward," a two-syllable foot: English lines in falling meters often lose their last unstressed syllables, so the line ends on a firmer beat than "-da-da." Longfellow's Evangeline (1847) is written in dactylic hexameter.

Amphibrachic meter

The bouncing da-DUM-da of the limerick can be read as amphibrachs, as here, or as anapests with an iamb at the start (There was | an Old Man | with a beard). Both readings put the stresses in the same places. When two scansions agree on the stresses, the choice between them is a matter of convention, not of right and wrong.

Metrical variation

Strict meter for line after line sounds like a metronome. Poets vary it constantly, and recognizing the standard variations is most of what makes scansion easy.

In "To be, or not to be," some readers put the fourth beat on "that" rather than "is." Meter allows both, and an actor chooses. That flexibility is the reason scansion is a reading, not a calculation. The opening sentence of Paradise Lost runs on for more than a dozen lines before its first full stop, which is how enjambment builds momentum in a long poem.

Meter, rhythm and free verse

Accentual-syllabic meter is one way of organizing a line. There are others, and a poem without any of them is still not without rhythm.

Whitman's lines don't repeat a foot, but they are not random. The repetition (myself, myself; assume, assume), the parallel structure and the long third line that breaks the pattern all do the work meter does elsewhere. The guide to writing a poem covers line breaks in free verse. For a strictly syllabic form, see the haiku examples.

How to scan a poem

1. Read the line aloud as speech

   Say it the way you would say it to a friend, not the way you think a poem should sound. Sing-song reading invents stresses that aren't there.

2. Count the syllables

   Write the number at the end of the line. In iambic verse, ten suggests pentameter and eight tetrameter, and an odd count often means a feminine ending or a dropped syllable.

3. Mark the stresses in longer words

   Words of two or more syllables have a fixed stress, which any dictionary shows: curfew, parting. Mark these first, because they rarely move. They can weaken, though: next to a heavier word, a word's stress may fall into a light position, as the second syllable of "before" does in the Christmas line in the practice set below.

4. Decide the one-syllable words

   Give a stress to the nouns, main verbs and adjectives, and leave the articles, prepositions and conjunctions light. Where you're unsure, let the pattern of the surrounding feet decide.

5. Find the repeating foot

   Look for the unit that recurs most often and draw bars between the feet. Start from the end of the line if the beginning is irregular: openings vary more than endings.

6. Count the feet and name the meter

   Foot plus number gives the name. Scan three or four lines before you decide, because a single line can hide the pattern behind its variations. Then note the variations (a trochee at the start, a feminine ending) rather than forcing them into the pattern.

Here is a line from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751) scanned with the traditional marks, x for unstressed and / for stressed:

x    /     x    /      x    /      x   /      x    /
The  cur-  few  tolls  the  knell  of  part-  ing  day,

Ten syllables, five stresses, alternating from the second syllable: five iambs, so iambic pentameter. Every stress falls on a word that matters (curfew, tolls, knell, parting, day), which is part of why the line sounds so settled.

How to write in meter

• Start with iambs. English falls into iambic rhythm naturally. Write a few lines of iambic tetrameter before you try pentameter or anything falling.
• Say it in prose first. Write what the line means as a plain sentence, then look for the order of the same words, or close synonyms, that fits the beat.
• Don't twist the word order. "To town I to the market went today" scans and sounds absurd. "I walked to town to buy a loaf of bread" scans and sounds like a person. When the meter forces an inversion, change the words, not their order.
• Let the long words set the beat. A three-syllable word fixes three positions at once, so place it first and fill in around it.
• Vary on purpose. Put substitutions where you want emphasis, often at the start of a line or right after a pause, and keep the rest regular so the variation can be heard.
• Read every line aloud. If you have to distort a word's natural stress to make it fit, a reader will stumble exactly there.

For a second look at a draft, open the Strokes Assistant beside the poem and ask it to mark the stresses in a stanza and name the lines that break the pattern. Then check its marks by reading aloud, as in step 1 above: names and words with two accepted stresses need your ear.

Practice: scan these lines

Scan each line, then check your answers below. All six are from public-domain poems.

1. "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day," (Thomas Gray, 1751)
2. "Tyger Tyger, burning bright," (William Blake, 1794)
3. "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house" ("A Visit from St. Nicholas," 1823)
4. "Double, double toil and trouble;" (Shakespeare, Macbeth)
5. "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks," (Longfellow, Evangeline, 1847)
6. "She walks in beauty, like the night" (Byron, 1815)

If you got the Christmas line as iambic, read it again faster. The two light syllables before each stress ('Twas the, be-fore, -mas when, through the) are what make it gallop.