"What is Meter in Poetry?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers

Great!

I teach English 12 and I use this video once a year in my classes. They ALL perk up when he starts dropping those Migos bars 🔥🔥🔥 Thanks for the awesome resource!

so many props for using rap verses as an example

W migos reference

Thank you for this sir!

This is a very enlightening video! I was wondering if you could point me to any other videos or learning guides from yourselves or others so that I can better understand :)

Yeah I believe that poetic meter is very interesting

Thanks

Okay I seem to understand some of this stuff. The only confusing bit for me is telling what is a stressed syllable and what isn't

Tupac has a kind of bouncy flow that kinda relates to this. Lit

One point that still has to be made is that the ways the cesura corroborated an addition within the poem, which also personifies dissonance- a kind of "disobediance" to the strict recognizable repeating metrical feet form established in the first three places of the presented excerpt. In this understanding, a Theological renting of an ancient story reveals complexities that poetry might convey. Of course in identiying a dominate metrical compass (Iamb, Trochee, etc...) For example, The prose choreopoem 'Typescenes' (September 11) personifies Black American mental health experiences while at the same time analyzing how poetry scsnscion can be life saving in the Black world. The book uses scanscion to push against the oppressive forces of [Black] reality and tease out new tools that may be used to dismantle the "master's house." In an acknowledgement of difference - rap - hip hop - eurocentric as opposed to dialectic poetry (Paul Lawrence Dunbar) orsouthern syllabic traditions. The disruption from the recognizable poetic form signals a rupture between God and humanity. As Paradise Lost presents Biblical ( and other sacred text) interpretation.

Milton On man's first disobedience which is a blank verse,
According to me, he'd break the metrical pattern or without an endstopping for readers to emphasize the main idea of "Pardise lost" without which the reader wouldn't notice or would move on. That's why we can see Of Man's First Disobedience till this day the most revered idea all over world of Milton. His main purpose was Theodicy. That's why most of the writers like Wordsworth, Blake, Hardy, John Dryden were inspired by him.
Milton for me is one of the greatest poets of all.

These days I observe that there are people around increasingly using free verse or prose poetry which is really difficult to engage in enjoying rhythm, ideas, deftness. People have reduced using metres in their poems and I feed remorsed. I'm a man who has been a readed of Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, pope, Shelley, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and more. But today all kinds of digressions are going on and people are enjoying too. Looks like poetry is taking a new form ignoring it's few classical rules and format.

I do recommend people to read books like - " the ode less travelled by Stephen Fry". Incredible book!

Thanks for the video, it helped me in a few things.

I have a question, Do all words have a definite stress or unstress n we need to memorize it? If not, how do we know by reading a poem's first line or any line that what poet wants to be read as a stress or unstress syllable in a word? How should we read it correctly?

Shakespeare and Towns Van Zadnt are my favorite writers

Thank you so much sir, you literally saved my life!

I wrote a poem before learning about meter and I'm struggling to identify the meter in my own poem. The issue is that the first line has an odd number of syllables, whereas the examples featured here (unless I missed something) feature even number of syllables which are easy to group. Is there any way to work with odd number of syllables in a foot?

So many smart words.

Thanks a bundle..it's really useful and effective..I have learned a lot from you

This is so helpful for my literature class. Thanks❤

Am I stupid? Who says Im stressing Christmas? What if I dont? Would commas work better for stress?

But how do you figure out if a word is a stressed or unstressed? Wouldn't it depend on the person reading the poem aloud? I just have a hard time hearing stresses in everyday conversation.

Thanks, much appreciated.

is that Obi-Wan Kenobi?

Hi there, I have an URGENT poetic question regarding a Master's essay I am writing.

I am looking at the English translation by Andrew Lang of the French poem Les Roses de Saadi (Marceline Desbordes-Valmore). The original is has an alexandrine metre - as is typical of classical French prosody - and 3 tercets. However, I am struggling to define the metre of the English translation. Could you help me? Here it is:

"This morning I vowed I would bring thee my Roses,
They were thrust in the band that my bodice encloses,
But the breast-knots were broken, the Roses went free.

The breast-knots were broken; the Roses together
Floated forth on the wings of the wind and the weather,
And they drifted afar down the streams of the sea.

And the sea was as red as when sunset uncloses,
But my raiment is sweet from the scent of the Roses,
Thou shalt know, Love, how fragrant a memory can be."

It seems to be a mixture of 12 and 13 syllables, but I'm not sure how to define it exactly. I recognise a strong four beat, but I am not a prosody expert at all.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

It's so hard to tell and hear the difference between stressed and unstressed jeez

Am I the only one who finds it difficult to recognize or to hear the stressed and unstressed syllables?😅

Sir what is accentual syllabic meter. Please reply.

Oh, I thought this was important sorry!

The Pritchard scale is garbage.
Let's learn our rhyme and meter and move on. Really?
If you dissect poetry like a lab frog it looses its beauty.
If you never broke the rules nothing new would ever happen.

Hey I was wondering where is the other video that you mention about why the meter is important. If you can please share the link

Iambic pentameter

Beauty fades into the night. What once was seen, now out of sight. A bright flame flickering with endless glow., has suddenly faded, like tainted snow. Dreams never attained, left behind, for a different World, somehow not as kind, as when youth eminated from the soul. Days of yesterday leaving one bitter and cold. Should one just give up when all fades to black? And something once possessed is now something one lacks.m? Is the end of the story inevitably near? Should one wipe away the last pitiful tear? Never thinking the end one would have to face. Or really knowing the World to be such a cold place. Reality now written all over ones dreams. Wondering in life if anything is exactly as it seems? The flame has sorrowfully gone out. All your left with is anger and doubt. Dont forget memories of a time long ago. When dreams came true, like fresh fallen snow.

What's up with the gray beard ?

A meter is roughly three feet

I thought the syllables are just counted.

Writers are thinkers.
Musicians are doers.
Meter is their common-law wife.

You might be interested in hearing from one who is a total novice when it comes to meter. I'm 82 and have done writing all my life. I've never studied it, taken one writing class or had any kind of other training or experience. Even so, in almost all that I have written, whether it me short stories, prose, poetry or my "Pandemic Ponderings" ( philosophical quotes basically) I've always put meter into most of it. I do it by slowly reading what I've written to the tap of my foot. Sometimes it is a real challenge to find the words to clearly express your thought and keep it in meter. Is frustrating but carries great joy when you find it. If one line is out of meter it's kinda like for me a wholesome choir with a tin ear somewhere in its ranks. So it was interesting for me to hear, for the first time ever, a knowledgeable discussion of what I always try to do. I've always intuitively felt that when a work is in meter it corresponds with how the human brain operates, making it much easier for a reader to absorb and "feel" the truth of your words. Kinda makes it like you're swimming downstream. You're in sync with the power of the flow. Well... those are just some thoughts and experiences of one with no study or training in this joyous addiction of writing.

In art, meter is balance.

Thank you so much for this sir😊

Well, as you mentioned to put more emphasis on the line and to compare it with the regular metres that come before and after it or it could be simply a tension in the work. I haven't read the work though. Thank you for explaining metre accurately, it's thought provoking and illuminating indeed.

WOW! Just wow!

how come "this" is stressed and "the" is unstressed, even though they have the same amount of syllables?

Really pleasing and lucid videos ! Thanks for this video! Maybe sometime later , you could also include the spondee and the pyrrhic.

Thank you sooo much for this ❤
If you don't mind, I have a question.
In a poem, does all the lines have to be, for example, iambic or it can have two or more meters?

Thank you so much! This helps me understand more about meters. Learning poetry alone is not easy as I thought it would be.

interhigh?