Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
about poem/poetry help pls!	henriyaz	11/07/06
Good Morning Teacher, how are you? Shall be very grateful if you can plsssssss..... Can you please simplify with example if possible what is as below: 1) rhythm 2)syllable 3)metre 4) free verse 5)stressed/unstressed Thank you very much in advance:-)
Answered By		Answered On
Schoolmarm		11/08/06
Hi, Henriyaz. I'll do the best I can. It sounds as if your poetry study is progressing nicely! I'm going to answer this in a logical progression, so bear with me. Syllables are the individually pronounced phonetic units or segments of a word. "Segment", for instance, has two: seg and ment. In any word of more than one syllable, there will be one or more stressed syllables and one or more unstressed syllables. In "segment", seg is pronounced more loudly and with more emphasis, making it the stressed syllable, while ment is pronounced more softly in a slightly lower register, making it the unstressed syllable. In speech not only are syllables within words stressed or unstressed, but single syllables within sentences are also stressed or unstressed. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables and the placement of rhyming words and poetic devices such as alliteration results in the rhythm of the poem as a whole. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables within each line is the metre. There are several recognized poetic meters: Iamb, dactylic, anapest, trochee, and spondee. These can be combined to create complex poetry forms or used alone for highly structured poems. "The boy stood on the burning deck" is an example of iambic metre. It would be read with the bold-faced syllables stressed. The iambic pattern is (unstressed)-stressed, (unstressed)-stressed. The line above has four repeats of the pattern, so it is iambic quatrametre. Do that five times in one line and you've got iambic pentameter, common in British poetry of the 19th century. In addition to the metric denotation, the number of syllables in a line is used to create the rhythm. That brings us to free verse, which is poetry without any particular metre or rhythm. Much modern poetry is in the free verse style, but it has been in use for at least a century. I trust that clarified at least some of your questions, but you may also find more help here: http://faculty.nwacc.edu/ljlovell/Powerpoints/meternew.ppt#256,1,Poetic Meter. It's an outstanding powerpoint presentation on scanning a poem. I highly recommend it. Good luck with your studies! JMF

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