What are some examples of a meter in literature?

Answer 1

Metre (Meter in US) means measurement. Metre is the rhythms, beats or length (in beats rather than in letters) of a line of poetry.

There was an old man with a beard

Who said 'It is just as I feared,

Two owls and a hen

Four larks and a wren

Have all built their nests in my beard'.

(Edward Lear)

If you say this limerick aloud, you'll notice that the first, second and fifth line have the same rhythm and length, while the third and fourth have fewer beats. Putting nonsense syllables shows it better:

Dee DUM dee dee DUM dee dee DUM

Dee DUM dee dee DUM dee dee DUM

Dee DUM dee dee DUM

Dee DUM dee dee DUM

Dee DUM dee dee DUM dee dee DUM

The DUMs are what are called stressed syllables - ones which get more emphasis, and the dees are unstressed syllables. In English, not all syllables in a word are stressed: a word like "teacher" has one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed one ("DUMdee", whereas "Japan" is the opposite ("deeDUM"). In a sentence, not all the words are stressed. When someone says 'did you see the Batman movie?' they probably won't stress the word the,and they'll only stress the word you if they want to make a point. So stress is quite variable in English speech. Poetry is a rather heightened form of speech, and it uses and plays with the rhythm of speech through metre.

A very common metre in English poetry is iambic pentameter - pentameter means "five beats" (or five feet, as beats are often called feet), so there are five stressed syllables in each line, and 'iambic' means it has a pattern of one relatively unstressed followed by one relatively stressed syllable (deeDUM). It sounds fairly natural, and not obviously "poetic".

'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' is a line of iambic pentameter:

dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM dee DUM

Each deeDUM is called an iamb, hence iambic.

The opposite of an iamb is a trochee (DUMdee).

Trochaic tetrameter (four feet) is a bit less common, but Longfellow uses it in The Song of Hiawatha:

Swift of foot was Hiawatha

He could shoot an arrow from him

And run forward with such swiftness

That the arrow fell behind him

DUMdeeDUMdeeDUMdeeDUMdee.

It's easy to parody, as it's obviously unlike the way people speak - and in fact a lot of people parodied Hiawatha.

The word "poetry" is stressed, unstressed, unstressed (DUMdeedee). This is called a dactyl (which means fingers: try strumming the fingers of one hand on a table top...)

Dactylic metre is not easy in English, but Browning does it (with a trochee at the end of the first line and a single emphatic beat at the end of the second):

Just for a handful of silver he left us

Just for a ribbon to stick on his coat

DUMdeedee DUMdeedee DUMdeedee DUMdee

DUMdeedee DUMdeedee DUMdeedee DUM

This puts a lot of emphasis on the word coat - to me, it gives an impression that Browning is almost spitting the word (the poem is about a betrayal: the handful of silver references Judas).

The opposite of a dactyl is an anapaest: two unstressed syllables and one stressed: deedeeDUM. It sounds a bit like a horse galloping:

Half a league, half a league, onwards

All in the valley of death rode the six hundred

The first part of the first line is anapaestic.

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse

is in anapaestic tetrameter (four beats).

dee dee DUM deedee DUMdee dee DUM dee dee DUM

It's rare nowadays for a poem to use the same metre all the way through. Poets are free to change metre within a verse, or even within a line (as Shakespeare did), as poetry more approaches the qualities of heightened speech.