Meter

Meter is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse, counted in small units called feet, which gives a poem its underlying beat.

Say this line from Gray's "Elegy" and tap the stressed syllables: "The CURfew TOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY". Weak, strong, weak, strong, five times. That steady pulse is meter.

How it is counted

A foot is one repeating unit, and each foot has a fixed pattern of stress.

• Iamb: da-DUM, as in "aBOVE". The most common foot in English.
• Trochee: DUM-da, as in "GARden".
• Anapest: da-da-DUM, as in "interRUPT". It gives a galloping feel, and the limerick leans on it.
• Dactyl: DUM-da-da, as in "POetry".
• Spondee: DUM-DUM, as in "HEARTBEAT".

A line is then named by its foot and its length. Iambic pentameter is five iambs.

Why poets bother

Meter works like the beat under a song. It gives the reader something to expect, and the poem gets its force from the moments it breaks that expectation. A line that suddenly stumbles, or stacks stresses, tells the reader to pay attention.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

Even if you never write verse, you write rhythm. Prose that falls into an accidental meter can sound sing-song, and sentences that all share one length wear a reader out. Reading a draft aloud for stress is the same skill that scanning a poem trains.

In verse, check whether a metrical slip is a flaw or a choice. Poets deliberately vary a regular line, and a good editor leaves the variation alone when it lands on an important word. Compare free verse, which drops the pattern altogether.

Read an example

Read an example: the first two lines of "The Tyger" by William Blake (1794), which beat out a hammering four-stress rhythm.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;

William Blake, 1794

The whole poem is on Bossfeed: read "The Tyger".

Frequently asked questions

What are the main kinds of foot?

The iamb (unstressed, stressed), the trochee (stressed, unstressed), the anapest (two unstressed, then stressed), the dactyl (stressed, then two unstressed) and the spondee (two stresses).

What does pentameter mean?

Five feet to a line. The line-length words run from monometer (one foot) through dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter (six).

Is meter the same as rhythm?

Not quite. Meter is the pattern the poet sets up. Rhythm is what you actually hear, which bends the pattern with natural speech stress and pauses.