metre

metre. The sound patterns on whose recurrence rhythm depends were formed in antiquity by arrangements of long and short syllables. Lines of verse consisted of ‘feet’, the commonest being the iambus (∼—), trochee (—∼), anapaest (∼∼—), dactyl (—∼∼), spondee (——). The pyrrhic (∼∼), tribrach (∼∼∼), amphibrach (∼—∼), cretic (—∼—), paeon (—∼∼∼), bacchius (∼———), ionic a minore (∼∼——), and choriamb (—∼∼—) featured mainly in lyric poems. The most popular ancient measure was the hexameter; it was divided by a caesura usually in the third foot. Elegiac couplets linked the hexameter with a pentameter which consisted of two feet (dactyls or spondees) and a single long syllable before the caesura followed by two dactyls and a single syllable, always end-stopped. Dramatists used the iambic trimeter because of its closeness to common speech. This comprised six feet arranged in pairs (hence ‘trimeter’) where the iamb could be replaced by other feet according to strict rules. There were also numerous lyric metres. Alcaics, Sapphics, and Asclepiads organized trochees, dactyls, and spondees in various patterns, and trochaic hendecasyllabics flourished in satire.

The 5th cent. ad brought, however, the beginnings of a radical change. The shape of the classical feet was retained, but stress became their determining feature, so that a trochee was an accented followed by an unaccented syllable. The trochaic tetrameter catalectic, which was divided by a caesura after the fourth trochee, the second half consisting of three trochees and a single syllable, provided the basis for most medieval hymns.

English prosody is similarly based on stress. The earliest measures to develop were trochaic, but soon iambic couplets of four or five feet linked by rhyme became more popular. In the four-foot couplet we find extensive modulation: often the first foot has only one syllable, and the final syllable in the fifth foot is dropped. The five-foot couplet had a strict form, end-stopped with a marked middle break, but also a form that allowed overflow from one line to the next and substitution of different two- or even three-syllable feet for the iamb. But it is not in the couplet that the five-foot iambic line (imabic pentameter) attained greatest importance. Introduced into poetic drama in 1562, it had a distinguished history as ‘blank verse’, with more modulations than in the couplet and the final foot often replaced by an amphibrach. When blank verse was used later in epic by Milton, the modulations, if more controlled, were also more frequent and the use of overflow developed into paragraph construction. Five-foot lines were also built into stanzas with a variety of rhyme schemes: rhyme-royal (or rime royal, seven lines rhymed ababbcc), used for narrative from Chaucer to W. Morris; the nine-line Spenserian stanza, ababbcbcc; and, principally, the sonnet introduced by Wyatt and used since by every major English poet. (Wyatt copied Petrarch, dividing the sonnet into an octave rhymed abba, abba, and a sestet ccd, ccd or cde, cde; but Shakespeare preferred three quatrains ending with a couplet.) Other popular iambic metres include in Tudor times the awkward poulter's measure, a rhymed couplet where the first line had twelve, the second fourteen syllables. Broken by pause and internal rhyme, this makes a stanza 3343 which has been widely used by hymn writers. Fourteeners appear unresolved in Chapman's Homer, but provide, when divided 4343 and rhymed, the buoyant and well-known ballad stanza. Trochaic, anapaestic, and dactylic metres, though they figure in many poems, have not been as popular as the iambic.