hey welcome back today we're going to be talking about Rhythm and meter and what they mean are you ready here we go so when we talk about Rhythm we're talking about the patterns of sound within a piece of poetry or any piece of language it's the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that we use as we speak meter is our term for the way that we measure those stressed and unstressed syllables so we almost use the two interchangeably but meter is the more carefully measured form and rhythm is the more natural form now studying Rhythm can be fairly difficult at times because it's pretty nuanced when we talk about stressed and unstressed syllables we don't mean that all syllables are equally stressed or equally unstressed in fact no two are really alike just the way no two people are really alike therefore we're really talking about relative stress or how stressed they are in comparison to the other syllables around them and this can get a little hairy I'm going to try to talk about it in the simplest terms that I can and also give you some suggestions for how to pay attention to stress and unstressed syllables but if you want a much more nuanced and complex look at sound in poetry I highly recommend this book Robert pinsky's the sound of poetry a brief guide it's phenomenal and he looks at some of the more nuanced aspects of poetic rhythm when talking about meter there's really three things we need to talk about number one what are stressed and unstressed syllables number two how can stressed and unstressed syllables be arranged into meaning ful units and number three how many units makes up a line of poetry once we understand those three things we can begin to scan or Mark the rhythm of a line of poetry okay so let's start by defining stressed and unstressed syllables a syllable of course is a unit of sound within a word some words are monosyllabic which means they have one syllable to them like me or Bob or cow and some words are polyic which means they have multiple syllables to them like inde fatigable or unconstitutional some of the syllables that we say when we speak have more emphasis than others and it's that emphasis that we're measuring when we talk about accented versus unaccented for the most part monosomic nouns verbs and adjectives carry an accent like Bob tree go red those all tend to be accented helping verbs being verbs and suffixes don't usually have accent like can go eaten possessive pronoun aren't usually strongly accented his car car accented not his and if a word has more than one syllable you got to kind of play around with it to figure it out or as a shortcut you could look it up in a dictionary and see which ones are marked as accented pugnacious not pugnacious so there are a few ways that you can judge how accented a syllable is one is to have a really good ear for it some people are just naturally rhythmically inclined and have sharp ears they also make good rappers a trick I learned a long time ago is to take your hand and place it under your jaw as you're talking if you feel your jaw go down more it's probably an accented syllable and so you can kind of feel some of the more accented syllables doesn't always work but it's a little bit of a hint okay so accented unaccented when we're talking about meter we call this stressed versus unstressed syllables and so this pattern of stressed and unstressed sound is rhythm and the measurement of that rhythm is meter when marking stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry we usually indicate them with a u for an unstressed syllable and an accent or a slash for a stressed syllable simply writing these marks over the syllables in the line helps us to be able to see the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables okay if we can get a feel for the stressed versus the unstressed syllables we can begin to organize those into meaningful units we can talk about organizing stress and unstressed syllables into meaningful units by talking about the number of syllables in a unit it's either going to be in two syllables or in three syllables and they can really fall in any sort of combination also whether we start with a stressed or an unstressed makes a difference something that starts unstressed and works its way towards stressed is going to be called a rising Rhythm something that starts stressed and works its way to unstressed is going to be called a falling Rhythm so these are are the basic patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables the first is a two- syllable Rhythm it starts with an unstressed syllable and is followed by a stress syllable bu bum this is called an I am and it's the most famous kind of Rhythm in English poetry often poetry goes B bum B bum B bum B bum B bum whose woods these are I think I know shall I compare thee to a summer's day this is of course a rising Rhythm the opposite Rhythm which starts with a stress syllable and ends with an stress syllable is called a Troy or trochaic Rhythm Double Double Toil and Trouble on the other hand we can have three syllable patterns what happens if we have unstressed unstressed stressed have you marked but the fall of the snow B Bumm bum this is called an anapest or anapestic Rhythm the opposite again would be an accented followed by two unaccented woman much missed how you call to me call to me bum bu bum bu it's like a [Music] waltz this is called a Dactyl or dactylic Rhythm it's really hard to keep a Dactyl up in English we just don't have the Rhythm for it finally there are two other units of measurement we might use but we don't usually have a whole line of them they're used more when we insert an irregularity into a pattern the first is to have two accented syllables back to back bum bum this is called a spondi or spondaic Rhythm the second is to have two unstressed syllables back to back we call this a purus or pic Rhythm some people say that the line in Shakespeare's Sonet 18 and often is his gold complexion dimmed includes a purus and often is his gold complexion dimmed there's an extra unstressed syllable in there and also in Shakespeare son at 130 there's an extra stress if hairs be wires black wires grow on her head it's an irregularity and it changes things up a care poet might add a break in the Rhythm or a change in the Rhythm to cause a certain effect in the reader either to speed up a line to slow a line down and make it more deliberate or simply to throw a reader off and make the reader stop and think more we call these units of measurement for rhythm feet this little I am went to Market this little Troy stayed home so an I Amic foot is a bu bum now that we have the basic list of metrical feet or units IMS trokies anapests dactyls spaes and pares we can talk about how many beats show up in a line so in since meter is our term for measuring the number of units in a line or the number of feet in a line we also use that term within our terms for the number of beats in a line so if we have one beat in a line one mono and meter it's monometer 2 feet in a line line dimeter 3 ft in line trimeter 4 feet tetrameter 5T pentameter you've probably heard that one before right because the most famous line of poetry is five beats of bum or I AMS so I Amic pentameter five bums bum bum bum bum BM shall I compare thee to a summer's day when I have fears that I might cease to be Etc Etc you can also have more beats than that in the line hexameter septamer octameter Etc so John Dunn's song go and catch a falling star get with child aandre root that's a clear example of tro trimeter or listen to the destruction of sakb by Byron the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold and his cohorts Were Gleaming and purple and gold and the sheen on his Spears was like stars in the sea B bum B bum bum bum bum bu bum it's anapestic tetrameter this is all kind of challenging and you might be saying ah why does this matter it matters because the more control you have over the sound and the more playing with sound you do the more meaning the structure of the poem can have for the reader even a poem that doesn't have a careful pattern of rhythm is still going to have stressed and unstressed syllables and is going to create certain sound effects for the reader the way those sounds hit us influences the way we feel as we read this poem a lot of stressed syllables in a row will hit us hard a lot of unstressed syllables in a row will make us kind of run forward a sudden change in rhythmic pattern Catches Us offg guard or adds a lot of emphasis to what's being said so let's recap rhythm is the meaningful arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry or speech meter is the way we measure the beats in that line a unit of measurement made up of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a foot the six kinds of feet we talked about are I AMS and trois which are two syllable feet and ests and dactyls which are three syllable feet and spaes and pies which are those irregular two syllable feet the IMs are made up of an unstressed and a stressed syllable the Troy is made up of a stressed and an unstressed syllable the anapest is made up of an unstressed unstressed stressed syllable the dactyl is made up of a stressed unstressed unstressed syllable the spa D is two stresses in a row and the purus is two unstressed syllables in a row then we talked about the number of feet in a line we simply count the the number of those units in the line and measure that out so maybe we have five IMS in a row and we call that I Amic pentameter maybe we have four anapests in a row and we call that anapestic tetrameter maybe we have six Troys in a row and we call that trochaic hexameter so let's go back to one of the Beloved Robert Frost poems Stopping by Woods at a snowy Eve whose woods these are I think I know can you hear the IMs there bmm bum how many are in there bum bum bum whose woods these are I think I know there are four of them so it's I Amic tetrameter if you still feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of this I recommend practicing listen to lots of poetry read a lot of it out loud maybe hold your hand under your chin while you're doing so and try to count the Rhythm get a feel for it start with poetry that's pretty he heavily rhythmic and see where you go from there maybe you'll practice really hard and truly Master this and become a master of Rhythm or maybe you'll just get a little bit more comfortable with the idea of Rhythm either way it's still a useful practice and if you're going to write your own poetry and have that control over that poetic sound and the way the poem comes across to your reader understanding Rhythm is a must thanks for watching tune in next time and we'll talk about another literary term for now you can click over here on some of the links or you can click to subscribe have a great week