4/7 Notes

The Line

1. Prose:  It is printed or written within the confines of margins.
2. Poetry: It is written in lines that do not necessarily pay any attention to the margin.
3. In metrical verse, each line of the poem can be divided into feet, and each foot into stresses, to reveal the overall rhythmic pattern.
4. Scansion: The process of dividing a line into its metrical feet and each foot into its individual parts.
5. Metrical Lines
1. Monometer: A one-foot line (\/ /)
2. Dimeter:  A two-foot line  (\/ / \/ /)
3. Trimeter: A three-foot line
4. Tetrameter: A four-foot line
5. Pentameter: A five-foot line
6. Hexameter: A six-foot line.  When it is a pure iambic line, it may be called an alexandrine
7. Heptameter: A seven-foot line.
8. Octameter: A eight-foot line
6. Metrical Feet and Symbols
1. Iamb: a light stress followed by a heavy stress. (\/ /)
2. Trochee: a heavy stress followed by a light stress. (/ \/)
3. Dactyl: a heavy stress followed by two light stresses. (/ \/ \/)
4. Anapest: two light stresses followed by a heavy stress. (\/ \/ /)
5. Spondee: two equal stresses. - -
7. In the tetrameter lines, there is a sense of quickness, spareness, even a little agitation, which is not evoked in the five-foot lines.  It can release a felt agitation or restlessness, or gaiety, more easily and "naturally" than pentameter and so on. The trimeter line can evoke an even more intense sense of agitation and celerity.
8. The longer line suggests a greater-than-human power.  It can also indicate abundance, richness, a sense of joy.
9. Language is a living material, full of shadow and sudden moments of up-leap and endless nuance. Nothing with language, including rhythmic patterns, should be or can be entirely exact and repetitious, nor would we like it if it were.
10. Within the poem, irregularities may occur for the sake of variation; they may also occur because of stresses required by the words themselves.
11. Nursery rhymes are full of "impure" anapestic and dactylic lines-- they use the metric patterns, but tend to end each line with a single heavy stress, as in "Hickory | dickory | dock. | The | mouse | ran up | the clock." 
12. Caesura: It can break into the established tempo of the line, thereby indicating-- almost announcing-- an important or revelatory moment.  It is a structural and logical pause within and only within the line, and usually, but not always, within a metrical foot itself.  It is useful not only where emotion is amassed, but in such lines as these, which set a conversational tone.
13. When a poem does begin with a heavy stress, it immediately signals to the reader that something dramatic is at hand.  The similarity of sound ar the end of two or more lines create cohesion, order, and gives pleasure.  
14. True rhyme (Masculine rhyme): on a single stressed syllable
15. Off rhyme (Slant rhyme): The words are not true rhyming words but almost rhyme.
16. Feminine rhyme: uses words of more than one syllable that end with a light stress, as in "buckle" and "knuckle" 
17. Feminine endings tend to blur the end rhyme.  So does slant rhyme.  Masculine and true rhyme endings are forthright.
18. A self-enclosed line may be an entire sentence, or it may be a phrase that is complete in terms of grammar and logic, though it is only a part of a sentence.  
19. enjambs the line runs the line so that a logical phrase is interrupted.  It speeds the line for two reasons: curiosity about the missing part of the phrase impels the reader to hurry on, and the reader will hurry twice as fast over the obstacle of a pause.
20. Evert poem has a basic measure, and a continual counterpoint of differences playing against that measure.  On the other hand, the poem needs to be reliable.

Some Given Forms

1. Rhyming patterns include everything from simple rhyming couplets (line 1 rhymes with line 2, line 3 rhymes with line 4, and so forth) to the terse rim and the Spenserian stanza.
1. Couplet:  aa bb cc dd
2. Tercet, or Triplet:  aaa bbb ccc ddd
3. Quatrain:  abab cdcd
4. Terza Rima: aba bcb cdc deu
5. Spenserian Stanza:  abab bcbc
2. The sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines: traditionally it uses the iambic pentameter line.
3. The Italian sonnet: abba abba cdd cee
4. The English sonnet divides into three quatrains and a final couplet.
5. Blank verse:  Poems written in iambic pentameter without end rhyme.
6. Stanza break will inevitably result in either a felt hesitation or a felt acceleration. Running a sentence through a final line of one stanza and on into the first line of the next stanza hastens the tempo.  Additionally, it can create a feeling of creative power over mere neatness.
7. With the use of separate sections, however, the poet may change the landscape, the narrative, the tone of the writing, line length-- in fact, anything and everything.
8. In syllabic verse, a pattern is set  up and rigorously followed, in which the number of syllables in each of the lines of the first stanza is exactly repeated in the following stanzas

Verse That Is Free

1. Free verse (fluid poem, organic poem): Implies that this kind of poetry rose out of a desire for release from the restraints of meter, the measured line, and strict rhyming patterns.  It is free from formal metrical design, but it certainly isn't free from some kind of design.
2. The initial premise is made up of everything the old metrical premise is composed of-- sound, line length, and rhythm patterns, but in this case they are not strict, they are not metrical.
3. The free verse poem, when finished, must feel like a poem -- it must be an intended and an effective presentation.  In term of the sound of the poem, it is quickly apparent that the poem makes brilliant use of dark, heavy mutes.
4. Enjambment gives the writer an ability to restrain or to spur on the pace of the poem.  It can be serious, disruptive, almost painful.