Class - 9/17

Meter

• Not something to be learned in a single day.
• Iambic pentameter is probably the most famous form of meter.
• Several characteristics are common to most forms of meter:

1. All meter uses rhythmic instead of ordinary statement. Focuses it towards formality or ritualism.
2. Changes in meter can reinforce other effects in the poem
3. Meters that use existing convention and patterns often associate themselves with the source of the convention

• Accentual-syllabic meter - both accents and syllables are measured and numbered, often in terms of feet or conventional patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. Tends to move toward order.
• Common feet - conventional patterns or units of stressed and unstressed syllables, examples are:

1. iambic foot (iamb): unstressed, stressed (u or ` respectively)
2. trochaic foot (trochee): stressed, unstressed
3. anapestic foot (anapest): unstressed, unstressed, stressed
4. dactylic foot (dactyl): stressed, unstressed, unstressed (like a triplet in music)
5. spondaic foot (spondee): stressed, stressed
6. pyrrhic food (pyrrhic): unstressed, unstressed. When followed by a spondee, the pair feet are referred to as a double iamb

• Line length

1. manometer
2. dimeter
3. trimeter
4. tetrameter
5. pentameter
6. hexameter
7. heptameter
8. octameter

Ex.

Before / I came / to class (iambic trimeter)

Exit / Often (trochaic dimeter)

Side Comments

• Apollonian vs. Dionysian impulses - the orderly or chaotic inclinations of human nature
• These terms mainly come from Greek dance moves (iam)b