Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 17.1
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

For each text below, name the metre (type of foot, and number of feet in line). For each text, every line of the text is in the same metre; you are likely to find the metres increasingly difficult to analyse as you work through this exercise.

As a very rough reminder, these are the characteristic rhythms corresponding to each type of metre:

Text A

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;

Oh the weary haunt for me,

All alone on Airley Beacon,

with his baby on my knee!

    (Charles Kingsley, ’Airly Beacon’, 1847)

Text B

The choking Frog sobbed and was gone

The Waggoner strode whistling on,

Unconscious of the carnage done,

Whistling that waggoner strode on -

Whistling (it may have happened so)

’A froggy would a-wooing go.’

A hypothetic frog trolled he,

Obtuse to a reality.

    (Christina Rossetti, from ’A Frog’s Fate’, 1885)

Text C

’I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!’

’My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be,

Isn’t equal to that. You ain’t ruined,’ said she.

    (Thomas Hardy, from ’The Ruined Maid’, 1866)

Text D

In Siberia’s wastes

The ice-wind’s breath

Woundeth like the toothed steel;

Lost Siberia doth reveal

Only blight and death.

    (James Clarence Mangan, from ’Siberia’, 1845)

Text E

Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’t is arched by . . .

what you call

. . . Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:

I was never out of England - it’s as if I saw it all.

    (Robert Browning, from ’A toccata of Galuppi’s’, 1855)

6 Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork.

    (Arthur Hugh Clough, from Amours de Voyage, 1858)

Reading

Attridge, D. (1995) Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fabb, N. (2002) Language and Literary Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapters 1, 2 and 4.

Fabb, N. and Halle, M. (2007) The Meter of a Poem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Furniss, T.E. and Bath, M. (1996) Reading Poetry: An Introduction, London: Longman, Chapter 2.

Fussell, P. (1979) Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, New York: McGraw-Hill.