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

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

The rain is raining all around

It falls on field and tree,

It rains on the umbrellas here,

And on the ships at sea.

iambic tetrameter

iambic trimeter

iambic tetrameter

iambic trimeter

    (Robert Louis Stevenson, ’Rain’, 1885)

This is an example of metrical verse. It is verse because it is divided into lines. It is specifically metrical verse because each line belongs to a ’metre’ (here iambic tetrameter, or iambic trimeter), which partially controls how many syllables there are in the line and what the rhythm of the line is. In order to understand English metre, it is first necessary to understand the two aspects of English words that are controlled by metres: syllables, and relative stress on syllables.

17.1 Syllables and stress

Syllables can be thought of as ’beats’ in speech, such that, for example, a word of three syllables such as ’umbrellas’ consists of three beats and you can represent it by tapping three times with your fingers (try tapping ’umbrellas’ on the table). In English, a syllable is usually based around a vowel or diphthong (two vowels spoken together) or triphthong (three together), which is called the ’nucleus’ of the syllable: see Unit 16, Rhyme and sound patterning where we look at sounds in more detail. However, a syllable can also be based on vowellike consonants such as ’l’ or ’n’ or ’r’, so that a two-syllable word like ’bottle’ actually has its second syllable based on ’l’.

Some words have alternative numbers of syllables (e.g. ’literature’ usually has 3 but can be pronounced with 4; ’Wednesday’ can be pronounced with 2 or 3), and dialects can differ in this way. (To test your understanding of syllable counting, describe each line in the poem above in terms of how many syllables there are in each word; for example the first line has 1-1-1-2-1-2. Then count up the syllables in each line. You should find that there are 8+6+8+6.) One characteristic of being metrical is that the number of syllables in each line is controlled (with some permitted variation); thus an iambic tetrameter line normatively has 8 syllables, and an iambic trimeter line normatively has 6 syllables, as here. This places a constraint on composition; in this metre the 1-syllable word ’field’ could not be replaced by the 2-syllable word ’garden’ without the line becoming here unmetrical. As a way of visually representing the organization of the line into syllables, we suggest writing an asterisk (or x) under each syllable in the line:

(Tip: if you are writing a representation like this using a computer, choose a monospaced font such as Courier, where each letter has the same width; this will make it much easier to match the asterisk with the nucleus of the syllable in the line above. Do not use the tabs key.)

The second aspect of metricality involves the placement of stress. In any sequence of syllables, some syllables carry greater ’stress’ than others: the syllable with greater stress is experienced as more prominent (e.g. louder). This is true of all the polysyllables in the list above, where, for example, it is possible always to designate one syllable as systematically the most strongly stressed, and in any given accent of English this syllable will always carry the strongest stress within its word, irrespective of the words around it. In dictionaries of English the syllable with greatest stress relative to other syllables has an inverted comma put before it in its representation of pronunciation, and we can do this for the words in the above list: r’eady, r’eadiness, monstr’osity, unre’ality, encyclop’aedia, environm’entalism. (Try doing this for all the words in the list, and check in a dictionary if you are unsure.) When words are put together, the relative strength of syllables can also vary between words; thus in a sequence of monosyllables you will find that some monosyllables (e.g. the nouns) have more stress than others (e.g. the article ’the’ or the preposition ’of’ tend not to be stressed relative to surrounding words). When you tap out a word, you should find that you can tap loudest on the syllable with greatest stress. Stress is also manifested as higher pitch and greater length, and these may also be audible on the stressed syllables in addition to greater loudness. Furthermore, syllables with very weak or no stress are often reduced in ’vowel quality’ such that they are no longer clearly distinguishable from other vowels and may also be shortened. (The extent to which this happens depends on dialect: some kinds of Welsh and Scottish English for example have less reduction of unstressed vowels than some kinds of English English.) In the poem below, we have indicated with an inverted comma where the stressed syllables in polysyllables are: these syllables are also underlined, and they must have stress. And we have underlined monosyllables that are likely to have stress in a performance of the line (but some variation is permitted here):