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

17.2 Iambic feet
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

The striking thing about the stresses in this poem is that they tend to be two syllables apart; only the third line fails to show this pattern (and even here we could choose to stress ’the’ and so make the rhythm fully regular). This suggests that, as far as the organization of stress is concerned, the syllables are grouped into pairs. Furthermore, it is clearly the final (rightmost, second) syllable in each pair that tends to have stress. A group of syllables like this is called a foot, and because the ones in this poem are pairs and the final syllable in the pair is stressed they are called ’iambic feet’. Feet are divided off in the diagram below by putting brackets after every second asterisk, so that the asterisks - representing syllables - are grouped into pairs. This is a ’scansion’ of the line - a representation of its metrical structure:

The right bracket separates off two asterisks as a pair, but it is actually ’bracketing’ the rightmost asterisk in each pair. We use this to indicate that this asterisk, and the syllable it represents, is the ’head’ of the foot - the syllable that is more likely to carry stress than the other syllable in the foot. It can be seen that the heads - the ’bracketed’ syllables in the above scansion of the line - tend to be stressed syllables, the ones that are underlined.

Now we come to the difference between the rhythm of the line and its metre. The first and third lines are in the same metre - they are both ’iambic tetrameter’ (the name for a line with four iambic feet). However, they have slightly different rhythms, as can be seen by looking at the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The rhythm of the line is indicated by underlinings in the line itself, while the metre of the line is indicated under the line by the asterisks and brackets that indicate foot structure. The rhythm is what the line sounds like; the metre is the abstract organization to which the rhythm approximates. The metre of each line in this poem is given a name, such as ’iambic tetrameter’, which indicates (1) the type of foot in the line, here iambic, and (2) how many feet there are in the line. Tetrameter means that there are four feet, while trimeter means that there are three.

Now consider the relation between the rhythm and the metre. First, note that, while stressed syllables tend to be heads of feet (and vice versa), there are some heads that are not stressed. In particular, the word ’the’ in the third line is unlikely to be stressed in performance, though there is nothing actually stopping a performer from stressing it. Furthermore, the final line could have at least two other fairly natural sounding stress patterns in performance, either stressing ’and’ instead of ’on’, or stressing neither ’and’ nor ’on’:

These variations tell us, first, that there is no requirement that a stressed monosyllable should be a head of a foot, and, second, that a head of a foot need not be a stressed syllable. Thus there is potential variation between the rigid (unpronounced) pattern of the metre and the pronounced pattern of the rhythm; it is possible that we match the abstract pattern (the metre) in our head against the actual pattern (the rhythm) that we hear, giving various kinds of complex mismatch, which are sometimes called ’metrical tension’.

A metre is named after the type of foot and the number of feet in the line. These are the names for numbers of feet. So far we have seen iambic trimeter and iambic tetrameter.