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

17.3 Other kinds of foot
Unit 17 Verse, metre and rhythm
Section 4 Poetic form

There are four kinds of foot in English: two binary feet and two ternary feet:

For example, here are some lines organized in trochaic feet (but with varying numbers of feet in each line):

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak mid-winter

Long ago.

     (Christina Rossetti, ’In the bleak mid-winter’, 1872)

Here, scanned, are three lines from the poem (note that the third of these lines permits various other possible rhythms, some closer to the metre and some further from the metre). The bracketed asterisk is now the initial asterisk in each foot: this is the head, the syllable most likely to be stressed:

In these lines we see something new: a foot at one end of the line contains one syllable when it might be expected to contain two. This is called ’catalexis’; it is one of the permitted variations in English, where a foot can be ’short’ at one end of the line. In trochaic metres the short foot comes at the end of the line (in iambic metres it comes at the beginning).

Now we look at some lines in a metre where the syllables are grouped into triplets for rhythmic purposes:

          (Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ’Song by the Deaths’, 1829)

The stressed syllables tend to be three syllables apart. Furthermore these are three-syllable feet in which the final syllable tends to be stressed (and so is the head). Three-syllable feet (triplets) with a final head are anapaests, so this is in an anapaestic metre (actually anapaestic tetrameter because there are four anapaestic feet in each line). Note that the initial foot in the line is sometimes one syllable, sometimes two and sometimes three, thus showing different possibilities for catalexis, which thus permits variation between lines. Metres are rigid systems that nevertheless open up various ’loopholes’ for variation (in length or rhythm) in this way. Another kind of variation can be seen in the fact that, while there is a general tendency for the head of the foot to be stressed, other syllables can sometimes be stressed as well, as ’every’ in the second line shows. Finally, if we look at the first line we can see that the likely stressing of ’out’ is to some extent a performance decision that is forced on us by the metre.

Finally we consider the fourth kind of foot, dactyls, which are initialheaded triplets. These are quite rare in English:

         (Thomas Hood, ’The Bridge of Sighs’, 1844)

In these lines, which are in dactylic dimeter (two dactylic feet in each line), the final foot in the line sometimes falls short. We can tell that these are dactyls, first because the stressed syllables tend to fall three syllables apart, and second because the stressed syllable comes first. Note again various possibilities for rhythmic variation: we might want to stress ’wave’ in performance even though it is not the head of a foot. Lines that are in the same metre can thus vary in length and in rhythm.