Renee, I was happy to see you had a new video to start off 2021 right! This was a fun exercise. Iambic - As AUtumn TURNS to WINter SNOW, I WATCH and WAIT. Anapestic - But I WANT to be BOLD like a HOLLywood STAR. Trochaic - HAPpy ROSEs BLOOM in SPRING aROUND the GARden. Dactylic - LOVingly, TENDerly CROONS little BIRD at dawn.
Thank you, Susan! This was a whirlwind video because I just didn't like the idea of starting the year with nothing, haha. I hope I can get back into a regular routine with them.Your metrical lines are great! The only one I'd quibble with is dactylic -- the most difficult meter, in my opinion -- since I would definitely stress DAWN in that line. The others are spot on! Thanks for taking the time to try this exercise on New Year's Day!
@@LyricalLanguageLab Ooo, you're right! The first fix that came to mind is "little BIRD to her CHICKS" but that adds an extra stressed syllable. I'll think more on this.
This video was very helpful to me as I'm working on somethings right now and this issue keeps coming up. Counting stressed beats instead of syllables make so much more sense. You're the best. It's a shame that you don't seem to be critiquing things any longer. I'm sure you were overwhelmed with input. Thanks for the video series. I wish I had found you sooner.
How is this? Lavender Fields Perfect lines of green and purple The floral perfume a wave of scent As I hear the gentle sullen breeze The petals soft beneath my touch I sip my flowery tea with welcome lips The lavender fields the perfect place to meet her A love as joyful as the summer buds I tried not to count syllables and stick to the meter
Good effort! The meter is consistent BUT lines 1, 2, and 4 only have four stressed beats while all the rest have five stressed beats. They should either all be the same or alternate, something like 5/4/5/4 etc or 4/3/4/3 etc.
So helpful! I'm 78 and just began writing poetry and was only counting syllables on my fingers which worked until I began a course and today learned about the beats. Your video solved a problem for me. In the past, counting on my fingers I saw that sometimes the syllables seemed uneven with an additional syllable that seemed out of sync with the rest of the lines. Now I see why, and this is illuminating. Though I write more free verse now, I have to develop a good ear for the stressed and unstressed and correct my rhyming poem errors.
Thank you!! This is exactly what I needed. You explained it the best out of the many videos and articles I’ve watched and read. One told me that I needed to keep consistent syllables and that got me really confused because my rhymes flowed despite the extra syllables here and there. Bless you!
Oh no no no no no! I wish people would stop telling rhymers to count syllables! Argh. I'm so glad you found this video helpful -- now get out there and rhyme (without counting)! 😂
This is groundbreaking info. So happy to know this. I go by the ear, but when I started counting the syllables, they were all over the place. I will never be a great rhymer but at least I know about the syllable-counting myth! Awesome!
I'm so glad I found out videos, taking English 2 summer courses were working oh Poem this week where I have to Annotate a poem, this week, after being out of school over 35 yrs. feel like a rebirth, but your videos are saving me. thank you so much , and you have a new subscriber.
Thank you! This is very elucidating. Though I wasn't exactly counting syllables, I never understood why I picked up pace at some places so my reading would come out right. I have what some call good ears, but not really a good framework for explaining things. Your video is easy to follow. Thank you so much!
Ha! Thank you! I love my giraffe lamp! I also have a lion-on-a-zebra-on-an-elephant lamp, and have my eye on a flamingo lamp that's currently out of stock... Yes, I am a lamp enthusiast. 😂
@@LyricalLanguageLab a poem about your animal lamps would be fun! Here is my attempt based on the exercise you gave us, and thank you for this and all your other tutorials! I have these lamps in my big house - iiambic The giraffe is the first you could count - anapestic Then, comes the one with the lion too - dactylic (with meter variation at the end or could be ‘small lion too’) Zebra topping elephant’s shoe. - trocheic
Thank you. Great videos. Trying to go through them now... Dealing with a hot mess of a poem that I thought I was ready to publish but am now rewriting!!! For a beginner like me. How do you suggest I jot down/check my meter/stress marks. Print poem out on paper and write on it, or type the beat out next to it?
Sherri, it's really the preference of the writer. If you've seen any of the Peek & Critique videos, you'll see that I type out the meter next to each line as I say the line. If you are a beginner, though, it might actually help you more to double- or triple-space your poem and use a 14- or 16-point font, then print it out and write the scansion notation above the actual beats in each line. This would give you a better visual of what's happening in the line that you won't get if you notate to the side of the line. You might also go further with the visuals and space out your lines by foot, so if you are writing in iambic tetrameter, for example, you'd put extra spaces between each foot, like this: she wants to go to Can- -dy land Anything that can help you get a visual and really "SEE" the metrical pattern is good!
@@LyricalLanguageLab Thank you! I've been working all morning using your tips and typing it out like you showed. I think it's working! Until I show a pro and they tell me "No" LOL!
I'm a complete neophyte to all of this, yet there's a quality I'm noticing even in regular prose that stressed syllables with unstressed syllables seems to flow and read a lot more smoothly (at least to my eyes and ears). For example, "The silver spoon," doesn't seem to flow as smoothly to me as, "The silvery spoon". The former using the disyallabic "silver" seems harsher, more staccato in nature than the trisyllabic "silvery" version if I use a musical analogy.
Yes, isn't it interesting how these seemingly tiny variations can create such impact? "The silver spoon" has an iambic rhythm, which is slightly more staccato than "the silvery spoon," which has a more languid anapestic rhythm. However, we do always need to be aware of meaning and choose words that serve us both for meaning AND rhythm -- because a silvery spoon is NOT necessarily a silver spoon. If the text calls for an actual silver spoon and we use silvery instead, it comes off sounding forced. So much to think about in lyrical writing!
@@LyricalLanguageLabSomething I've noticed -- being from Japan -- is that the time required to enunciate English syllables seems to wildly vary based on the syllable. This adds a whole new layer of rhythmic richness that delights me studying the language, but also some very daunting complexity! In Japanese, we use mono-length rather than variable-length syllables which makes rhythm and rhythmic analysis very simple, although at a cost to richness. For example, we would transcribe, "Go wild," in Katakana as: >> ゴウ ワイルド [go-u wa-i-ru-do] That is to say, we'd break this down into six mono-length syllables. We'd also break "go" down into two syllables, not one, to distinguish it from the shorter "o" sound as in "gong" vs. the prolonged "oo" sound as in "gone". So we can tell at a glance that this takes 6 units of time to enunciate normally, as with any other 6-syllable phrase in Japanese like, "So-re wa [ha] su-shi da". Each syllable spans the same length in time, like uniformly using nothing but quarter notes in music. But with the variable-length nature of English syllables, it seems to me like if "go" is a quarter note in length, "wild" wants to take something like a half-note, and "the" (when pronounced "ðə") might be something like an eighth note. What I'm noticing is that stressed syllables seem to want to be quantized (as in musical quantization; snapped to an even timing in position). So "go wild [...]" might not take any longer to say than "go as wild [...]" -- and perhaps not even longer than "go as a wild [...]" -- because the stress of "wild" wants to be snapped (quantized) into a discrete beat position in time where the "as" and possibly "as a" can fit in without prolonging the duration of the phrase.
@@LyricalLanguageLab Something still isn't quite sitting right with me with scansion at the syllabic level in English, given both the varying degrees of relative stress between English syllables but also the way English syllables are variable-length in time (compared to Japanese syllables which are mono-length). I hope you'll forgive all my long-winded posts explaining my confusion! If we think of rhythm at least in terms of the fixed-length beats of music, then English poses the complexity of trying to map/position variable-length syllables to fixed-length beats. The "most stressed" syllables to seem to want to be quantized discretely to land evenly on timed rhythmic beats with subtle pauses or stretching and/or extra unstressed syllables, but syllables don't seem to map one-to-one with a uniformly-timed beat (such as that of a metronome). "The cat" seems to tightly fit into a dibeat foot/monometer, mapping neatly to the disyllabic foot/monometer, because "the" and "cat" have relatively short and evenly-timed syllables and offers no room for insertion of syllables in between without disrupting the whole rhythm and length of the phrase. However, "The cat went to the schools," seems to want to stretch to a tetrabeat meter due to the longer length of "schools". "The cat went to | the sch-oo-ls." The syllabic accents then seem to manifest in something like a secundus paeon against a tetrabeat foot: "the CAT went to | the sch-OOls [tap]." A syllabic analysis seems to suggest an iamb followed by a pyrrhus followed by an iamb ("the CAT | went to | the SCHOOLS.") which seems clumsy and chaotic unless "TO" is considered accented (which seems a bit odd and unnatural to me when spoken at natural speed: "the CAT | went TO | the SCHOOLS"), but when analyzed in terms of beats rather than syllables, it seems to cleanly and uniformly conform to a secundus paeon tetrabeat dimeter rather than a jarring mixture of disyllabic feet, and naturally extends: >> the CAT went to | the sch-OOLs [tap] | and WAN-dere-d in | the FIE-lds [tap tap]. It seems so much easier to think about this way in terms of fixed-timed beats rather than variable-timed syllables. The above if we attempted a scansion towards a disyllabic hexameter would be: >> the CAT | went to | the SCHOOLS | and WAN | dered in | the FIELDs. Iamb, pyrrhus, iamb, iamb, pyrrhus, iamb? Or maybe it's using tetrasyllabic trimeter? >> the CAT went to | the SCHOOLS and WAN | dered in the FIELDs. Secundus paeon, ditrochee, quartus paeon? That doesn't seem right. Or maybe it's using trisyllabic tetrameter? >> the CAT went | to the SCHOOLS | and WAN dered | in the FIELDs. Amphibrach, anapest, amphibrach, anapest? That seems the most uniform in structure so far using trisyllabic tetrameter, but actually it's showing repeated hexasyllabic patterns: >> the CAT went to the SCHOOLS | and WAN dered in the FIELDs. [di DA di di di DA | di DA di di di DA] But thinking about it in terms of hexasyllabic dimeter still doesn't seem anywhere near a true description of its rhythm. Meanwhile, it does seem to map very cleanly to tetrabeat feet (specifically a secundus paeon tetrameter) which doesn't map a syllable one-to-one to a beat and considers the variable-length nature of syllables as well as natural pauses. >> 1. The cat went to the schools and wandered in the fields. >> 2. the CAT went to | the sch-OOLs [tap] | and WAN-dere-d in | the FIE-lds [tap tap]. >> 3. [di DA di di | di DA di pi | di DA di di | di DA si pi] -- ["pi" indicates natural pauses] -- ["si" indicates natural pauses with syllables half-spilling into them.] This seems to capture something closest to the true musical rhythm against uniformly-timed beats, including the natural pauses: a secundus paeon (tetrabeat) tetrameter. And it doesn't have a one-to-one syllable mapping because the syllables vary in length: two syllables map to one beat in some cases, one syllable maps to two or more in others, and there are natural pauses in between syllables to ensure 4 beats per foot. Is this a strange way of looking at it? I'm mostly just hung up on how variable in length English syllables are. That makes mapping them to uniform-length beats so complicated to me unless we start looking further into the lengths of syllables and not just in terms of stress/unstressed syllables, or else our ideas of relative syllabic stress seem to get extremely complicated and contextually-variable with loads of exceptions. I have some background in musical production and the idea of thinking of rhythm in terms of English syllables is so counter-intuitive to me when the syllable sounds vary so much in length. Yet if we think about "stressed sounds" and the phonetic length of sounds (which decomposes syllables further down into one or more uniform-length sound pieces), there seems to be a much simpler and "atomic" way of "sound scansion" that wants to emerge over the very complex and "compound" way of "syllabic scansion". Variable-length syllables don't seem to be the proper atomic units to analyze rhythm; they seem to want to decompose further, and where speakers tend to pause seems important to factor in as well.
@@darkengine5931 Thanks for the interesting and enlightening discussion! Not being a linguist, however, I find myself at a loss as to answering your further questions. If you'd like more in-depth discussions of meters and rhythms in English, I would suggest the books THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED by Stephen Fry and ALL THE FUN'S IN HOW YOU SAY A THING by Timothy Steele. Both are excellent sources for discussion on meters and syllabic and accentual verse. Happy reading!
@@LyricalLanguageLab Thank you so much and apologies again for chatting your ears off! Your video gave me an epic Eureka moment since I've only been taught to count syllables and couldn't understand how on earth to analyze rhythm of authors like Shakespeare, especially as a non-native speaker. Yet my enthusiasm got the better of me. What I've always struggled with in scansion of Shakespeare's writing is that, even factoring in Original Pronunciation, there just seemed to be way too many rhythmic disruptions if we map a rhythmic beat to all syllables, and not just the stressed ones as you taught us in the video. When I asked my teachers about it, they'd casually dismiss it by saying a small rhythmic disruption here and there is fine and adds interest. Yet that didn't make any sense to me musically since -- for example -- if we add the odd fifth quarter note in 4/4 making it spill past a bar, that doesn't just create a little localized rhythmic disruption. It disrupts the entire song! Yet trying my best to read Shakespeare out loud, those extra unstressed syllables and omissions here and there didn't seem to disrupt the overall rhythm at all. So something else was going on, and what you taught here about focusing primarily on just stressed syllables made sense out of years of confusion I had. On the original point about "silver spoon" vs. "silvery spoon", while the two words alone in the latter case suggest an anapestic foot and overlooking the differences in meaning, I'm thinking the third "y" syllable is so terse and lacking in stress (even by unstressed standards) that, provided it doesn't change the stress patterns, we can probably replace any duple meter poem (ex: iambic or trochaic) using "silver spoon" with "silvery spoon" and not disrupt its stressed beats and overall rhythm at all.
Hi Renee, in regards to the couplet, "She WANTS to GO to CAN-dy-LAND", at 2:10 you added the 2nd line, "but HER mom HAS some-THING else PLANNED". As you said, this line does not work when scanned in iambic tetrameter but what if you wanted to use this same line and yet have it function properly in this couplet? Is there a method/strategy to change and/or substitute the words to make it a successful scansion? As an example, I replaced “tired” with “worn” (among other words) and would like to know if this alternate line would work, "but Mom who’s WORN has OTHER-wise PLANNED"? Also, the 2nd syllable in the word ‘Otherwise’ (wise) adds a secondary stressed syllable according to Merriam-Webster dictionary (oth·er·wise ˈə-t͟hər-ˌwīz) yet this word still sounds like it would work in the iambic tetrameter couplet. Thoughts please? Thank you so much for this video?
Hello! I think with enough revision you can change any line to fit your meter. In the example you gave, though, you still have an extra unstressed beat in OTH-er (you show both syllables as stressed), so the actual emphasis is OTH-er-WISE. The full line, then, would be: but MOM, who’s WORN, has OTH-er-WISE PLANNED -- and that doesn't quite work yet either. All you would need to do to fix it is change the last two words slightly: but MOM, who’s WORN, has OTH-er PLANS. (Obviously that would mean you'd have to fix the rhyme too!) You also said that WISE is the second syllable in OTHERWISE, but it is the third syllable. It is indeed a secondary stress, and secondary stresses can (and usually do) absolutely function as a stressed beat in a line of metered verse.
@@LyricalLanguageLab… Thank you Renée for the detailed response! Can’t believe I missed the additional syllable and unstressed beat in the word “Otherwise”. Thank you for alerting me to that error. Yes, after revising the line, the need now arises to fix the end rhyme. Thanks for bringing that to my attention as well.
This was so helpful!! Thank you so much. I am just learning the basics of critical appreciation and I am being taught about the metric pattern of poems, but I really find it difficult to correctly find the feet, can you please guide me how can I be sure of pronouncing the stressed and unstressed words correctly?
Hi, Bhumika! I would start with my video on identifying stressed and unstressed syllables in English: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0R2vTDyoQRk.html&ab_channel=LyricalLanguageLab And after that -- it just takes practice! Start by identifying the meter of the very first line of a poem. Once you are sure you have marked the stressed and unstressed beats correctly, move on to the second line and try reading it with the same beats as the first line. Does it work? One other note: if you are trying to scan "classic" rhyming poems, it will be a bit harder because pronunciations and styles change over the years (plus it sometimes seems that a poet did not strictly adhere to the chosen meter).
@@LyricalLanguageLab Thanks for replying! I have already watched this video and it was very helpful! I got the basic idea how to identify, but since English is not my first language, I'm having troubles to totally grasp the concept. I would be waiting for your upcoming video on this topic 💐
Another great video! Curious if you have, or are thinking of making a video about “near rhyme”. Also, should submissions be four or five consecutive stanzas in a PB?
It is unnecessarily time consuming, and in the end it does not matter one whit how many syllables you have if your meter is wonky. If someone wants to count syllables, that's their prerogative, of course -- but it simply cannot be the way they check to see if their meter is sound. :)
Does a word have a fixed standard stressed and unstressed pattern or does it changes for sentence to sentence? For example, the last syllable in the word lollipop, i.e, "pop" is unstressed in anapestic trimeter and is stressed in trochaic trimeter (in your 8-syllable line example), LOL-li-pop and LOL-li-POP respectively. Thank you.
Hi Zen. Yes, multisyllable words have one primary stressed syllable and may also have a secondary stressed syllable. Depending on the meter and placement in a line, that secondary stress can act as a stressed beat (as in LOL-li-POP). I talk all about this in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0R2vTDyoQRk.html
@@LyricalLanguageLab thank you so much. You videos are really good. I've been studying prosody for quite sometime now; however, despite all my efforts, I am finding pretty tough to figure out the the type of metre used whenever I come across a new poetry. I am totally confused whether the metre type is iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic. For example, I was reading the following poem by Samuel Coleridge just the other day: "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay, Beside the ruined tower."
@@rediff9819 It's iambic with quite a few variations, so I am not surprised it confused you! For practicing scansion, I suggest using contemporary poems for kids, which tend to be quite regular (not nursery rhymes, mind you, but rather real poetry written in the last 15 years or so).
Renee, thanks! I am a syllable counter, and I think I am very often stuck in my head to only use meter perfectly without variants thinking I am doing a sloppy job in my poetry. But I guess I will have to get over this! I do have a question, I was on Merriam Webster dictionary and saw that the word "inside" can be stressed on either syllable INside or inSIDE...why is this the case? Am I just missing something?
Just to clarify: not having the same number of syllables in every line does not mean your meter isn't perfect. As for INSIDE, both pronunciations are used. Which one can depend on both context and . Consider these examples: "Kids, please come inside for dinner." "Hey, cat, decide if you want to be inside or outside!" Where do you put the emphasis in these cases?
@@LyricalLanguageLab Renee, I see the difference now with "inside" thank you. However, and maybe I am just thinking to black and white about this, but if I am getting rid of a syllable (like your example of fitting meter into an 8 syllable line) or adding a syllable such as Juliet or lollipop, doesn't that mean that your meter is imperfect? Or does it all depend on how it flows? Because I can see that "It is the east and Juliet is the sun" flows, but at the same time it breaks the meter of an Iamb and becomes anapestic. Am I just totally missing something? lol
@@the.thinking.failure I do not call it "imperfect" but rather "varied meter." Imperfect meter is when it just does not flow and the stresses have an erratic pattern. Just about everything has varied meter (aka meter with slight metrical variations, or meter with metrical substitutions e.g. an anapest instead of an iamb), and it is desirable (when done correctly/well). "Perfect" meter has a tendency to sound too sing-songy, especially in picture books; varied meter, used judiciously, keeps things interesting!
Can you guide me regarding labelling meter ? Actually, have labelled meter but need to confirm from you whether am doing right or wrong. The poem is IF by Rudyard kipling
Hello! If you mean scansion, please take a look at my three videos on iambic, anapestic, and trochaic meter, where I demonstrate how to scan the meter. If you aren't sure about stressed beats, also take a look at my video Top 5 Tips: How to Identify Stressed Syllables. IF by Rudyard Kipling is written in iambic pentameter. :)
For the sake of my examples, and for people who may not be familiar with meter, I do suggest using accentual-syllabic verse, which just means that the meter is perfect with no variations. If you do that, yes, it is likely (but not an absolute given) that each line will have the same number of syllables. Even so, I definitely discourage the counting of syllables!! Most people who write in verse, however, do vary the meter so that it sounds more natural and to prevent a sing-song-y rhythm. But when just starting out, I think it's important to strive for perfect meter -- know the rules before breaking them!
