Understanding Poetic Metre - What, Why, and How?

When listening to music at home, you may find yourself tapping your feet along to the beat - or rather, to the rhythm. Rhythm is the most essential part of all the music you listen to, and it's at the heart of every song you love. One definition of rhythm is that it is 'the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the Occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats' - essentially, rhythm is the part of the song that makes us move, dance, sway - how you bop your head up and down, by mixing up different kinds of pulses. The same can be applied to poetry. Each poem has a unique rhythm, which, rather than making us move in a certain way, makes us speak and deliver the poem in a certain way. For example, when we read 'Sonnet 18' of Shakespeare, we hear a particular rhythm:'Shall I/ com PARE/ thee TO/ a SUM/ mer's DAY?/Thou ART/ more LOVE/ ly AND/ more TEM/ per ATE'Here, you can visually see the rhythm of the poem. The parts in bold are where you stress what you're saying - almost the vocal version of a foot tap, or a clap, to your favourite song.Rhythm is, however, a wider term. We can be even more specific when we are analysing the rhythm of poetry. Rhythm is created by the poets' use of a particular poetic metre. A metre is a pattern in poetry made up of what we call poetic feet. Every foot is made up of stressed (emphasised) and unstressed (not emphasised) syllables (remember, you can work out what a syllable is if you clap your hands along to a word; happy is two syllables, because you can break it up into two claps, whereas sad is just one syllable). Depending on the type of foot that is used, and how many times it is used in a line, we get a different metre and therefore a different rhythm. There are five main types of feet in literature:1. Iambic (one unstressed syllable and one stressed syllable - daDUM)2. Trochee (one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable -DUMda)3. Spondee (two stressed syllables - DUMDUM)4. Anapest (two unstressed syllables and one stressed syllable - dadaDUM)5. Dactyl (one stressed and two unstressed syllables - DUMdada).If we think back to the line we used earlier from Shakespeare, we can now work out what type of poetic foot is used:'Shall I/ com PARE/ thee TO/ a SUM/ mer's DAY?/ Thou ART/ more LOVE/ ly AND/ more TEM/ per ATE'. Each little part of the line - the foot- is made up of an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable - deDUM. This is iambic. Now if we count up how many of these feet are in each line, we can see this happens five times. So we have five iambic feet in each line, and this forms the metre. There are special words that we can use to describe the number of feet in each line in poetry:1. Monometer2. Diameter3. Trimeter4. Tetrameter5. Pentameter6. Hexameter7. Heptameter8. OctameterSo in Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18', we know that the metre he uses is iambic pentameter, and this forms the rhythm of the poem. Working out the metre of each poem is immensely helpful in telling you new things about it. For example, if you clap out iambic pentameter - a small clap and a big clap - you can hear that it sounds like a heartbeat. Perhaps Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter in his love poetry because it is the closest to the rhythm of his heart, making the poem all the more romantic.