How do I find the meter of an unseen poem?

Let’s begin with a poem with a steady meter; we’ll focus on Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’. First, try reading the first stanza aloud, exaggerating any rhythm you can hear. Which words naturally sound the strongest? Some people find it helps to tap out the rhythm like you would a song. Now try marking any stresses you think are there on the first line, using a / for a stress and an x for anything unstressed (here, I would use the whiteboard feature to demonstrate and see how much the student understands). The stresses here fall on every second syllable - ‘fuck’, ‘up’, ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ – we call this pattern of unstressed/stressed ‘iambic’. One iamb consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed. Each iamb, or packet of stresses, is called a ‘foot’ – in this poem we have four, giving us four feet, which we call tetrameter. If we combine these, we can call the meter of the poem ‘iambic tetrameter’. If we had two feet, we would call it dimeter; if we had three it would be trimeter; If we had one, it would me monometer, and so on. Try applying iambic meter to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, heavily stressing every second syllable – ‘shall Icomparethee toa summer’s day’ – to see how we naturally accentuate certain words. If we reverse it – ‘shallI comparethee to a summer’s day’ – it sounds unnatural and uncomfortable. If you’re ever given a sonnet, remember - all sonnets are iambic, and have five feet in each line, which we call iambic pentameter. Now try finding the meter of this line: ‘Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green’There are still four feet in each line, so it is still in tetrameter, but there are three syllables in each foot, and the meter is x x /, or anapaestic.