If you would like to support my channel, then please do: www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=D8LSKGJP2NL4N Thank you very much indeed for watching.

Variety is the spice of life -- and art! I agree with you about the importance of deliberately breaking the rhythm. Unrelenting strict metre gets painful fast. Of course, if that's the effect you _want_ to create... Have you come across "This sentence has five words" by Gary Provost? It's a piece of self-demonstrating writing advice that had a big impact on me when I first read it.

This is great! I am slowly getting into poetry, and this is exactly the sort of information I need to understand it better.

For me one of the most dramatic moments in Shakespeare comes near the end in King Lear. With all the iambic pentameter of the play, Lear, over the dead Cordelia says "Never, never, never, never, never." The change fairly weeps.

Excellent video! Thank you for not wasting any time, and for just teaching us this topic. Too many KZfaqrs will try to cram in stupid jokes, which only serves as a frustrating distraction. This was wonderful.

I have phoentic dyslexia and no musical talent so despite loving Shakespeare I always glazed over not sure how to understand rhythm or iambic pentameter. As I've written poetry myself, I can tell if it works or not but not why. So this was fun to findly understand more and analyze what I write most in. Eight syllables tend to be my go to, but I can see poems where I rewrote them until they fit in metre even though I didn't understand metre. I was going by ear.

Great video! Your comment on the spondaic and the pyrrhic metre made me think of my no. 1 rule in graphic design: if all design elements claim the same amount of attention, none of them are important. Kind regards from Copenhagen ❤️

Such a great content !!! Your channel brings. Earlier I used to hate poetry and lit. As I thought this was jst a waste of time but gradually I realized poets and their works introduce us to that depth and perspective of life that one could never imagine ....

Thanks so much for this video! I’m a professional musician and I’ve always wondered how poetic meter relates to musical meter. Your video has been very helpful in making that connection for me!

It's just like travelling to a new planet....wow! highly interesting! A new perspective for me!

The best explanation of metre and rhythm I've come across yet. Thank you.

At last! I have wondered about metre for years, but didn't know whom to ask. Thank you! (I don't know about you, but my KZfaq doesn't want me to use "metre." Oh well, too bad for KZfaq.)

I would love more videos that feature close readings of poems for form, metre and structure. You could do one on sonnets, one on odes etc. I'd also be enthusiastic to watch the way these styles evolve when we hit the modernist era: T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Mina Loy-the whole gang.

Sometimes I like to think of poetry more in terms of musical notation, with a foot equaling a measure and the syllables as notes of different duration. "Cannon to left of them" is two bars of 3-4 time with three quarter-notes in each, the stress occurring on the first beat ; and the last line "Rode the six-hundred" would be two bars of 3-4 time with a half-note at the beginning of the first line since to my ear the word isn't just emphasized, it actually takes more time.

How are you doing dr octavia actually iam very lucky to be subscriber in your wonderful channel i studied English language and literature till second year and left college it’s will of god not mine but thank god we are foreigners subscribers as overseas students KZfaq channels are as open universities for us thank you for reminded me of my past lessons lectures and refresh my memory again I gathered main points about rhythm and meter in English poetry briefly here it’s common types of meter in poetry one foot monometer two feet dimeter three feet trimeter four feet tetrmeter five feet pentameter six feet hexameter seven feet heptmeter eight feet octameter rhythms is expressed through stressed and unstressed syllables and rhythm too is pattern of stresse in line of verse common examples of rhythms good evening dear (lamb) how it’s only (trochee ) check please (spondee) beautiful weather we’re having now ( dacty) to infinity and be yond ( anapest) can I consider my self university student and youare my teacher i promise you iwill be very polite and active student you became proud of her iam Arabic lady citizen ihope too we became intimate friends from now on stay safe blessed good luck to you your dearest ones

Hello, Dr. Cox! Thank you for an illuminating dive into metre and rhythm. Loved it! I've been looking at the Charge of the Light Brigade verse, and I slightly disagree. I believe the last line shares a meter/rhythm with an earlier line in the verse: Volley'd and thunder'd Rode the six hundred These two lines seem to be the same to me. A dactyl followed by a trochee. Just the way it reads to me. I don't stress the word 'six'.

This is one I'll keep coming back to! BTW, in the Tennyson, the fourth line also breaks the rhythm, ending on a trochee, does it not? He's even written "thunder'd", to make sure it's said as two syllables. This creates a tiny pause between the first quatrain, which tells us what they saw, and has an urgency (or, could be interpreted that way), and the second, which tells us what an onlooker might have seen, and contains comment. The whole thing echoes the rhythm of a galloping horse, perhaps with slight falters in the face of the cannon fire, before it all breaks down at the end. It's fascinating how these metres interact with natural speech rhythms. English is a stress-timed language, but has irregular stress patterns, so the art is to make it regular sounding (so we know it's poetry!), without being too unnatural, or too boring. Did these patterns come from ancient Greek poetry? If so, was there a period of English poetry with different conventions? I'm thinking of really old poems, such as Beowulf.

This is super helpful. Love watching your back to basic type videos. Thanks so much!

I'll be honest... I have a very hard time telling stressed & unstressed syllables apart. In a poem, I can tell there's a metre, but can't usually pick it up. Then again, I'm mostly deaf, so maybe this is common for people with severe hearing loss? Oddly, I do fine in ballet class unless there's a really strange piece of music (or if the music is too soft). I'd think that picking out the beat from a waltz would be a similar skill to picking out the beat of a piece of poetry? (To be clear: I do find poetry & this topic interesting. It struck me that my post could sound negative, but that's not my intention. I find differences in perception interesting).

How wonderful is that! Just what I need for my composition studies. It work of course also with German Literature and it's what i longed for to know about Poetry for my musical ambitions. 👍👍👍

I would love to hear you talk about William Blake’s “Lullaby”. Thank you! Jane Bryce

Thank you for helping others keep the best of human nature alive. It’s not always easy or properly appreciated but it is important work. Never stop.

Thank you so much. I am delighted with the technical aspects of your videos!

Your explanation on the topic is appreciated. Without fail I think of Strauss’ Blue Danube whenever there is a mention on the stressed-unstressed syllables!

I have just watched this video again: I find it very interesting and insightful. That would be great to have other videos about poetry and versification.

I would also add that dactyls (in hexameter) were the basis for classical epic poetry in Greek and Latin in the same way iambs were the 'default' English meterical foot. So the use of a dactyl in English is usually done with reference to those works (which were widely known as they formed the basis of much formal education in previous centuries) and therefore lending an air of epicity either earnestly or ironically.

Amazing, as they ever happen to be, your videos! I'm not a poetry reader, I confess. Now thanks to this video I can say I understand "how is it written", but please let me confess my greatest problem with poetry is not "how" but "why". Every time I read a poem I end wondering why to write that way: rythm, broken lines and so on. Why not to write clear prose?

Hola, que tal?, como van?, Los mejores y más cordiales Saludos desde puente piedra, lima, Perú, ojalá que puedas venir en algún momento a mi país y que disfrutes mucho de todo por aquí, con la familia y los amigos; felicidades por tus vídeos....

I love your videos, my daughter and I watch you together a lot. Today: “Mama, is she rapping?” (she’s 7😁)… Me: “… yes. That’s… yes.”

Thank you for this 🙏

Ha! Fascinating! I now have much nerdier words for 4/4 time, 3/4 time, 6/8 time, etc. in music 😂

Can you please help me find more information on "How to properly deviate from the intended rhythm in a poem by using "Spondaic and Pyrrhic meters" to create more interesting lines? Very helpful video in that you explained how a poem can be classified as being in a specific meter but in most cases the rhythm can be temporarily broken. Thank you!

Do you have any of your own examples of a poem’s metre and rhythm that you find particularly striking or interesting?

Thank you mam

Thank you for this - It took me back a long way. I wish you hadn't started with Paradise Lost - it reminded me of Housman's lovely couplet "And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man". Has any poet matched Stravinsky's variations to rhythm at the end of "The Rite of Spring" where the time signature from bar to bar? I love the way Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" changes the last line of each stanza from four syllables to five.

excellent. thank you

Excellent video, as always! One thing that I've never been able to analyze - how should Betjeman's "Group Life: Letchworth" be characterized? *Sym* - path - y - is - *sten* - cil l -ing Her - *dec* - or - a - tive - *leath* - er - work, *Wil* - fred's - learned - *a* - folk - tune - *for* The - *Mor* - ris - Danc - ers' - *band.* It's metrical, but what sort of meter? Is it a dactyl? But most of the feet have four (not three) syllables.

Hi, Dr Cox. Thank you for your excellent videos. I have a question which is as relevant here as anywhere. Regularly, I come across the single stressed syllable "heav'n" or the disyllabic "heav'nly" (typically in Shakespeare and above all in Milton). Do you know how these were actually pronounced? Do we just slur the sounds between the h- and the -n?!

great! thanks!

I think you should have explained about stressed / unstressed syllables. It is not clear what is the physical difference between double and triple meters.

Thank you!

never been this fast to any video before!

Something never made sense to me about English syllabic scansion. The syllables in English don't map one-to-one with a timed beat since they vary so wildly in length. They aren't all like quarter notes in music for an analogy. For example, the time it takes to say "spawned" is substantially longer than "sat" even though they're both monosyllabic words. With such wildly varying lengths to syllables, it doesn't seem right to me to analyze rhythm in terms of syllables but rather their timings/lengths as well as natural pauses between. Without consistent time patterns, there is no rhythm. Consider this example: >> Jim had flown today. That would obviously classify as using trochaic feet if we analyze it by syllables, but it is not at all rhythmic unless we draw out the time between "JIM" and "FLOWN" to quantize "FLOWN" to a stress beat like so: >> JIMmm had FLOWN toDAYyy. Unless we read in such an unnatural and exaggerated way, it's like a horrible drummer who is sticking to a consistent kick and snare drum accent pattern, but his timing is so all over the place that it doesn't sound the slightest bit rhythmic. Read naturally, it isn't like "DA di DA di DA." It's more like, "DAA di DAAAA di DAA." It doesn't matter how uniformly sounds conform to an accent pattern if their timing is sporadic; the first and foremost thing a rhythm in sound requires is to establish consistency in timing (even more important than accents/stress to sound rhythmic to our ears). Meanwhile, consider this: >> Jimmy had flown today. This disrupts the trochaic feet by starting with a dactyl from a strict syllabic scansion. Yet it actually sounds _"more trochaic"_ to my ears, not less with this insertion of the extra syllable -- because it smooths and helps even out the timing of the stressed syllables; It evens out the length discrepancies of "JIM" and "FLOWN" as syllables and the time between them. It now becomes like, "DAAdi di DAAAA di DAA," which leave some tension at the end still but that tends to be smoothed out with the natural pause created by the period. Thinking about scansion in terms of stressed/unstressed syllable patterns seems counter-productive this way to understand the true rhythmic sound qualities of a poem or lyrical prose. I think we have to focus, above all else, on timing between stressed syllables to distribute them evenly across uniformly-timed beats -- not how many unstressed syllables there are -- or else we can create a lot of needless rhythmic tension even when conforming perfectly to a syllabic meter. I hope you'll forgive my long-windedness but focusing so much on syllables and not timing just always struck me as an incorrect way to understand rhythmic qualities of a poem. The ancient Greeks, to my understanding, did factor in the relative lengths of syllables when they came up with these metrical systems.

So, what is happening in the movie, “Sense and Sensibility “ when Hugh Grant is reading poetry with an incorrect rhythm and Kate Winslet, clearly irritated, pushes in and demonstrates how to read it properly?

👌

However… what is of the utmost importance, is freedom (a breakfast food) and finding one’s own voice in writing…

This is difficult for me because it's in English. I would certainly read "That like a wounded snake" as `- - - `- - -, not -`- -`- -`-. And then, lose all rhythm and rhyme (which, by the way, I could hardly find in those few English verses I read, probably because I'm not a native speaker).

Seems to me that if one is writing _in order to_ fit a meter scheme, both the meaning and the sound will suffer. I'm not sure why things like sonnet forms became so popular. Makes the language so much more stilted and awkward.

I always thought trochee was pronounced trokee not troshee.

2ish poetry would have been explained in school like that. My teacher made me hate it. Made me nnotmli,e poetry