Understanding Poetry – Accentual-Syllabic, Syllabic, and Accentual Meters
Rhyme is the most conspicuous feature of formal poetry written in English over the last several centuries. But the most important feature, the feature that divides poetry like Milton’s Paradise Lost from free verse, is rhythm.
There are three ways to establish a fixed rhythm for a poem:
1. You can count syllables.
2. You can count accents (stressed syllables).
3. You can count both syllables and accents.
Syllabic poetry is not common as a native English form, because the English language has strong stresses. A poet writing in a strictly syllabic meter counts how many syllables there are in a line, without paying attention to stress. Haiku is a Japanese syllabic form that has three lines with fixed syllable counts: the first line has five syllables, the second seven, and the third, again, has five.
The kind of rhythm you’ll see in most formal poetry written in modern English is accentual-syllabic. Accentual-syllabic poetry has a fixed pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. For instance, the most common English meter, iambic pentameter, has a ten-syllable line, with five stressed and five unstressed syllables arranged as they are in these lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea …
(Although accentual-syllabic poetry in its basic form has a fixed count of stressed and unstressed syllables, most poets writing long poems will vary the line structure, to provide interesting variation.)
There is also another, less familiar, way of establishing rhythm in English poetry: counting accents rather than both accents and syllables. Some people may perceive accentual poetry as irregular, and confuse it with free verse. However, unlike free verse, accentual poetry has rules. It has a fixed number of accented (stressed) syllables per line, but the count of unstressed syllables may vary. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel is accentual poetry: every line has four stressed syllables:
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high …
As you can see, there are four stressed syllables in every line, but the count and position of unstressed syllables vary.
Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry (e.g., Beowulf) was accentual rather than accentual-syllabic. More modern poets, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, have also written accentual poetry. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien, is accentual poetry written in modern English, but imitating an Old Norse style.
Meriall Blackwood has published fiction and non-fiction. Her major work in progress is Dragon Winter, a fantasy in verse.
Fantasy Poetry
Blackwood’s Journal: Poetry, Books, and Writing
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