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English 252: Introduction to Poetry Everything You Always Wanted to Know Alfred J. Drake. Hours: Cyber Cafe M/W 10-11 (See Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York : Random, 1979.) 1. When you cite two or three lines of a poem, you should mark the division between lines like this: "Whose woods these are I think I know;/ His house is in the village though" (1-2). Use // to mark the division between stanzas. It is not necessary to mark divisions between lines when your quotation is in offset form. (Moreover, do not use quotation marks when you offset lines.) 2. The poetic line is divided into feet. The most common form of line is iambic pentameter--i.e. a line consisting of five iabic feet: unstressed U + stressed /. Five iambs equal one line of iambic pentameter: U/ U/ U/ U/ U/. For the sake of formatting, a boldface syllable equals "/" and unbolded syllables are short "U." "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon" (Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters.") iambic tetrameter (four feet)-- "Whose woods these are I think I know" (Robert Frost) iambic hexameter (six feet)-- "With that misformèd spright he back returned againe" (Edmund Spenser) 3. When a poem is basically iambic but still varies at points in its metrical pattern--which often happens--the poet has substituted some other kind of foot for a basic iamb, U /. The main substitutions are: a) the anapest, or anapestic foot: UU/ as in intervene. The second and fifth foot of the following pentameter verse are anapestic: "My bodily form from any natural thing" (Yeats) b) the trochee, or trochaic foot: /U as in groovy. The first foot in the following verse is trochaic: "Courage, he said and pointed toward the land" (Tennyson) c) the dactyl, or dactylic foot: /UU as in verily (see Longfellow's "Evangeline"). In the epic hexameter verse below, the feet are dactylic, with the hexameter pattern being /UU /UU /UU /UU /UU /U. (The final, shorter, foot runs /U or //.) "This is the forest primeval, | the murmuring pines and the hemlocks." d) the spondee, or spondaic foot: // as in Browning's pentameter line below, in which the first two feet are spondaic: "Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!" ("The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's") e) the pyrric, or pyrric foot: UU "the sea son of mists" 5. A caesura, marked "|," indicates the rhetorical center or pause in a given line: "What oft was thought | but ne'er so well expressed" (Pope) (A few of these lines were taken from Paul Fussell's book, Poetic Meter and Form, which I recommend to anyone interested in prosody.) P.S. Refer to citations from a play as follows: with plain numerals, as in (3.2.87-92). The older standard used Roman numerals, as in (III.ii.87-92). Do not leave spaces between the act, scene, and line divisions. Do not use abbreviations like "ll," for "lines," and so on. Place periods and commas outside the parentheses: "Come hither, Catesby. Rumor it abroad / That Anne, my wife, is very grievous sick" (4.2.50-51).
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