#DEFINITION OF SCANSION HOW TO#

We’ll pause a little longer between stanzas than we will between lines. In poetry, line breaks, stanza breaks, white space, and punctuation provide cues for pauses. These lines are therefore written in iambic pentameter. Each line also includes five iambs, one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. Thou ART | more LOVE | ly AND | more TEM | perATE:Įach line consists of five metrical feet, so this poem is written in pentameter. Shall I | comPARE | thee TO | a SUM | mer’s DAY? || This line consists of three anapests followed by an iamb, or a combination of anapestic and iambic feet.īut what about the number of feet? How do those factor into the language we use to talk about meter? Let’s look at a line from Shakespeare’s “ Sonnet 18” (please note that I have changed the capitalization to accommodate scansion): Let’s return to the first line of “Annabel Lee” and show its metrical feet: We also use special terminology to refer to the number of feet in a line of poetry: Trochee: One stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (DA-da).Iamb: One unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (da-DA).Dactyl: One stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (DA-da-da).Anapest: Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (da-da-DA).Here is some special terminology that helps us communicate when discussing meter:Ī metrical foot is a unit of metrical measurement that includes stressed and unstressed syllables.

#DEFINITION OF SCANSION HOW TO#

We now know how to show meter with scansion, but we also need to know how to talk about it. Ah, that’s more like it: easy to read and easy to type. Another option, which is much clearer, is to use all caps for stressed syllables and all lowercase letters for unstressed syllables: POetry and we can add hyphens to further denote each syllable: PO-e-try. Dictionaries often use quotation marks for stressed syllables and apostrophes for unstressed syllables: PO”e’try’.

Some dictionaries include pronunciation guides, which indicate stressed and unstressed syllables. Fortunately, there are some other methods available to us. However, working with breves and slashes on a computer in this manner is tedious and time consuming.

You won’t find the breve on your keyboard, but it is available in Microsoft Word by using the Insert –> Symbol function. The breve indicates unstressed syllables, and the slash indicates stressed syllables. Here is a traditional method of marking up a poem, using Edgar Allan Poe’s “ Annabel Lee” as an example: The character that looks like the bottom half of a circle is called a breve. Scansion is the practice of marking up a poem to reveal its meter. Silence (or pauses) also contributes to a poem’s meter. In poetry, meter is determined by accented (stressed) and unaccented (unstressed) syllables. Perinne’s Sound and Sense (aff link) describes this difference clearly and simply: “rhythm is the flow of sound meter is the patterns in the sounds.” The words rhythm and meter are often used interchangeably, but their meanings are slightly different in the context of poetry. Poetry encapsulates all of these definitions of rhythm. Movement, fluctuation, or variation marked by the regular recurrence or natural flow of related elements

Definition of scansion