These names refer to the arrangement of syllables in the foot. There are other names that refer to the number of times the foot is repeated in the line. These also come from the Greek and are long and difficult, but are no more necessary for you to learn now than the names of feet. If you can pick out the arrangement of syllables which make up a foot, and the number of feet in a line, you can make a pattern for yourself out of any piece of poetry. The names and examples of the most common meters are here given for reference, however.
1. Three feet to the line, three-accent line or trimeter.
H[)i]s voíce [)no] móre [)is] heárd.
2. Four feet to the line, four-accent line or tetrameter.
Buíld [)me] straíght, [)O] wórth[)y] Mást[)er].
3. Five feet to the line, five-accent line or pentameter.
[)At] lást, w[)i]th héad [)e]rect, th[)u]s críed [)a]loúd.
4. Six feet to the line, six-accent line or hexameter.
T[)h]e Ny['m]phs [)in] tángl[)e]d shádes of t['w]ilig[)ht] thíck[)et]s mou['r]n.
Turn to any collection of poetry, and see how many of the feet and meters you can recognize. You will find, although the accent gradually recurs after a regular number of syllables, that it does not invariably do so; but you will also notice that this does not affect the accenting of the line. For instance, you give three accents to the line, "And I would that my tongue could utter," where there are ten syllables, but you also give three to the line, "Break, break, break." You must learn, therefore, to distinguish one variety of meter from another by the number of times your voice naturally makes an accent in reading it aloud; but for your own verse making it is a simpler and better rule to arrange your line so that there is the same number of syllables between each accent. You will find this a very general rule in all poetry, and it is a good guide for beginners.
You can take, then, any piece of poetry which you admire and make from it a pattern for yourself. Suppose you wish to write a verse describing a rainy day. You turn to Whittier's Snow-Bound as a suitable model:—
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Reading the lines aloud, you see that they have four accents or feet, and each foot has two syllables, the second of which is regularly accented. Marking the accented and unaccented syllables as shown above, and then taking away the words, you have left a pattern by which you can test your own lines, namely u — u — u — u —. Now, if you wish to write in metrical or verse form the statement that the rain resounding on the roof sounded as though a great many little drums were being beaten, you might write,—
The rain drummed loud as though the elves
Were playing soldier.
Your idea is now completely stated, and if you were writing prose you could stop there; but on consulting your pattern you see that you need one accented syllable to finish the last foot you have written, and one more foot to finish your last line. In your effort to add these three syllables, arranged in words which will complete the picture your lines suggest, you will readily hit upon some such phrase as overhead, on the roof, in a crowd, or noisily.
You will then have written two lines of correct verse; but in comparing them with the first two lines of Snow-Bound, your model, you will notice one difference. Of the last words in each pair of lines from Snow-Bound all but the first consonants are the same and have the same sound. These are called rhyming words. Nearly all verse rhymes. Words are considered to rhyme when they have the same accented vowel sound, different consonants preceding the accented vowel sound, and the same sounds following the accented vowel sound. One stumbling-block in the way of beginners in verse making is the fact that English words are spelled so differently from the way they are pronounced. Do not be misled by this. Remember that it is the accented vowel sound that must be the same in both words, and test your rhymes by saying them aloud. Thus vessel and wrestle, despair and bare, gaze and bays, bird and heard, rhyme perfectly, although they look so very different, but door and boor are not good rhymes, although they look just alike, nor are trough and bough, and through and plough. Rhymes usually occur at the end of lines, but not always, as in Snow-Bound, at the end of each pair of lines.
Just as syllables are arranged in feet and feet are arranged in lines, so lines are arranged in stanzas. The shortest stanza is two lines rhymed. This is called a couplet.