This document provides examples and explanations of different types of meter in poetry, including iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, and spondaic feet. It discusses how to identify the number of feet in each line and the meter (monometer, dimeter, etc.). Common meters like iambic pentameter and examples from poems demonstrate different feet. Including pyrrhic substitutions is discussed as a way for poets to avoid sing-song rhythms.

1. Meter in Poetry
Some Examples

2. Iambic
I do not like green eggs and ham,
I do not like them, Sam-I-Am

3. More Iambs
From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening” by Robert Frost:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

4. Can you count the feet?
In literary terms, the foot refers to two or more syllables that
together make up the smallest unit of rhythm in a poem. For
example, an Iamb is a foot that has two syllables, one
unstressed followed by one stressed. An anapest has three
syllables, two unstressed followed by one stressed.
The numbers of metrical feet in a line are described as follows:
• Monometer – one foot
• Dimeter — two feet
• Trimeter — three feet
• Tetrameter — four feet
• Pentameter — five feet
• Hexameter — six feet
• Heptameter — seven feet
• Octameter — eight feet

5. So…how many feet are there in
each line below?
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

6. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

7. My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun
(Sonnet 130)
by William Shakespeare
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

8. Iambic Pentameter
Each line has five feet (pentameter)
The feet are all iambs (da DUM).
Iambic pentameter is the most common
meter in English, and Shakespeare’s
favorite for both his plays and his sonnets.

9. Trochaic
From The Tyger, by William Blake:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

10. Once upon a midnight dreary….
From The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe:
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted---nevermore!

11. How many feet now?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night…
= trochaic ________meter
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door
= trochaic _________

12. How Many Feet?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night…
= trochaic tetrameter
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is
sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber
door
= trochaic heptameter

13. Trochaic Monometer?
Fleas
Adam
had’em.

14. The word dactylos is Greek for "finger" (and for "toe" as
well, which picks up on the notion of feet). The dactyl is
therefore a snippet of rhythm that resembles, at least to
the ear, a finger. It has a rhythmic shape consisting of one
long syllable which represents the long bone, or phalanx, of
the finger, plus two short syllables, which represent the two
short phalanges.

15. Dactylic
(or…DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM diddy)
From Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
THIS is the FORest priMEval. The MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks
How many feet?
This is the| forest pri|meval. The| murmuring| pines and the| hemlocks
Hey! It’s dactylic hexameter. Just like The Odyssey.

16. Are these dactyls?
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider and
sat down beside her and
Frightened Miss Muffet away.

17. Anapestic
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

18. How many feet?
"And today the Great Yertle,
That marvelous he
Is King of the Mud.
That is all he can see."

19. Other Types of Feet
A spondee consists of two stressed syllables in a row:
football mayday Key West black hole
dumbbell childhood bathrobe love song
The last foot in a line of epic poetry (i.e., Homer) is almost always a
spondee.
In an amphibrach, the middle of the three syllables in the foot is
stressed, as in the name Patricia or the words organic and fantastic.
And NOW comes| an act of| Enormous| Enormance!
No former| performer’s| performed this| performance!
from Dr. Seuss’s “If I Ran the Circus”:

20. Pyrrhic: Avoiding Sing-Song Cadences
Poetry in which every stress appears in its place can take on a tedious
sing-song quality, and poets avoid that problem by introducing small
variations into the meter of individual lines. A particularly common
variation is the replacement of an individual iamb or trochee with a pyrrhic, a
disyllabic foot in which neither syllable is stressed (or, at least, in which neither
syllable is stressed very strongly). The following line from William
Shakespeare’s Richard III is iambic, but with one pyrrhic substitution:
A horse! | a horse! | my king|dom for | a horse!
If you read this line naturally, as if it were prose, the preposition “for” would
have no (or almost no) stress. The line thus consists of five two-syllable feet, all
of which are iambs except the fourth, which is a pyrrhic. The line overall is felt
to be iambic because of the overwhelming general iambic cadence, but sporadic pyrrhic
substitutions here and elsewhere save that cadence from a relentless thumping and
clunking that would distract from the natural rhythm of the language.