Metre, Rhyme and the Meaning of Regularity

Feet and line lengths

English metre counts feet: small repeating packets of stressed and unstressed syllables. The four you must recognise are the iamb (unstressed-stressed, as in be-LOW), the trochee (stressed-unstressed, GAR-den), the anapest (two unstressed then a stress, in-ter-VENE) and the dactyl (a stress then two unstressed, MER-ri-ly). A spondee is two stresses together and is always a disruption, never a base metre.

Line length is named by the number of feet: trimeter (three), tetrameter (four), pentameter (five), hexameter (six). Iambic pentameter — five iambs — is the default line of English verse because it sits closest to the rhythm of ordinary English speech.

Substitution is the point

No good poem is metrically perfect. Poets substitute a different foot inside a regular line, and the substitution is where the analysis happens. A trochee at the start of an iambic line lands like a shove. A spondee slows the line and makes both syllables heavy. Missing a final unstressed syllable (a catalectic line) makes a line stop early, which can feel abrupt or final.

Rhyme beyond the perfect chime

• Perfect rhyme: light / night. Closure, agreement, resolution.
• Slant (half) rhyme: light / late, room / storm. The sound almost fits and does not. Useful for unease, for a claim that will not quite settle.
• Masculine rhyme ends on a stressed syllable (de-CIDE / in-SIDE) and sounds decisive; feminine rhyme ends on an unstressed one (MO-tion / O-cean) and sounds softer, sometimes comic.
• Internal rhyme falls inside a line and speeds it; eye rhyme (love / move) looks like rhyme on the page and refuses it in the ear.