Learning Meter #1: Stressed and Unstressed Syllables

This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets

If you’d been doing poetry 125 years ago, or 500, or even 2,000, meter would have been the very first thing you learned.

For more than 2,500 years, meter—which just means the use of a regular rhythm—was so important that words with meter were poetry, and words without it could not be.

And if you think about it, this makes sense. Just think about all the rhythms that are everywhere in life, from your heartbeat to the cycle of the seasons. Even now in our technological age, rhythm is a powerful part of human life, and so of course it became central to humankind’s most strongly‑felt creations in words.

But today, meter is much less common—some poets come to it late, some never use it, and you may not even know what it is.

But in the same way that learning to draw is a good idea if you want to be an artist, even a conceptual artist, learning about meter is still a good idea if you want to be a poet.

Drawing helps artists learn about shape, light, texture, and line, and that’s helpful even if they never exhibit a single drawing.

Likewise, learning meter can help you understand the sounds, feelings, and “textures” of the words you’re using, even if you never publish a line of iambic pentameter in your life.

So this article is the first in a series where I will take you through what you need to know to about meter.

In the beginning, there was stressed and unstressed

Before we get to meter though, I need to get you a little stressed. And also unstressed.

You see, in English, all meter (and indeed all rhythm) is built on patterns of stressed and unstressed words and syllables.

Learning poets sometimes get themselves in a twist about this, but I hope you won’t! You see there’s no need to fear stresses, because it’s something that you use all the time.

Whether you know it or not, you constantly vary the amount of stress (meaning loudness, weight, or any other emphasis) that you give to different syllables and words, when you talk and when you read.

So all you have to do to start learning meter is to become aware of what you’re already doing.

Syllables recap

First, let’s do syllables. A syllable is a “beat” within a word. Some words have just one beat or syllable, like:

cat
give
fast

Other words have multiple syllables, like “apple,” which splits into two beats: “ah” and “pul.”

Some more examples:

Two syllables: carrot, attack, record
Three: attitude, banana, copycat
Four: obviously, diameter, television

and so on.

And as I said above, syllables are vital because they’re the building blocks of rhythm.

Syllables and Stresses in multi-syllable words

Now we need to go a step further and think about the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables.

(For convenience, we usually refer to syllables in poetry as either “stressed” or “unstressed,” although in reality it’s a sliding scale, with varying levels of stress. But you don’t need to get into that, so I won’t!)

In general, English words have one stressed syllable, and the other syllables are unstressed.

That means that one syllable is said LOUDER or with extra emphasis than the other syllables in the word (assuming of course that the word has more than one syllable).

So, think about the word “apple.”

In theory, there are two different way to say this, depending on where you put the stress:

You can say AH-pul

putting the stress on the first syllable

Or you can say ah-PUL

putting the stress on the second syllable.

But if you try them both out loud—and please do, it’s the best way to understand—you’ll find that one of these options sounds wrong.

We just don’t say “ah-PUL”: we only ever say “AH-pul.”

If you can’t hear what I mean, try exaggerating the way you’re saying the word. Put a ridiculous amount of extra stress on either the AH or the PUL. Both ways will sound a bit odd, but one will still sound like the word apple: the other really won’t.

And this is because:

Many words we use come with fixed patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables built in.

Phew! This is a big relief. Why? Because it makes your job easier.

Imagine if every time you wrote a line of poetry you had to decide yourself where the stresses should go in each word! You’d go mad.

But you don’t have to. All you have to do is learn which syllables are already stressed, and use those to help you build your meter (using the methods I’ll cover in the later articles).

Let’s practice finding those stressed syllables

Here are the words I listed earlier. Please take a few moments to identify which syllable you think is stressed in each of these words.

carrot, attack, record
attitude, banana, copycat
obviously, diameter, television

Answers—please look only AFTER you’ve worked out your own

(Really, I know it’s a pain to stop and do the exercise, but you’ll learn this way better if you do it yourself!)

OK, ready? Here are the answers.

Carrot: first syllable CA-rot
Attack: second syllable ah-TACK

But for “Record,” I played a mean, dirty trick on you! Both ways of saying “Record” are correct—but they have different meanings.

If you do the first syllable

REC-ord

—you mean a noun, the thing the Beatles sold billions of and that your children/grandchildren have no idea ever contained music.

But if you do the second syllable

re-CORD

—you mean the verb, meaning to document something or to put sounds onto a tape/MP3/smartphone.

So just be aware that sometimes changing the stress changes the word.

Remember you already use this knowledge all the time: it just takes a little practice to transfer it into poetry.

But in general, once you know where the stress is in a word, you can be pretty sure of that being true for life!

Using a dictionary to help

If you get stuck, with a word, look it up, and the dictionary will tell you what the stressed syllable is.

For example, suppose you wanted to know which syllable was meant to be stressed in the word “cogent.”

I just googled “Define cogent,” and as well as the definition I got this:

Screen Shot 2020-12-30 at 2.48.31 PM.png

See that weird thing I’ve circled? That’s the part you need. Ignore the strange stuff like the “o” with a hat on it and the backwards “e”, and look for the apostrophe.

You see, the apostrophe comes before the syllable that should be stressed. In this case, the apostrophe comes first, so that tells me that I need to stress the “CO-,” not the “-gent:”

CO-gent

Easy!

Next article: stresses in a sentence

Once you’ve figured all this out, you’re ready for finding stressed and unstressed syllables in actual sentences, not just single words.

And that will be the topic of the next article!

But in the meantime, you can get yourself really comfortable with this stress business by doing some of the exercises in the next section.

Next Steps: Ways to practice

Practice words: Pick a sentence at random from any text. For all the multi-syllable words, work out which syllable you stress when you say them. Check your answers in a dictionary.
Listen to talk: Eavesdrop on others talking (you can’t do this with a conversation you are part of, you’ll be too distracted!). Ignore the meaning of what they’re saying, and listen instead for where they put their stresses.
First, listen for which words get emphasized.
Then, try to hear which individual syllables get stressed within longer words.
English from different places: Try listening to English from a country you don’t belong to—be it America, Britain, Ireland, Australia, India, New Zealand, or any other. (You can use YouTube to find videos from all these places).
Ignoring accent differences, listen out for words or phrases that are stressed differently. For example, in Britain we say the word “debris” as DAY-bree, but in America it’s day-BREE.
Read sentences out loud: Get ready for figuring out stress patterns in sentences by reading out sentences yourself, from your own work or anyone else’s. Don’t try to find every stressed syllable, but try to spot the strongest stresses.