Learning Meter #2: Stresses in Sentences

This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets

Welcome to the second article in my series about the most ancient poetry tool there is—Meter.

Meter means “a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.” In my first article about it, I went through:

What syllables are
How syllables are either stressed (said with more emphasis or weight) or unstressed
Finding the main stressed syllable in multi-syllable words.

In this article, I’m going to take you to the next level, which is finding the stresses in whole sentences, not just individual words.

Stresses in Sentences: Getting started

Basic principles

When you’re looking for stresses in sentences things get more complicated. Instead of taking it one word at a time, you have to consider lots of words strung together, and see how they share out the stresses.

In particular, you have to think pretty darn hard about the one-syllable words, which are trickier than multi-syllable words, because there’s no rule for where the stress goes! They are just either stressed or unstressed, and for every single one of them, you have to figure out which.

How do you do this? By listening carefully to the way you say the sentence.

In fact, the Golden Rule of stresses and meter is:

Listen hard and trust your ear.

Listen hard: there’s no other way to do this than by listening. There isn’t a formula or shortcut, though as I said it does get easier the more you do it.
Trust your ear: The way you hear a sentence is the right one—for you! Other people may hear it differently, but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong.

A simple method for finding stresses

This is the approach I recommend for finding stresses in a sentence:

Say it out loud or in your head, looking for particularly strong (or stronger) stresses.
Look at the multi-syllable words and work out where the main stress will be in them.
Then see if you need extra stresses between the ones you’ve identified already.

Let’s try that with the following sentence:

Can you stop on the way and pick up pizza?

This has lots of one-syllable words, so it will be good practice!

1. Look for strong stresses

Do you hear any strong or stronger stresses in that sentence?

If you’re not sure which words you’re hearing stressed, try putting EXAGGERATED stress on each word in turn.

If the sentence sounds strange, that word should not be stressed.
If the sentence sounds as though it could be normal except for the extreme emphasis, then that word probably is stressed.

For example, if you try to say

Can you stop ON the way and pick up pizza?

it should sound pretty silly—like someone thumped you in the diaphragm right when you said “on”!

But if you say

Can you STOP on the WAY and pick up pizza?

it may sound weirdly urgent, but still like basically the same sentence.

So that tells us that there are two strong(er) stresses we can start with: STOP and WAY.

2. Multi-syllable words

“Pizza” is the only multi-syllable word in this sentence. Using the techniques from Article #1, you can see that the stress is on the first syllable: PEE-zah.

So there will probably be a stress there in the sentence too.

3. See if you need extra stresses

So far we have:

Can you STOP on the WAY and pick up PEE-zah

If you say that sentence, can you hear any additional syllables getting some stress besides the three I’ve bolded?

To test it, you can try to keep your voice excessively flat and boring on all the syllables that aren’t bold. Does that sound right?

I think the first part of the sentence sounds just fine like that—

Can you STOP on the WAY

—but I hear a problem with

and pick up PEE-zah

Three entirely flat, unstressed syllables before pizza sounds false—it’s too level and dull for too long. So I think there must be another stress in there, and I hear it on “pick.”

Putting it all together

So here’s what I get after all 3 steps:

Can you STOP on the WAY and PICK up PEE-zah?

Four stressed syllables in all. Although I am aware that the stress on “PICK” is a bit weaker than the others, I still count it as stressed.

Job done! We’ve found all the stresses in this sentence. Hopefully that wasn’t too hard: you may even have heard the stresses right off the bat, without having to go through my three steps

Change stresses, change meaning

In the Next Steps section below, I’ve given you some practice at finding stresses in a few sentences.

However, before you get to that, I need to let you know that the picture is a bit more complex than I’ve said so far.

You see, stress is more than just an abstract pattern than happens to appear in all sentences. It’s actually a fundamental tool for our communication, because:

Where you put the stresses can change the meaning of what you’re saying.

To see how this works, let’s go back to our pizza sentence.

What if this sentence was actually part of a conversation, in which two people are each trying to avoid having to get the food? It might go like this:

A: Let’s get a takeout tonight.
B: Great idea! You can get it after you’re done at school.
A: No way, I’ve got too much homework! Can’t you stop on the way from work and get tacos?
B: No, I’ve got get straight home to let the dog out. Can you stop on the way and pick up pizza?

The conversation has changed the meaning of our pizza sentence—now it’s all about person B saying that person A should do the job, not person B! So a word that wasn’t very important in our original reading of it, has suddenly taken on new significance: “you.”

That means that person B is going to put their biggest stress on YOU, like this:

Can YOU stop on the way and pick up pizza?

So then we have to re-do our steps 1-3, and check if that means new places for other stresses.

I think actually STOP, WAY, PICK, and PEE remain stressed (although “stop” gets a lot lighter, and you might even hear it as unstressed):

Can YOU STOP on the WAY and PICK up PEE-zah?

All this goes to show is:

You also need to consider how the sentences before your sentence may change its meaning and therefore its stresses.

Next up: How all this stress becomes useful for us as poets (at last!!)

That’s enough for one article! In the next one, I will show you how you can use these tools to think about rhythm in poetry.

But right now, it’s time to practice finding stresses in sentences. Have fun!

Next Steps: Practice finding stresses in sentences

Below are 5 sentences from a prose poem by Louise Glück in her fabulous book Faithful and Virtuous Night. Use these to practice all you now know about finding stresses in sentences.

Once you’re done with your own version, you can click here to download my answers.

Remember that you may have heard the sentences differently from me, and that’s OK!

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me.
Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively I lit a cigarette.
In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor.
But who would see this light, the small dot among the infinite stars?