Learning Meter #5: Varying Your Meter
This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets
In previous posts in this series on meter, I’ve covered stressed and unstressed syllables, finding stresses in sentences, the four main meters in poetry, and lastly, how to actually write using meter.
You might think that means we’re done—but not yet! We still need to cover one last, and very important, topic about meter:
Using variations
This means deliberately putting into your metered poetry some parts that don’t follow the meter.
But wait a minute—why would you do this? You’ve just spent all this time learning how to squeeze and squoze all your lines into iambs or anapaests—why on earth would you now want to deliberately mess it up again?!
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Why it’s good to have variation in your meter
The big benefit of meter is that it creates a regular pattern of sound in your poetry. This makes it sound “like poetry,” and can also give a kind of hypnotic power, irrespective of the words.
It also helps you make stronger creative decisions about words, as I covered in the last article.
On the other hand, one problem with meter is that it creates regular pattern of sound in your poetry!
If the pattern is too rigid, happening the same way all the time, then it can become mechanical, or hypnotic in a bad way—sending your readers to sleep, irrespective of the words!
And you may also find that having to keep the pattern going all the time gets in the way of your creativity.
In other words, the good features of meter are also its weaknesses.
Fortunately, there’s an answer:
Variation: occasionally using metrical feet that don’t fit your overall pattern.
Not too many of them, but some.
For example, one of the most common is to switch around the unstressed-stressed pattern of the first foot in an iambic line—which I’ll say more about in a moment.
When you insert these variations every so often, your metered poetry can gain a lot of potential benefits:
First and foremost, you break the metronomic repetition of the stress pattern, so your verse is less boringly predictable—and your reader gets jolted awake!
The poetry becomes more human—after all, we’re not always the same, so why would our poetry be?
The poetry also become more responsive—you can change the pattern to reflect what you want to convey, if you need to.
Lastly, it’s easier to make the poetry sound more like expressive speech, which is full of variation.
For all of these reasons, poets have developed a number of ways to vary metered poetry. Here I give you the main ones. I’m going to concentrate on iambic verse, because that’s the most common by far.
1. Switch around the first foot
This is the most common variation and the easiest to do. As I mentioned above, you swap around the unstressed-stressed pattern of the first foot of the line, so it goes like this:
stressed-unstressed | unstressed-stressed | unstressed-stressed | unstressed-stressed
This change is useful because it turns out that we naturally often want to start a line with a stressed syllable. This is partly to make an impact, and partly because a lot of multi-syllable English words have the stress on their first syllable.
If you look at any piece of classic iambic poetry, you’re going to find this variation cropping up very soon.
For example, what more classic poem is there than John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”?
SEAson | of MISTS | and MELL | ow FRUIT | fulNESS
And there is the reversed first foot, in the very first line (“Season”).
Even if you just use this variation and no other, you should find it makes iambic much more comfortable to write.
2. Switch around another foot
In this case, you swap the unstressed-stressed pattern of a foot somewhere else in the line than the first two syllables.
It might for example look like this:
unstressed-stressed | unstressed-stressed | stressed-unstressed | unstressed-stressed
Notice that when you do this, you get two stressed syllables next to each other, like this:
unstressed-stressed | stressed-unstressed
These two stressed syllables together are the reason that this variation is much less common than switching the first foot: it tends to sound odd or wrong to have them together like that.
However, sometimes it can be downright useful. Here for example is Shakespeare doing it, in a line from The Winter’s Tale:
NOTHing | but THAT;| move STILL,| STILL so |
Here, the two “still”s are both stressed next to each other, because the last foot has been reversed.
Why does he do this?
The character who’s speaking is describing another character as like a wave, and the “peak” of the stressed “still still” between the unstressed “move” and “so” is a bit like the peak of a wave between two troughs.
The line now ends softly and tenderly on the unstressed syllable, showing the gentle feeling of love that’s behind the line.
So, in this case we see how the variation makes the meter more responsive and expressive.
3. Add an unstressed syllable
This is a fairly common approach. One foot in the line gets an extra unstressed syllable, and it can be anywhere.
Here is my favorite example of this, from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Yeats:
I WILL | aRISE | and GO now,| and GO |to INN | isFREE
This is a perfectly regular line of iambic—except for that one extra syllable “now” after the first “go.”
It doesn’t really mess up the overall pattern of the line, because there are so many more feet that are strictly iambic.
But to me, that extra syllable makes the line work: it’s a sigh of longing that can’t help but escape from the speaker as he thinks of going to the lovely island, but can’t.
Again, the variation is expressive.
This is a relatively easy one to do, and also hard to get wrong! Because it’s unstressed, the extra syllable doesn’t have that much power. But it can relax and loosen a line a lot.
(And in general, Yeats is a great poet from whom to learn about varied meter!)
4. Replace an unstressed syllable with a stressed one
If we can add unstressed syllables easily, then you might think we can also add an extra stressed one here and there too.
But adding stresses is not so easy!
Stressed syllables have more power in the ear, so it’s harder to add an extra one without unbalancing that line. In fact, it only really works if you put the extra stress in place of an unstressed syllable. Even then, it’s taking a risk!
But it can be useful, especially if you want to drive something home very forcefully.
In fact, you may have noticed me doing it in the example line of iambic pentameter that I created in the previous article:
Sly ICE |is TO|tal, SLICK |and THICK —| opAQUE |
Last time, I scanned the first foot as unstressed-stressed, but I think you could equally argue that actually “Sly” is stressed too:
SLY ICE |is TO|tal, SLICK |and THICK —| opAQUE |
This puts a lot of weight on the start of the line—which I think sounds kind of oppressive, or too much. Is that suitable for the dangerous, omnipresent ice I’m talking about? I think it is. So it’s worth doing—even though I think it makes the meter a bit wobbly for the whole line!
So, take care with this one—but it can be useful.
5. Shorten or lengthen the last foot
Last one! Quite often, poets will make the last foot of a line shorter or longer, by cutting off or adding unstressed syllables.
This has a lot to do with rhyme. If you want to use a two-syllable rhyme word with an unstressed last syllable, like “AP – ple,” strict iambic (or anapaestic) meter says that you can’t do so.
This is too limiting, so poets have always felt free to use words with extra syllables, or fewer syllables, at the end of the line if they want to. Here’s Shakespeare again:
A WOM | an’s FACE | with NAT | ure’s OWN | hand PAINT |ed
The extra syllable at the end is not too noticeable, though it does add a softer ending to the line.
In dactylic or trochaic meter this procedure works the other way around, with unstressed syllables removed so that the line ends on a stress.
Here’s Robert Browning, writing in dactyls:
JUST for a | RIBand to | STICK in his | COAT
This “coat” has a more noticeable effect than the extra unstressed syllables, I think: it makes the line ending more forceful.
Next Steps
Take a metered poem that you’ve drafted (or write 4-5 lines of iambic verse, not trying too hard!).
Look for a line in the poem that seems “stiff” or “awkward” when you read it.
Create several redrafts of this line where you add a variation to the meter:
—Reverse the first foot
—Add an extra unstressed syllable
—Reverse a different foot.Read the new versions. Do they sound more fluid and natural than the original?
If not, try new variations.
