Editing Poetry analysis (section)

===Meter and rhythm===
English language poetic meter depends on [[lexical stress|stress]], rather than the number of [[syllable]]s.<ref>Poetry’s Form and Structure (vaniercollege.qc.ca)</ref> It thus stands in contrast to poetry in other languages, such as [[French language|French]], where syllabic stress is not present or recognized and syllable count is paramount. This often makes [[scansion]] (the analysis of metrical patterns) seem unduly arcane and arbitrary to English students of the craft.

In the final analysis, the terms of scansion are blunt instruments, clumsy ways of describing the infinitely nuanced rhythms of language. Nonetheless, they provide a tool for discerning and describing the underlying structure of poems (especially those employing closed form).{{Citation needed|date=April 2016}}

The terms fall into two groups: the names of the different feet, and the names of the varying line lengths.

The most common feet in poetry written in English are the [[Iamb (foot)|iamb]] (weak STRONG), the [[anapest]] (weak weak STRONG), the [[trochee]] (STRONG weak), and the [[Dactyl (poetry)|dactyl]] (STRONG weak weak). The iamb and anapest are known as ''rising meters'' (they move "up" from weak to strong syllables); the trochee and dactyl are ''falling meters'' (they move "down" from strong to weak). Less common, but frequently important for the variety and energy they bring to a line, are the [[monosyllabic foot]] (weak) and the [[spondee]] (STRONG STRONG).

The terms for line length follow a regular pattern: a Greek prefix denoting the number of feet and the root "meter" (for "measure"): [[monometer]], [[dimeter]], [[trimeter]], [[tetrameter]], [[pentameter]], [[hexameter]], [[heptameter]], and [[octameter]] (lines having more than eight feet are possible but quite rare).

Another useful term is [[caesura]], for a natural pause within a line.

Meter and line length are not formulas for successful lines of poetry. They are rough forms of notation for the many satisfying and variable rhythms of language. Slavish adherence to meter produces [[doggerel]]. Skillful poets structure their poems around a meter and line length, and then depart from it and play against it as needed in order to create effect, as [[Robert Browning]] does in the first line of "My Last Duchess":

:That's my last Duchess painted on the wall.

The opening spondees, which throw the iambic line out of pattern, gives the Duke's words a certain virulent energy: he's spitting the words out.

[[Gerard Manley Hopkins]] took this idea of poetric energy through departure from meter to its extreme, with his theory and practice of [[sprung rhythm]], an approach to poetry in which the language constantly frustrates the reading mind's expectation of a regular meter.