Writing Poetry, Scansion, and Rhyme

A number of years ago, I purchased a book entitled The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry, written by Nikki Moustaki and published by Alpha Books. It has become an important reference book for me as I continue to hone my writing skills and tutor students in English and other writing classes. On page 104 of the book, Nikki includes a short course in scansion, a method that poets use to measure metrical patterns. She explains that a metrical foot is a unit of measure that measures the stresses in a line of poetry.

For example, let's take the popular children's book by Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham. Two of the  lines read: "I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam-I-am." Both last words of these two sentences rhyme, am versus Sam. Also, notice that there are 8 syllables in each sentence. When you read the two sentences out loud, they flow quite nicely. Each line is composed of 4 iamb feet. Iambic means each foot is composed of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The emphasis is placed on the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th syllable in each line.   Capital letters indicate a stressed syllable, while unstressed syllables are written as lower case letters. With that in mind, the two sentences can be rewritten as: i DO not LIKE green EGGS and HAM. i DO not LIKE them SAM-i-AM. These sentences are written in iambic tetrameter form, which means they each have 4 iambs, each made up of  2 syllables (unstressed/stressed= 1 iamb, tetrameter means 4 feet).

A quick way to check on what syllables in certain words are stressed is to look at a dictionary. The stressed syllable is indicated with an accent mark ' just before the stressed syllable. For example, the word "behave" is pronounced "beHAVE" not "BEhave". Another example is the word "volleyball", which is pronounced  "VOLleyball".

I'm hopeful that you will find this post helpful in understanding scansion, meter, and rhyme.

Ken

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