Don't Stress Stress: Syllabic and Accentual Verse (Poetic Meter pt. 1)

Hey, don’t stress about stress—you already know more than you think.

Welcome back! I hope you’ve been well, and I’m excited to spend some time today talking about meter.

Even though most contemporary poetry is written in unrhymed free verse, poetry is still most famous for its rhymes and its regular, metrical rhythms. But, while rhyme is often pretty intuitive and easy to notice and produce, meter can be a vexing challenge for the people who are learning to analyze poems as much as for the ones who are writing them. 

Part of that, I think, is that discussions of meter are clogged up with specialized terms like iamb, dactyl, hexameter, or acephalous which make meter sound so much more complicated than it really is. Of course, those terms are useful—and a whole lot of fun—so we’ll be learning them as we go.

The basic idea, though, is that meter involves setting the length of lines by counting rhythmic units that are already a natural part of the language. That regular rhythmic patterning is what gives so many poems their distinctive sound. And, just like the language of meter, the practice of meter can get as complex as it gets delightful.

But, for today, we’re focusing on just the fundamentals with two of the most accessible kinds of poetic meter—syllabic and accentual verse. And, to do that, we’ll need to have a good handle on syllables and stress. 

So let’s get right to it—

Syllables & Syllabic Meter

In English, meter revolves around syllables, segments of words that, as we’ve talked about before involve—at a minimum a nucleus that is usually a vowel, and sometimes consonants in the onset or coda. What that means is that a syllable typically involves initiating airflow and then cutting it off—like with the the single syllable words punch, bit, jump, or prod. 

When we speak, then, we’re restricting the air moving through our lungs and vocal folds and releasing it at fairly regular intervals. Every word has at least one syllable, and, of course, many words have multiple syllables. 

Any good dictionary will show you a breakdown of the individual syllables in a word, but it’s also something you can feel. It may not be a foolproof test, but, when I was very young, someone told me that you can count the number of syllables in a word by counting the number of times your jaw drops when you say that word. 

And that makes sense: if syllables involve restricting airflow at the beginning and end and opening up that airflow through the nucleus, then, in most cases, your mouth will be more open while you articulate the nucleus than elsewhere. 

So, take a word like hendecasyllabic, count the jaw drops—hen de ca syl la bic.

And you get six jaw drops—and six syllables, which we can confirm in a dictionary. 

Now, when we turn to poetic meter—syllabic verse is a type of meter that sets the length of lines by counting syllables. As simple as that. 

So you could write a poem and determine that each line will have ten syllables. So you write a line, going until your jaw drops ten times (and maybe an eleventh because you’ve astounded yourself with your brilliance) and then move on to the next line for ten more. 

I’d bet that the syllabic form you’re most familiar with is the haiku—at least, the version of the haiku that has been adapted into English and then taught in grade schools since the dawn of time. 

Contemporary haiku don’t really adhere to strict syllable counts—but the conventional English haiku is a short poem with three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. 

And, at least in terms of meter, that’s all you need to know. Count those syllables, and you’re on your way. 

For reasons we’ll get into a little later, syllabic verse isn’t very likely to sound like it has a meter. You’re not going to read a syllabic poem and fall into a sing-song pattern. Even where every line is the same length, syllabic verse ignores the rhythmic qualities of syllables, so it’s likely to sound like fairly natural speech.

So, if you want to go on a covert metrical mission, syllabic verse is your first friend. Add to that that it’s pretty easy to do, and it’s a great way to start training yourself to think metrically. 

Stress and Accentual Verse

Now, while syllables are at the heart of poetic meter in English, they’re not the most important thing to pay attention to—and that’s because not all syllables are equal. This is where we come to the perennial quandary of stressed syllables. 

I’ve been in enough poetry classes in my life, both as a student and teacher, to have heard people struggle vocally with identifying and working with stressed syllables. To be fair, poetry classes are often the only place that we’re asked to identify stressed syllables, so it can be an unfamiliar question—but if you are even halfway capable of speaking English, you already know where all the stresses go. 

And before you doubt me—I’m pretty confident that, even if you don’t know what I mean by stressed syllable, you still know that the word is encYlopEdia and not EncyclOpedIa. 

The difference in those two pronunciations is a matter of stress. And, if you know how to say the word, you already know where the stresses go. 

But, for the sake of technical knowledge, stressed syllables are syllables that are, in relative terms, longer, louder, and higher pitched than the syllables around them. 

So, in a two syllable word like jargon you can hear a difference between jar and gon. The first syllable in this case is the stressed syllable—and it’s louder, longer, and higher pitched than the second. 

Every word will have a syllable that receives primary stress—a syllable that is longer, louder, and higher pitched than all the others. And you might still be skeptical that you can be successful in identifying stressed syllables. 

But I want to let you in on a couple secrets:

The first is that any dictionary worth anything will show you where the stressed syllables are. 

The second is that you don’t need a dictionary. If you’re having a hard time finding the primary stress of a word, just imagine that it’s across the street and you’re calling it in for dinner.

See, when you’re calling a person from across the street, you naturally exaggerate the volume, length, and pitch of the stressed syllable in their name—

ThOmas, SabrIna, MichElle, GAry.

So, even if you don’t think you know what the stressed syllable of someone’s name is—you do, and you identify it correctly every time you call their name from across the street.

And the same thing works with regular old words, too:

dAffodil, raccOOn, potAto, antidisestablishmentArianism!

Easy peasy.

Of course, this trick will only help you to find the primary stress of a word. Words with a lot of syllables are likely to have secondary stresses—syllables that don’t get stressed as much as the primary stress but still have relatively more stress than their neighbors. 

The more you practice, the better you’ll get at hearing and feeling your way through primary and secondary stresses. And, if you really have to, you can break a longer word into parts and use the same trick:

Cutt off the primary stress of Antidisestablishmentarianism, call it again—and look at that—we found the next biggest stress in the word. And we could keep going, but let’s not—trust yourself to know where the stresses are: if you know how to say the word, you already know where the stresses go. 

But the fun facts don’t stop there—the reason that stress is more important for meter than syllables alone is that English works by timing stressed syllables at regular intervals, so the regularity of English rhythm has more to do with patterns of stressed syllables than with counts of syllables. 

For example, check this out:

If we write 

Big blue bird

We have three stressed syllables, which will take roughly the same time to say as:

The bigger bluer bird

Which has added three unstressed syllables that get smooshed in between the regular drumbeats of our primary stresses 

And we can add more:

The biggest and bluest eagle

The enormous cerulean chickadee 

And this is why syllabic verse isn’t likely to sound like a rhythmic meter: if all you’re doing is counting syllables, you’ll likely end up with inconsistent and irregular numbers of stresses in each line, so the timing of those lines will all be unique. English gets its timing from stressed syllables, so rhythm will depend more on the number of stresses in a line than just the number of syllables. 

In fact, the oldest recorded poetry in English—like Beowulf—is written in alliterative accentual verse: each line had four stresses, and the number of unstressed syllables was irrelevant. 

And we could spend a long time talking about how that form is a natural consequence of things that make English unique. It’s a stress-timed language, so the form counted stresses rather than syllables. English is a language that has fewer rhyming words than its European neighbors like Spanish and Italian, so it relied on alliteration rather than rhyme. And we could continue

But then the french-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066 and then scholars got all in a tizzy about the metrical systems of ancient Greece—and simple Anglo-Saxon accentual verse fell away in favor of things like iambic pentameter. 

And I don’t mean to say that that’s a bad thing—change in language over time is a fascinating and exciting thing. It’s just a thing that happened—and it’s probably why you have heard of iambic pentameter and not Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. 

But it can be a lot of fun to go back to the roots of English poetry—and you can try writing your own alliterative verse with these simple metrical and formal rules:

• First, ensure that each line has only four stressed syllables

• Then, ensure that three of those four stresses begin with the same sound—here’s where we get the alliterative aspect. It doesn’t matter which three are linked by alliteration—just that three of them are.

• And, finally, put a pause or caesura in the middle of the line, between the the second and third stresses. 

Just like that, you have some deeply English accentual verse. 

This accentual verse will sound more rhythmic, more metrical than syllabic verse—because the stresses will be showing up at regular intervals in each line. But there will still be an irregularity due to the variations in unstressed syllables. 

And that means you can play with your rhythm based on how many unstressed syllables you slip between your accented ones. 

Compare, for example lines like:

The big blue bird cried.

Or

The sizeable silvery sparrow whistled.

To my ear, the sequence of stressed syllables all together, as with the first line, builds tension as one stressed syllable piles onto the previous one. 

However, with the second, the strings of unstressed syllables give us a release from the intensity of the stressed syllables. So, if you can forgive the impressionistic language, there’s a fluidity and gentleness to the line with more unstressed syllables and an insistent heaviness to the line without them. 

That means that, when you’re only counting stresses, you can play around with building and releasing that tension by modifying how many unstressed syllables you include between and among the stresses. And, while meter can just be an exercise in identifying stresses and counting them out, the real fun—and artistic excellence—comes in controlling those patterns of building and releasing rhythmic tension. 

So, as we move on in later videos to more rigidly patterned meters, just remember that it isn’t just about getting test questions right with exact counts and precise patterns. The real value in learning this stuff is in the way it trains your ear, attuning you to the rhythmic patterns of language and the poetic opportunities available to you. 

Conclusion

Well, friends, I know it’s been a blast for you as much as it has been for me. When it comes to poetic meter syllabic and accentual verse are a great way to get your feet wet because they are so straightforward and simple. 

Not only that, but they can also be really rewarding forms to write in on their own—and not just as preparation for the more regularized accentual-syllabic—yes, both together—verse forms that we’ll talk about in future videos. 

For now, though, just remember that syllables are units of sound and that stressed syllables are easy to find when you just call those words in for dinner. Get familiar with those two aspects of language, and you’ll have a great foundation for what’s to come. 

So have some fun with syllables and give accentual verse a shot—it’s secretly one of my favorite forms to write in. While you do that, I’ll look forward to seeing you again soon.