Poetic Basics

Stanzas

Stanzas, in short, are the paragraphs of poetry. There are three main kinds. The first is couplets, which are two rhyming lines. Example: My mom gave me a nickel / She said go buy a pickle. 

Tercets have three lines, with various rhyme schemes. Example: The pickle was sour / it tickled for hours / that nickel had power! 

The last basic stanza is the most popular, the quatrain. It has 4 lines, with too many rhyme schemes to count. Example: I shan't forget / Not to let / In the pet / When he is wet.

All larger stanzas are composed of these.

Rhyme 

There are 5 main types of rhyme:

• End Rhyme

• Near Rhyme

• Consonance

• Assonance

• Internal Rhyme

End Rhyme is the type of rhyme you find in The Cat in the Hat. It is also called exact rhyme or true rhyme. Pet / wet is an example of end rhyme.

Near Rhyme is like taking a Lego brick and a knock-off and sticking them together. It fits, but it adds a different quality to the structure--for example, need / wheat. Near rhyme generally comes in two types: Consonance and Assonance. Consonance is 'rhyming' with consonants, like using gas / goes at the end of a line. The words seem to rhyme, because the g and s are shared. Assonance is when the vowels sound the same, as in pause and got. The short o sound is the same in both words.

Internal Rhyme is the pickle / tickle / nickel rhyming that went on in my example of a tercet above. The rhyme occurs within the lines.

When analyzing a poem's rhyme scheme, each end-sound is marked at the end of the line with successive letters of the alphabet. If a sound is repeated, the corresponding letter is repeated. (Internal rhyme usually isn't marked. Near rhymes are marked the same way as perfect rhymes.) For example:

There once was a kid in my county     A
Who grew from his garden a bounty.  A
He sold every fig                                 B
To a man with a wig,                           B
That prosperous boy in my county.     A

Meter

Meter is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that make up a word or line in poetry. Sometimes this is also called "scansion."

A stress is where you would put the emphasis when speaking. To make things simpler when scanning a poem (i.e., determining its dominant meter)

• An iamb is an unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat. (e.g., today, forget)
• An anapest is two unstressed beats followed by a stressed beat. (e.g., lemonade, lingerie)
• A trochee is a stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat. (e.g., ancient, triad)
• A dactyl is a stressed beat followed by two unstressed beats. (e.g., balcony, bureaucrat)
• A spondee is two stressed beats together. (e.g., cold air, dog breath)

When a stressed syllable follows an unstressed syllable, it's called a rising foot. When a stressed syllable precedes an unstressed syllable, it's called a falling foot.

When scanning a poem (which is something you'll probably never have to do, unless you major in English like me), stressed syllables are indicated with an accent mark ( ´ ), and unstressed syllables are indicated with a small curve ( ˇ ).

Why should we care about meter and rhyme if we're not English majors, inquiring minds want to know. Learning how meter works is important to poets (and those who enjoy poetry) for two reasons. First, because many forms of poems, such as limericks and sonnets, have strict metrical requirements--if you want to write one properly, you need to know how meter works. Second, when reading poetry, the meter often ahs an effect on the reader. Regular meters sound like marching armies, meandering meters can sound dreamy, and ending a line on a stressed or unstressed syllable changes what words the reader pays attention to.