Mastering Poetic Meter: A Deep Dive into Verse Analysis

Metric Concepts

• Prose: Always write forward.
• Verse: Writing with a certain measure, often structured in lines and stanzas.
• Narrative: Storytelling.
• Lyric: Expressing feelings.

How to Work with Verses

Analysis of the Form

Lines

• Measuring Lines
  • Separate Syllables: Each syllable has only one vowel sound.
  • License Application Metrics:
    • Sinalefa: Union of the last syllable of a word ending in a vowel with the first syllable of the next word beginning with a vowel.
    • Syneresis: Similar to sinalefa, but occurs within a word. A syllable with a vowel sound meets the following if it starts with a vowel to form a single syllable.
    • Umlauts: Two points are placed on top of an *i* or *u* to indicate that a diphthong should be counted as two syllables.
  • Rules for the implementation of umlauts and sinalefa:
    • If the two vowels are unstressed, there is sinalefa.
    • If one vowel is stressed and the other is unstressed, there is sinalefa if appropriate for the metric of the verses.
    • There may be a double sinalefa when two words are placed between vowels.
    • There may be coupled sinalefa and umlauts in the same word.
    • Stressed vowels are never in sinalefa.
    • No sinalefa between the last word of a verse and the first of the next.
  • Accentuation rules:
    • Acute: Adds a syllable.
    • Flat: It remains the same.
    • Proparoxytonic: Subtracts a syllable.

Rhythm

Distribution of accents.

Stanzas

• Rhyme

  Repeating the same sounds in different verses from the last accented syllable (vowel).

  • Consonant: When sounds are repeated from the last accented vowel.
  • Assonance: When only vowel sounds are repeated after the last accented vowel.
  • Free Verse: When the lines do not rhyme with any other verse.

Pauses

Pauses are stops that we make in the poems, marked by punctuation. There are four main types of pauses:

• Versal: When the pause coincides with the end of a verse.
• Verse: When the pause coincides with the end of a stanza.
• Final: When the pause coincides with the end of a poem.
• Inside: When the pause is in the interior of a verse. It divides a line into two equal parts, each of the parties is called a hemistich, and the pause is called a caesura. A verse can be divided into two parts (bipartite) or three parts (tripartite).
• Enjambment: When there is no pause at the end of a verse, and the syntactic structure of the verse continues until a pause in the following verse. There are two types:
  • Abrupt: When the pause occurs before the fifth syllable of the following verse.
  • Soft: When the pause occurs after the fifth syllable of the following verse.