Rhythm and Meter Notes - Chapter 12

·         Rhythm – any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound (198)

·         Accented – given more prominence in pronunciation (198)

·         Rhetorical stresses – a change in the rhythmic effects of a word or sentence to change meaning (199)

·         End-stopped line – a line in which the end of the line corresponds with a natural speech pause; often end with a period or semicolon (199)

·         Run-on line – a line in which the sense of the line moves on without pause into the next line; often no punctuation, but not always (199)

·         Considered natural speech pause if it is between the subject and the predicate, but not as much if between other parts of speech (199)

·         Caesuras – pauses that occur within lines, either grammatical or rhetorical (199)

·         Free verse – a style of poetry where the poetic line is the basic rhythmic unit (199)

·         Prose poem – a sort of poetry that depends entirely on prose rhythms (200)

·         Meter – the identifying characteristic of rhythmic language where the accents of language are arranged so as to occur at apparently equal intervals of time (200)

·         Rhythm designates flow of pronounced sound vs. Meter which refers to the patterns that sounds follow when a poet has arranged them into metrical verse (201)

·         Rhythm = building, Metrical form = blueprint (201)

·         Meter = “measure”, Rhythm = “flow” (201)

·         Foot – a basic unit of meter; consists normally of one accented syllable plus one or two unaccented syllables; only compare syllables to other syllables in the foot to tell whether accented or not (201)

·         Line – other basic unit of measurement in metrical verse; may be end-stopped or run-on, and phrasing and punctuation will create caesuras (202)

·         Metrical lines are measures by naming the number of feet in them (202-203)

·         Stanza – a group of lines whose metrical pattern is repeated throughout the poem (203)

·         Metrical variations – call attention of some of the sounds because they depart from what is regular; Substitution – replacing the regular foot with another one; Extrametrical syllables – added syllables in a meter; Truncation – the omission of an unaccented syllables at either end of a line (203)

·         Scansion – the process of defining the metrical form of a poem (203)

·         (1) Identify prevailing foot; (2) name the number of feet in a line - if the length follows any pattern; (3) describe the stanzaic pattern - if there is one (203)

·         A noun usually receives more stress than an adjective that modifies it, a verb more than its adverbs, and an adjective more than its adverb (205)

·         Though normal reading of the sentences in a poem establishes its metrical pattern, the metrical pattern so established in turn influences in reading (206)

·         Scansion only classifies syllables as accented or not, only begins to reveal anything (208)

·         Divisions between feet have no meaning except to help identify the meter (209)

·         Perfect regularity of meter is not criterion of merit (209)

·         Expected rhythm – a silent drumbeat that makes us think that the pattern will be identical to the actual sound, mental idea of rhythm (210)

·         Heard rhythm – the actual rhythm of the words, sometimes the same as the expected rhythm but sometimes not (210)

·         Grammatical pause – pause signaled by punctuation (211)

·         Rhetorical pause – pause signaled by syntax and rhetoric (211)

·         Punctuated pauses often longer duration than those by syntax or rhetoric, pause for periods longer than pauses for commas (211)

·         Meter and rhythm serve meaning (211)

·         No “happy” meters or “melancholy” meters (211)

·         In most poetry, rhythm and meter work with the other elements of the poem to create the total effect (212)