Meter- a Review
When writing poetry, this is not my first time using meter. Alongside the creative writing course I have also been taking an intro to literature course, and we began working on our poetry section about the same time as we had started on it in this class. I have been so far only able to reliably notate iambic pentameter patterns, maybe because they are so common. I really struggle with notating stressed and unstressed syllables correctly, and I think I might be struggling with the idea that a stressed syllable can exist without a strong consonant sound.
In the practice regarding Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29" I could not understand that the stress in the first word "Haply" was on the "Ha-" sound. When breaking it up I kept trying to force it into an iamb, like "ha-PLY" that I might have forgotten that the stress is determined by how it is said naturally.
The same problem existed for the word "odour" in the example from Richard Wilbur's "The Pardon". I kept trying to say "o-DOur", and because of the hard consonant sound in the "D" I did not think about the fact that when naturally spoken the word "odour" is pronounced like "Oh-der". This means the stronger vowel sound is on the first "Oh" and not the second.
I am still learning how t keep accurate notation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and I think that the more I do the better the rhythm will be in my poems. I love poems that have a distinct sound, and I would like to emulate the ease with which many of Shakespeare's or Robert Frost's poems roll off the tongue.
Your intro to literature course seems like it would be fun to take! This is my first time learning about meter. I also have some trouble marking the stressed and unstressed syllables correctly. In Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29," I also tried to place the stressed syllable on the “-PLY” sound rather than the “Ha-” in the word “Haply.” However, I think the more I practice this, the better I can get.
ReplyDeleteI think determining the stress and unstressed Syllables is a lot easier than figuring out which meter it is. I mean, I definitely could be doing it wrong, but I use the clapping method that we learned when learning syllables in grade school. It kind of helps too break it up and figure out which syllable seems more important. I also think that it’s fairly easy to see which words are stressed and which words are not, At least for the poem that I reviewed it seemed like filler words, such as It, and, the, etc. were the unstressed because you kind of bypass it when you read it. I found that to be a decent rule, if you would bypass it When reading it then it’s unstressed and if your brain focuses in on it, it’s probably stressed.
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