Marking Meter (Step 4) | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

welcome everyone to the lecture on meter I'm going to be introducing you to the main forms of English meter so in this lecture I'm going to teach you not only how to identify the meter of a poem what we're also going to be looking at how that meter is influencing the sense of the poem how it's contributing to our experience of the poem and what it's doing in the language itself so on the website in the link below I do have some printouts and some materials that might help so feel free to go and download those if they're helpful and hopefully those will assist you with your study of English meter let's begin by looking at syllables a syllable is a unit of pronunciation usually it's a vowel sound so if we take the word away we know that this word has two syllables two units of pronunciation a way now rhythm is the rise and fall of stressed and unstressed syllables in a word so if you take the word away it has two syllables one of them is stressed and the other is unstressed listen to how the word sounds we say away with the stress on the second syllable and we do not stress the first syllable so rhythm is the rise and fall of those stresses and unstresses in in language all conversation has Rhythm and we all naturally use Rhythm when we speak now meter is the organization of Rhythm into patterns these patterns are called feet and there are five main kinds of feet that English uses and that you'll find in English poetry and here they are on the left we have the name of the foot and on the right we have an example of words that are organized according to those feet so remember our word away to syllable word we mark an unstressed syllable with a line like this and we'll mark a stressed syllable with a line like that if you take the word away we would say ah way with the stress on the second syllable now this pattern of foot is called an ion now let's go to the word breaking it's the opposite of an I am we have the first syllable stressed and the second unstressed breaking that is called a true key now let's take the word understand how ...