Rhythm and Meter The Song of Hiawatha Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rhythm Rhythm is the pattern of stress in a line of verse. When you talk, you stress certain syllables and leave others unstressed. This is so natural that you hardly even notice it!

Try this! Stress the underlined word in each sentence and see how it changes. I didn’t say she stole my money.

How does that apply to this? Well, poetry works the same way. The syllables you stress affect the way the poem sounds. A poem can start sounding really weird if you emphasize the wrong syllables. That’s why there are specific patterns a poet can choose to make the poem sound more musical, natural, or pleasing to hear when read out loud.

Meter When you read poetry, you’ll begin to see patterns. A rhythmic pattern is called a meter. A meter is simply a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

What about feet? Feet are individual rhythmical units. They are the individual building blocks of meter!

Here are the most common: Anapest: duh-duh-DUH Example: “but of course!” Dactyl: DUH-duh-duh Example: “honestly” Iamb: duh-DUH Example: “collapse” Trochee: DUH-duh Example: “pizza” So if you were trying to explain the stress of a trochee to someone, you would say it is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. BAM! You’re so smart.

Think of the poet as a builder… In order to construct a line of poetry, he or she has to put together repetitions of one of those feet. So, he or she chooses one of the following: anapest, dactyl, iamb, or trochee. Then they have to decide how many times they want to repeat that foot in each line of their poem.

How many times the poet repeats his choice matters! Repeating it only once? That’s monometer. Repeating it two times? That’s dimeter. Not once, not twice, but three times? Trimeter. Four times? Well, that’s called tetrameter. Five times? That would make it pentameter. Repeating it six times? That’s hexameter.

Quiz time! If the poet chooses to use an iamb and he wants to repeat it five times per line, what would the meter be called?

And the answer is… IAMBIC PENTAMETER!

How many syllables are in one line of iambic pentameter? Quiz time! Part Two How many syllables are in one line of iambic pentameter?

TEN SYLLABLES! And the answer is… Just so you know, iambic pentameter is the most common meter used in poetry. Shakespeare used it a lot!

But we’re reading The Song of Hiawatha… The meter that Longfellow uses is called trochaic tetrameter. Remember that in trochaic meter, a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable. The term tetrameter means that this pattern (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) is repeated four times in each line of poetry.

Here are lines 136-146 from the poem: Hidden in the alder bushes, There he waited till the deer came, Till he saw two antlers lifted, Saw two eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to the windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. And his heart within him fluttered, Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch leaf palpitated, As the deer came down the pathway.