Rhythm
- Rhythm refers to any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound
- In speech it is the natural rise and fall of language
- In every multi-syllable word, certain syllables are accented or stressed
- Stressing certain parts of words to indicate a certain meaning is rhetorical stress
- Pauses:
- Also based on pauses: end-stopped line ends a line at normal speech pattern, run-on line moves on into the next line without pause
- Pauses in lines are caesuras
- Poetic line is the basic rhythmic unit of free verse
- Prose poems follow prose rhythms
Meter
- Meter is the identifying characteristic of rhythmic language that "we can tap our feet to"
- One basic unit of meter is the foot: normally one-accented syllable plus one or two unaccented syllables.
- The other basic measurements of verse are lines and stanzas
- Metrical Variations: call attention to sounds because they depart from norm
- Substitution - replace regular foot with another
- Extrametrical syllables added at the beginnings or endings of lines
- Truncation - omission of an unaccented syllable at either end of a line
- The process of identifying metrical form is scansion: identify prevailing foot, name number of feet in the line, describe stanzaic pattern
No comments:
Post a Comment