Just wondering how scansion and meter in poetry work. I have attempted to find the answer myself, but no book or website I found provided a sufficient answer. How precisely is one to know whether a syllable is stressed or unstressed? The whole business seems rather imprecise to me, and it looks as though one poem could be scanned a variety of ways. Am I missing something here? Or is this something that one simply knows after practicing?
(I also wanted to ask why anyone should care, but I’ll leave it at that )
Scansion (as far as I recall from grad school when I actually took a course called “Meter and Scansion”) is the quantification of patterns in poetry, and meter is the essentially binary system of measuring the beats (“stressed” or “unstressed”) in poetry. There are numerous factors which make beats appear stressed or unstressed, and they are somewhat (but not very) fluid:
One standard is the relative emphasis a given syllable receives within the word itself: i.e., in the word “syllable,” you pretty much always need to stress the first syllable, and de-stress the next two.
Another standard would be the predominant pattern of the poem. IOW, if the entire poem is dactyllic, and in the middle you find three syllables without a strong stress on any of them (surrounded by dactyls on both sides) you’d mark those three as dactyllic too in keeping with the pattern of the poem.
The hardest part of scansion, IMO, is deciding which syllables are being stressed, which largely takes a good ear and a lot of practice. A good way to develop that ear would be to over-exaggerate the alternative pronunciations, and see which sounds stupidest. In the word “stupidest,” for example, does it sound worse if you pronounce it (SHOUTING where capitalized): “STOOOOOOP id est” or “stup ID est” or “stup id EST”? I think the last two sound more wrong than the first one, and that tells us that the first one is the stressed syllable.
Often poets cheat, forcing a syllable to be stressed (because of where it’s placed in a line)–actually, pop song writers cheat a lot, and poets more rarely, but it happens with decent poets once a while too.
I could recommend some good books on the subjet, if you’re interested. Poets like John Hollander and Lewis Turco have written good ones.
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