When students swear at each other, brandish swords, or shoot pistols into the air, stop the argument and let them know theyвЂ™re both right. I recommend, after doing a few easy ones, putting an ambiguously metered line of poetry on the board and letting students argue over it. Determining the scansion of poems, however, is not an exact science. It may change your life!ДЄn excellent method for identifying meter in poetry is determining the scansion of poems. I have provided a near brilliant list of common feet and line lengths in the rhythm and meter in poetry study guide. It helps to know the different types of meter.

Any student who can do this should be given an вЂAвЂ™.

Students should be able to apply their knowledge of meter and use it with purpose in their own writing.

Students should be able to analyze how meter and rhythm affect a poemвЂ™s theme.

If that doesnвЂ™t suffice, just tell them it will be on the test. If they want to be masters of words, they should study how masters of words do this. Masters of words pay attention to the rhythm and flow of writing and speaking. It would be nice if they could do it without whining and asking that traditional teenager entitlement question, вЂњWhy do I gots to do this?вЂќ but they wonвЂ™t.

Students should figure out the scansion of poems and be proficient at identifying meter in poetry.

If poems were basketball teams, the fast break style of offense would be the meter and me dunking the ball in your face would be the rhythm (I can dream, canвЂ™t I?). Rhythm is the combination of adherence to and deviation from the standard meter. A foot is two or more syllables that make up the smallest unit of meter in a poem. Meter is the basic scheme of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Students should be able to define rhythm, meter, and foot.

To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan a poem.Have the following objectives in mind when teaching poetry meter: For a discussion of the others, I refer you to Fussell, page 18. Since the most commonly and most easily used is graphic, we will use it in our discussion. There are three kinds of scansion: the graphic, the musical and the acoustic. This technique is called scansion, and it is important because it puts visual markers onto an otherwise entirely heard phenomenon. To get a bearing on what these rhythms look and sound like, let's start with a method for writing out the rhythms of a poem. The former is the more common adherence to the latter often leads an English language poet toward self-conscious verse, as their predictable rhythms are counter to natural English speech (not that it is impossible to create great verse with this technique, but there is a tendency for it to end up so). For this reason most English language poets opt to look at their own meter as accentual or accentual-syllabic. There may be one, two, or three syllables between accents (or more, but this is a matter of debate). This means that its natural rhythms are not found naturally from syllable to syllable, but rather from one accent to the next. English, being of Germanic origin, is a predominantly accentual language. Of the ways of looking at meter, the most common in English are those that are accentual.

Quantitative: Measures the duration of words.Accentual-syllabic: A counting of syllables and accents.Accentual: A counting of accents only per line.

Syllabic: A general counting of syllables per line.Fussell defines meter as 'what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.' (4-5) To 'meter' something, then, is to 'measure' it (the word meter itself is derived from the Greek for measure), and there are four common ways to view meter. Although some of Fussell's ideas are a bit outdated (namely, he doesn't deal with the visual elements of a poem), his approach is complete, concise and useful. The bible of most poets today regarding meter and sound is a book by Paul Fussell called Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. The crafting of the aural aspects of a poem is what we may call 'ear training.' Thus, the crafting of the visual aspects is what we'd call 'eye training.' Meter

A brief exploration of the various aspects of sound that can be utilized when making a poem.

Scansion worksheet