Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Sound and Sense, Chapter 12 notes: Rhyme and Meter


Chapter 12 – Rhyme and Meter
Rhyme and Meter:
·         Rhythm: Any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound.
·         Accented or Stressed: A word or syllable that receives more pronunciation in relation to its surrounding neighbors.
o   toDAY; toMORrow; interVENE…etc.
·         Rhetorical Stresses: certain methods of pronouncing a word in order to display a certain meaning or intention.
·         There are multiple methods of displaying meaning through pauses as well:
o   End stopped line: end of the line corresponds with a natural pause.
o   Run-on line: the flow of the line moves on with no pause in between.
o   Caesuras: grammatical or rhetorical pauses that occur in the middle of the line.
§  Grammatical pause: A pause introduced by punctuation or anything grammatical.
§  Rhetorical pause: usually through syntax, a natural pause in the poem.
·         Free verse: Nonmetrical poetry where the basic unit is the line and where pauses and breaks occur out of the necessity of the poem instead of its style.
o   Predominating style of poetry among contemporary poets.
o   Opposite of metrical verse, which follows a meter and the pauses and breaks originate from the style.
·         Both free verse and metrical verse are distinguished by its meter and foot:
o   Meter: the identifying aspect of rhythmic language, the beat of a poem or song.
o   Foot: measures the metrical verse, and usually consists of one accented syllable and 1-2 accented syllables.
§  Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic, Dactylic, and Spondaic (adjectival examples of foot).
·         Stanza: Third unit of measurement; metrical pattern repeated throughout the entire poem.
·         Variations of the meter and foot:
o   Metrical variations: variations that deal directly with the departure of certain metrical patterns.
§  Substitution: replacing one foot with another.
§  Extrametrical syllables: added to the beginning or end of a line.
§  Truncation: omitting an accented syllable from the beginning or end of a line.
o   Expected rhythm: the expected rhythm the audience may perceive due to the meter and beat.
o   Heard rhythm: the true rhyme of the poem when read naturally. Usually a derivative of the expected rhythm.

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