![feet in a meter feet in a meter](https://marthebijman.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/metre-and-feet.png)
It does provide us with an awesome opportunity to practice what we've learned about meter in the first stanza, so take a look at the first few lines of the second stanza and see how you might scan them. The second stanza of the poem makes use of the different types of feet discussed in the first stanza, but its lines that are much longer, and the meter takes a backseat to the meaning of the lines. Now let's take a closer look at the second stanza, which is much more irregular than the first. Phew! That's a lot of different kinds of feet. This plodding line is an example of amphimacic tetrameter. If an amphibrach is unstressed-stressed-unstressed, it only makes sense that its opposite, the amphimacer, is stressed-unstressed-stressed. Line 9: First and last be-ing long, mid -dle short, Am-phi- ma-cer. And you can probably guess that because this foot repeats four times in this line, it's a line of amphibrachic tetrameter. Line 8: Am- phi-bra-chys hastes with a state-ly stride.Īt this point, you can probably figure out on your own that an amphibrach is a foot that contains an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed one, followed by yet another unstressed one. So line 6, then, is in anapestic tetrameter. And this foot, known as an anapest, repeats – no surprise here – four times. In this line, we've got two unstressed syllables, followed by a stressed one. Now we're really getting into the good stuff. Line 6: With a leap and a bound the swift An -a-pests throng. Once you learn iambic meter, you'll start to see it just about everywhere, from Shakespeare's sonnets to Led Zeppelin's " Kashmir." There you have it folks: iambic tetrameter. Here we've got an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed one, and this pattern recurs four times.
![feet in a meter feet in a meter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eMc57AObDK8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Line 5: I- am -bics march from short to long And there are four of them so this line is – you guessed it – dactylic tetrameter. This type of foot contains three syllables: stressed, unstressed, unstressed. Line 4: E-ver to come up with da-ctyl's tri- syll-a-bleĪh the dactyl! So fun to say. Can you tell what kind of foot it is? Here's a hint: we've seen it already in the poem.
![feet in a meter feet in a meter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hnJEkSx4hus/hqdefault.jpg)
![feet in a meter feet in a meter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NI7WMK_LACc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Just to throw us for a loop, Coleridge tosses in an extra foot at the end of the line that doesn't match the others. So line 3 is an example of spondaic tetrameter. If we break this up into groups of two, then we've got four spondees, which are feet that contain two stressed syllables. Here, we've got eight stressed syllables all in a row. Line 3: Slow spon- dee stalks strong foot yet ill ab-le That's just a fancy way of saying the line consists of four trochees, all in a row. In this case, we have four total stressed syllables, which makes this trochaic tetrameter. A trochee is a type of foot that contains a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. We're talking about trochees here, and we're using trochees. Line 1: Tro-chee trips from long to short. Because the poem is so complex, we'll break the first stanza down for you, line-by-line, so you can really see the meter at work. When it comes to "Metrical Feet," it can be a little tough to keep track of all the meters flying at us in every line. So, for example, in iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English, each line has five iambs. Usually when we talk about meter, we describe the type of foot (iambic, trochaic, etc.) and then describe the number of them in each line (tetrameter – 4, pentameter – 5, hexameter – 6, etc.). So let's take a step back for a mini-lesson on meter, just so we can get our bearings, before we jump into talking about this poem in particular. It's a veritable smorgasbord of different types of meter. Many Different Types Rhyming Couplets Measure your MetersĬoleridge's poem takes poetic meter as its subject, so it's a safe bet that it's gonna have some meter of its own.