It’s hard to appreciate how much meter affects writing without trying it yourself. So for this post, get ready to roll up your sleeves and write some poetry!

In a reply on the Discussion Board, please write a four line stanza (quatrain) in one of the three meters listed below (all of which appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  Please label your poem with its meter. Finally, briefly describe your experience writing it. What surprised you most? What was the most challenging aspect? Does it change your view of Shakespeare’s writing. If it doesn’t, explain why, too.

It can be hard to write in meter without practice–that’s why we’re starting small. I offer a few of my own horrible examples to encourage you and to show that, truly, you shouldn’t be ashamed of anything!

Verse forms (choose one):

• Blank Verse – Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter
• Heroic Couplets – Rhymed lines of  iambic pentameter
• Trochaic tetrameter – (can be rhymed or unrhymed), lines of four trochaic feet (opposite of an iamb and fewer feet than pentameter).

Some tips:

• The slides from the in-class Prosody presentation are available on the Readings page (under Hebert).


• Come up with a simple scenario to narrate.
  
  
• You’ll find that you often need to add/subtract syllables to meet the requirements. Descriptors are a good way to do this. For example, “The chair sits in the hall” is five syllables long, so it needs five more syllables to be a complete iambic line. “The chair” already has iambic rhythm, but so does “The crimson chair…”. The line “The crimson chair sits in the hall” is iambic, but missing two syllables to be pentameter.  One solution is to come up with a two syllable descriptor for the hall. Maybe it’s stately? Or kingly? Or even run-down? The final iambic line might then read “The crimson chair sits in the run-down hall.”
  
  
• You may find that the rhythm makes you want to end lines grammatically as in this example:

“When eager students ask to leave for bath,
If while prof speaks, it does provoke his wrath!

But you don’t have to. Enjambment is word for when the grammatical lines of a poem do not align with the meter. So if the bath/wrath rhyme doesn’t give you aesthetic joy, you might change it to avoid the end-stopped lines all together:

“When eager students ask for leave to go
from class, it does provoke professor’s wrath!”

• Rhyme can be deeply pleasing. Take this ending couplet from a well-known woman writer well-known 18th-century female writer, written to critique another 18th-century male writer (who had said some nasty things about women writers). She tells her fellow writer just why she hopes he’ll continue to write his critiques:

“She answered short, ‘I’m glad you’ll write;
You’ll furnish paper when I shite.'”

It’s as shocking now as in the 1700’s to imply that someone’s writing is so bad it’s only worthy to be toilet paper (and an exciting example of high-literary culture engaging in rude name-calling), but that rhyme adds emphasis beyond the shock value. One only needs to see the joke removed to understand:

“Iambic meter is quite hard to write,
You’ll find, I wager, near all drafts are bad. “

It just doesn’t cut it. Rhymes have a certain power. That’s also why they can’t be over used (remember Bottom’s terrible poems!).

A final example

Professor, might it be too much to ask
if I can give my essay in next week?

(Blank Verse: couplet in unrhymed iambic pentameter)