Artistic Tips: Meter and Other Basic Structures of Poetry

I picked this as my first poem to go through its PAST (Poetry, Art, Soul, and Therapy) because it is one of my poems that I spent the most time on the technical art aspect that also touches deeply to my soul and is a great segue into poetry as therapy. "Apathetic Artist" is written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, but not really. Allow me to break that down. A sonnet is simply a 14 lined poem. Traditionally there are two main styles of sonnets: Shakespearean or English and Petrarchan or Italian. The Shakespearean sonnet is the more famous one, at least in English and American poetry. The main difference between the two is the rhyme scheme or the pattern of which lines rhyme with each other. That's the easy part. Anyone can do that. I did that here. It's made up of three quatrains of an ABAB rhyme scheme and ends with a couplet or a pair of rhyming lines. The tricky part is that, like with most of Shakespeare's work, it's written in iambic pentameter. Not everyone can do that. I didn't do that. I just wrote it, and it more closely fit a dactyl rhythm so I just went with that as best as I could and even threw in some curve ball anapests because why not.


Now you can skip down to the glossary section at the end of this post to read the definition of all those poetic terms that I italicized for you, but I'll just give you a quick crash course on feet and meter that I learned in my poetry classes for my Literate Minor. Let's step back so we can zoom in.
A poem is made up of stanzas (quatrains, couplets, etc.) which are made up of the indicated number of lines. Each line is made up of a number of metrical units called feet. Iambs, trochee, dactyl, and anapest are the common ones in English. These feet are made up a certain pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (aka accented/unaccented or long/short). See the glossary below for examples. And these feet are not limited to within single words. In fact they usually depend on or determine what the next word is or could be. Now, how many times each foot is in each line determines the line meter. So a line with five iambs is an iambic pentameter, and since an iamb is made up of two syllables, an iambic pentameter should have ten total syllables. And since a dactyl has three syllables then a dactylic pentameter should have fifteen total syllables. Now, there are some exceptions which I brutally abuse in this poem based on the theme of apathy, but I hope you get the basic idea of how a traditional poem is constructed. But I'm not traditional in so many ways including my "Writing" style. But it's kind of hard to have a true "Red Rebel Heart" and break the rules if you don't know what the rules are. 

Here, I diagramed this poem according to the rules. But I'll explain which rules I actually attempted to use. It might seem complicated and confusing, but this is just the technical aspect to the art like the blueprints to a building except the poem can still stand by itself if you diverge from these blueprints.

1(A) I’m an artist with-out a muse (acephalous dactylic trimeter)

2(B) A poet not in pain (acephalous anapestic dimeter; intended to be broken dactyl meter)

3(A) Happ-i-ness makes me con-fused (almost an catalectic dactylic trimeter)

4(B) Sum-mer is really lame (catalectic dactylic dimeter)

5(C) Nei-ther here nor there (catalectic dactylic dimeter)

6(D) I sit in si-lence un-til a friend calls (almost a catalectic dactylic tetrameter)
7(C) A-path-y a-rrives and I don’t care (dactylic/amphibrachic/anapestic monometer or maybe tetrameter)

8(D) Then I wake up and no-tice that now it’s fall (acephalous dactylic tetrameter)

9(E) Sur-round-ed by stim-u-li I react with body and brain (acephalous and catalectic anapestic pentameter)

10(F) But my soul and heart still wan-der for mean-ing (catalectic dactylic tetrameter)

11(E) Chem-i-cal and e-mo-tion-al re-ac-tion reign (dactylic tetrameter) 

12(F) Win-ter comes craw-ling in, clott-ing the bleed-ing (catalectic dactylic tetrameter)

13(G) Puls-ing in pain from the in-cred-i-ble loss. A-pa-thet-ic. (almost catalectic dactylic pentameter; there's an extra syllable in the middle)

14(G) I don’t care. The med-i-ca-tion haze hides life’s aes-thet-ic. (anapest/catalectic dactylic tetrameter or maybe pentameter - I don't know if there's a term for mixing feet in a line.)

I intended to write this poem in dactylic rhythm in accordance to the theme of apathy.  The word “a-path-y” is a dactyl much like how in Greek and Latin the word for “dactyl” is a dactyl.  The phrase “I don’t care” in lines 7 and 14 is an anapest which is the reverse pattern of syllables of that in a dactyl.  Line 7 contains both “apathy” and “I don’t care” and is separated by an amphibrach making the line a palindrome of stressed and unstressed syllables.  Dactyls form a falling meter which makes a pun with my use of the seasons where the last dactyl in line 8 ends on the word “fall.”  The first two lines struggle to begin with a dactyl until the words “artist” and “poet” because of the failed invocation of a classical muse or forceful motivation.  This accounts for why most lines are one syllable off either at the beginning (acephalous) or the end (catalectic). (Hence the absurd amount of catalectic and acephalous lines. They're suppose to be the exception not the norm; only line 11 is a normal metrical line.) The third line starts to work but fails to finish, ending with “con-fused” describing a false sense of security found in happiness.  The fourth line ends with the word “lame” acting as a pun for the lack of a complete metrical foot. 

So that's the artistic technique I used in this poem. Below is a glossary of terms in this post. In the next post I'll talk about the piece of my soul in this piece.

If you're confused or have any questions, leave a comment or submit your questions to hashtaghashtagnofilter@gmail.com and I'll make a video attempting to answer them because you won't be the only confused.

Glossary: 
Rhyme scheme - the patterned of matching rhymed lines within a stanza or poem
Stanza - group of lines in a poem separated by space or theme
Quatrain - a four lined stanza
Couplet - a two lined stanza
Octave - an eight lined stanza
Sestet - a six lined stanza
Meter - the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables 
Foot - basic unit of measurement of meter (ex. iambs, dactyls, anapest, etc.) 
Iamb - one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (con-fused)
Trochee - one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (art-ist)
Dactyl - one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (po-e-try)
Anapest - two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (o-ver-come)

Amphibrach - one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables (re-gard-less)

Falling meter - stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables (ex. dactyls)
Rising meter - one or two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (ex. iambs, anapest)
Catalectic line - incomplete meter, missing a syllable at the end of a line
Acephalous/headless line - variation of cataleptic line, missing a syllable at the beginning of a line
Monometer - one foot per line
Dimeter - two feet per line
Trimeter - three feet per line
Tetrameter - four feet per line
Pentameter - five feet per line
Sonnet - A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme, traditionally about one idea with a volta, or turn
Shakespearean Sonnet -a sonnet composed of three quatrains and a concluding couplet with the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG (typically written in iambic pentameter)
Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet - (mostly used interchangeably) a sonnet composed of a octave and sestet with the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA and CDCDCD or CDEEDE or (Italian difference) CDDCEE 
Volta/turn - the change of shift of thought or direction in a poem, mostly found in sonnets between the octave and sestet or before or in the final couplet

For more complete and historic definitions with examples check out the Poetry Glossary from The Poetry Foundation in the links under Helpful Resources