Poetry: Metre, Fixed Forms and Analysis
This domain tests scansion, fixed forms and the reasoning that connects a poem's shape to its meaning. Expect to name metre and rhyme scheme, identify devices, and explain what the form is doing rather than only labelling it.
Metre: count stresses, not syllables
- Foot types: iamb (unstressed-stressed), trochee (stressed-unstressed), anapaest, dactyl, spondee.
- Pentameter means five feet per line; blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter; free verse abandons fixed metre but usually keeps patterning of line, breath or repetition.
- A substitution, such as a trochee opening an iambic line, matters only when you say what it does to pace or emphasis.
Fixed forms
- Petrarchan sonnet: octave rhyming abbaabba plus a sestet; the volta usually falls at line 9.
- Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet (abab cdcd efef gg); the turn often comes at line 9 or is reserved for the couplet.
- Ballad: narrative quatrains, often alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyme abcb, with refrain.
- Elegy: lament, praise and consolation; the pastoral elegy uses shepherd conventions.
- Villanelle: nineteen lines, two rhymes, two refrains.
Devices that shape reading
Caesura is a pause inside the line; enjambment lets syntax run past the line end; end-stopping closes it. Keep the three distinct.
Worked example
'The wind was walking softly through the wheat.' Ten syllables and five stresses: the WIND | was WALK- | ing SOFT- | ly THROUGH | the WHEAT, so iambic pentameter. 'Walking' personifies the wind, and the repeated w-sounds are alliteration. Effect: the line feels unhurried and muted, matching the image. The reasoning moves from scansion to device to effect, not from feeling to feeling.
Traps that cost marks
- Counting syllables and calling the result metre.
- Assuming any fourteen-line poem is a sonnet.
- Confusing enjambment with caesura.
- Paraphrasing the poem instead of analysing it.