What does feet mean in poetry

If you want to be the nerdiest nerd in the nerd herd , you should memorize it:. A combination of feet makes up a line of meter. So, for example, the most common meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter , which contains five that's where that "pent-" comes from iambs, all in a row.

Finding your feet can be as tricky as learning the Viennese waltz, but that's the main task of scansion , a fancy term for analyzing a poem's meter. Just remember the list above, and read aloud, read read aloud. Home Literature Glossary Foot. The combination of feet creates meter in poetry. Later, these meters are joined for the composition of a complete poem. Therefore, a foot is the formative unit of the meter. In poetry, there are various types of foot, each of which sounds differently.

Some of the basic types of foot are given below:. There are two types of meter, which are known as rising meter and falling meter. Each type of meter uses a different type of foot. As the rising meters go from unstressed syllables to stressed ones, they mainly use iamb and anapest feet.

On the contrary, the falling meters go from stressed syllables to unstressed ones, and mostly use trochee and dactyl feet. That strain a gain! It has been composed in iambic pentameter. Also note that, although there is an anapaest in the centre of this line, this is still a predominantly iambic line especially as it is within a predominantly iambic poem - varying the feet like this can keep a line from getting metrically dull.

The process of working out where the stresses fall is called scanning, or scansion. It's easiest to do it on poems where the rhythms are pronounced; on the other hand, it can be near-impossible, or simply unhelpful, to scan free verse. The poems suggested below have strongly accented feet, and the links to metre and form go into more detail on how poets use feet.

John Mole's 'Variation on an Old Rhyme' predominantly uses a three-syllable foot, with varying numbers of feet to each line. Username or Email Address. Remember Me.