In poetry how do I find the metric feet of each sentence in a poem? See detail below?

Question

How do I know what part of a sentence in a poem is unstressed or stress?

Answer 1

How is the word accented,and if unaccented, how many of these beats fall before you do come to an accent? āă=one foot, a spondee. ăā=one foot, an iamb, five of these feet in a line make up iambic pentameter... I hope this simple explanation helps you to understand.

Answer 2

This is too complicated for me to explain. I recommend googling "poetry scansion" (scansion is the measuring of verse into poetic feet). Check out sites that end with edu (education), there are many and they are all very helpful and easy to use. It's what I do often, though I don't have any site addresses memorized. I just keep checking out new ones.

When I'm scanning and have trouble with what is, and what is not stressed I look the word up in the dictionary.

Good luck. I hope this helps.

Answer 3

There are many patterns of meter. Iambic meter is a soft (short) sound (syllable) followed by a long one: "a man." The meter is measured in something called metric feet, annotated (marked) thusly: _ /

When you string the feet together, it looks like this:

_ / _ / _ / _ /

When you string the sounds together, it sounds like this:

"a man in sand is bound to frown"

This example I've show is a meter called "Iambic Tetrameter" because it is four feet with the soft-hard stresses (accents).

Iambic Pentameter is five feet long:

"is there a man who's bound up by the sand"