Whether a syllable uses a light stress or heavy stress?

Question

I am trying to understand when one should use a light stress or heavy stress on a syllable. Is it that certain vowels such as A, E, and I are light stresses and O and U are heavy stresses? Or is it certain combinations? I have a poetry book that explains the terms, such as a heavy stress, followed by two light stresses, is a trochee or dactyl or whatever. I jut don't understand how to determine whether the word is light or heavy stress, especially since the word "Is" is used as either heavy or light depending on its placing in the sentence. Please Help!

Answer 1

The stress comes down to how it sounds naturally, and it's the poet's job to engineer how the poem will be read. The most famous meter is iambic pentameter (unstressed-stressed), the meter which Shakespeare employed most famously. Look below:

From Sonnet 130:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her b*****s are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."

If you read it aloud, you'll notice that you naturally put the stress on "mist-", "eyes", "noth-", "like", "sun". Additionally, when you have words like "sun", they can pretty much ONLY be stressed; they're one-syllable words, after all. What vowels are used have nothing to do with the stress pattern, because after all vowels sound differently in any given word.

Metrical patterns are divided into metrical units called feet, like the iamb (IAMBic pentameter = 5 iambic "feet") and so on.

Some common metrical feet:

Iamb - unstressed-stressed, called a "rising meter" and sounds like this: "da DUM."

Trochee - stressed-unstressed, called a "falling meter" and sounds like this: "DUM-dum"

Dactyl - stressed-unstressed-unstressed, another "falling meter" and sounds sort of line a pencil falling on a tabletop--a big tap and then a bunch of bounces, like "DUM-da-dum". An example of a word that sounds like this is the modifier-form of dactyl, 'dactylic'. If you read it aloud, you put the stress on "dact-" and then kind of stumble over '-ylic.'

Anapest - unstressed-unstressed-stressed, a "rising meter" and sounds kind of like what you imagine a horse galloping to sound like. "da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM". An example of an anapestic word is, in fact, the word "anapest". Notice that you put the stress on "-pest", not "a-" or "-na-".

In order to determine the pattern (called "scansion") the best way is to read it aloud and mark which sounds natural. The easiest way is to first mark what you KNOW to be stressed, for example:

"That's my LAST DUCHess PAINT-ed on the WALL,"

(1st line of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess")

The capitalized parts are the ones that are obviously stressed.But remember that it's not always going to be hard-and-fast--scansion is, to an extent, subjective even in works that have a prevailing meter of iambic pentameter like this one. That is, you could read it as "THAT'S my last duchess.." or you could say "That IS my last duchess.." and the implication changes slightly.

In the end, it's subjective. Just go with what sounds natural and I'm sure you'll do just fine. Hope this helps--sorry to write an essay.