Metre (I): Alternating Metres
Daniel Sawyer · 2024
Abstract After some encouraging words on metre’s accessibility and pleasures, this chapter offers a basic guide to alternating (sometimes called ‘stress-syllabic’ or ‘accentual-syllabic’) metres. Natural stress and metrical beats are explained and distinguished. The chapter lays out some of the most common linguistic events that grease the wheels of metre: elision, syncope, and synizesis. The history of the four-beat line is traced from around 1200 on, in anonymous romances, John Barbour, and, later, in the work of John Gower and the early Chaucer, together with septenary couplets and their afterlife in, for example, Emily Dickinson and modern hymns. Then the account turns to the coming of the five-beat line in Chaucer. The chapter’s final part considers the different directions in which subsequent poets took the five-beat line, seeking to show the multiple possibilities of the five-beat pattern in the creative hands of poets such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve.