2. If you disregard syllable count and are only concerned with metric feet, you will have the flexibility to vary the syllable count of certain words to meet the requirements of the meter.
There are two terms used for this: elision and expansion.
Elision refers to the omission of a sound when speaking to make it flow more smoothly. To elide a syllable means to leave it out completely or change the pronunciation of the surrounding syllables to effectively omit it.
A common technique that poets sometimes use to indicate elision in the cases where you omit the syllable entirely is to use an apostrophe for the omitted syllable. For example: o’er, and whene’er. You don’t always have to use an apostrophe, though, because readers will just naturally elide the syllable when they read it. Words like temperate (temp-rate), and several (sev-ral) don’t really need the apostrophe. In cases where you change the pronunciation of the surrounding syllables, it’s not necessary to use an apostrophe either. For example: radiance (rad-yintz), curious (cur-yus), and natural (natch-ral), because the reader will just know to do it to keep the meter consistent.
Do you have to elide these words? Absolutely not. It’s perfectly valid to use them either way—with the lesser or greater number of syllables. It just depends on what you need in the meter.
Expansion refers to stretching out the pronunciation of a word by adding additional syllables. My own name Wile is a good example. I can expand it to two syllables by pronouncing it Wi-ul. Other examples are flour (flow-er), fire (fi-er), and idea (i-de-uh). Again, you can use these words either way—with the greater or lesser number of syllables.
3. The nature of certain meters allows varying the number of syllables with no effect on the number of metric feet.
Your ear (actually your brain) likes to hear things in even numbers, and when a line has an odd number of metric feet, like trimeter, pentameter, and heptameter, your ear wants to put a pause foot (an additional silent metric foot) at the end of the line.
Try reading the following stanza straight through with no pause at the end of each line, and it just sounds rushed. When you read it, tap your foot. With iambic meter, you begin with an upbeat followed by the downbeat (dit-DA), so your foot should be on the floor when you start and come up on the word “Shall.”
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
The winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
The last syllable of each line is a downbeat. Since the next line begins with an upbeat, you’ve got that constant dit-DA pattern of the iambs going, but doesn’t it sound awfully rushed?
Try putting in an extra, silent pause foot (dit-DA) at the end of each line, and see how much better it sounds. (Just put in one extra tap of your foot at the end of each line before starting to read the next line.) This does not change the meter; you still have five metric feet per line because you don’t count that pause foot as a metric foot. It just sounds more relaxed when you turn it into an even number of feet mentally.
Okay, Wile, what does this have to do with the syllable count? This natural trait of wanting to hear things in even numbers of feet allows you to have feminine endings—the term for an additional unaccented syllable at the end of a line—without disturbing the meter.
The feminine ending merely shortens the silent pause foot from a full beat to a half-beat. In the dit-DA pause foot, the dit portion is taken up by the feminine ending, and you are left with a silent DA to take up the other half of the extra foot.
Here’s an example of iambic pentameter with feminine endings on lines one and three. Note how I’ve also added the additional pause foot:
Stars twinkle forth, their distant light now glowing, (DA)
While shadows lengthen in the fading day. (dit-DA)
The moon ascends, its silver radiance growing, (DA)
Illuminating paths in soft array (dit-DA)
Excluding the silent pause feet, which you don’t count, each of the four lines in the above has five metric feet, but the syllable counts for each of the four lines are 11, 10, 12, and 10.
Line 3, with 12 syllables, still only has five metric feet. Not only is there a feminine ending, but notice how we elide the three-syllable word “radiance” to two syllables, pronounced as “rad-yintz.”
Can even-numbered meters like tetrameter also employ feminine endings? Yes, but with a slight adjustment to the line following the feminine ending line. For example:
It happened several months ago,
The night was just like any other.
Then my daughter made me know
That I was blessed to be her mother.
Lines two and four have a feminine ending in this iambic tetrameter stanza. But since line two ends on an upbeat, notice how line three starts with a downbeat, turning this line into trochaic. But the overall dit-DA pattern is preserved, and the lines flow beautifully. That changes the syllable count of the lines, but not the metric feet. You would expect the syllable count of these four iambic tetrameter lines to be 8, 8, 8, 8, but in reality, they are 9, 9, 7, 9.
4. If you’re not concerned about syllable count, you can add an additional syllable virtually anywhere in a line (beginning, middle, or ending) without disrupting the meter.
We’ve already seen that adding an unstressed syllable to the end of a line (feminine ending) doesn’t change the metric foot count. In the same way, the addition of an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line will change the number of syllables but not the metric foot count. It serves as a grace note, so to speak, and, as in music, a grace note does not disturb the beat because it is played quickly. For example:
The meadow is swaying in time with the breeze,
And blossoms are nodding their colorful heads,
As butterflies dance over flowers and trees,
In the garden, the roses unfurl from their beds.
This stanza is written in amphibrach meter (dit-DA-dit) with four metric feet per line. But notice how line 4 has an extra unstressed syllable at the beginning which can be said quickly and doesn’t affect the beat. There’s actually a term for adding an extra unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line: anacrusis.
You can even add an extra syllable to the middle of a line and still maintain the meter without worry. Here’s an example:
The mice will play in the ship at bay
The nine syllables in this iambic tetrameter line work just fine because “in the” can be said quickly and doesn’t throw off the entire meter of the line. As long as they are both unstressed, short syllables without too many phonemes (discussed shortly), this works fine. [Note: If someone questions you about this and you want to impress them with your poetic knowledge, just tell them, for variety, you decided to replace one of the iambs with an anapest on the line. It was a feature, not a bug.]
Are there cases where it doesn’t work to insert an extra syllable? In the last example, you can say “in the” quite quickly, so it doesn’t throw off the meter. But there are many word combinations or syllable combinations that can’t be said quickly and therefore make poor candidates as extra syllables. Here’s an exaggerated example similar to the above:
The mice will play midst each ship at bay
In this case, “midst each” simply has too many phonemes (the different sounds that comprise a word) to be able to be said quickly like “in the.” So, if you’re thinking about squeezing in an extra syllable here and there, choose short ones that roll off the tongue quickly.
5. It is quite common and acceptable to remove a syllable from either the beginning or the ending of a line and still maintain the same metric foot count.
Here’s an example of the first stanza of a poem I wrote called “Pluto” in amphibrachic tetrameter. It has the form:
(dit-DA-dit) (dit-DA-dit) (dit-DA-dit) (dit-DA-dit) normally 12 syllables
Pluto the space rock of dubious fame
was once called a planet then stripped of the name,
but not for the reason you’d think it would be.
He well-earned his fate, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
In the first line, I left off the leading unstressed syllable and just started right in with a stressed syllable. The rest of the lines all had that unstressed syllable in front. Also notice how I left off the final unstressed syllable in each line. This is very common in this particular meter. Hence my syllable counts are 10, 11, 11, 11 instead of 12, 12, 12, 12, yet all four lines maintain a perfect meter.
Let’s conclude with one final stanza from “Pluto” which illustrates several of the points made in this essay:
Earthlings adored him. They couldn’t deny he
made temperatures everywhere more like Hawaii.
Despite his intention to ruin the Earth,
his action instead proved to be of great worth.
I’ve dropped the leading unstressed syllable from the first line. I’ve dropped the ending unstressed syllable from the third and fourth lines. I’ve also elided “temperatures” to sound like three syllables instead of four (temp-ra-tures), and elided “everywhere” to sound like three syllables instead of four (ev-ry-where). The strict syllable counts of the four lines are 11, 14, 11, 11 instead of the standard 12, 12, 12, 12 you might expect, yet all four lines still have four metric feet and stay perfectly in meter.
I hope you can see that syllable count can really only serve as a rough guide of how long a line should be, and can be very limiting on your ability to write lines in perfect meter with varying numbers of syllables. Also, it does absolutely nothing to enforce good meter, which comes from maintaining the proper number of metric feet per line and making sure the stressed syllables in the words align with the stressed syllables of the chosen meter.
