What is the predominant meter of the line Hickory Dickory Dock? The mark for a stressed syllable is a slash (“/”) and the mark for an unstressed syllable is a dash (“-”). The most common method of scanning a poem is to place marks above the syllables to indicate whether they are stressed or unstressed. The second stanza of Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged Moments” is a sexain. A sestet refers only to the final portion of a sonnet, otherwise the six-line stanza is known as a sexain. What does Sestet mean in poetry?Ī six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet.
An example of a spondaic word is “hog-wild.” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” is heavily spondaic: With swift, slow sweet, sour adazzle, dim He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
A simple scan of a poem might simply bold or underline the stressed syllables. What can scansion tell you about a line of poetry?Ī graphic scansion visually marks the syllabic rhythm and feet in a line of poetry. This technique is called scansion, and it is important because it puts visual markers onto an otherwise entirely heard phenomenon. To get a bearing on what these rhythms look and sound like, let’s start with a method for writing out the rhythms of a poem.
How do we do scansion and what is the importance of doing it?.