Foot (poetry)



A Foot (plural feet) is the unit of meter in verse in most Western traditions of poetry (including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry). The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few variations, by the sound pattern the foot represents. The English word "foot" is a translation of the Latin term pes, plural pedes; the equivalent term in Greek, sometimes used in English as well, is metron, plural metra, which means "measure." The foot might be compared to a measure in musical notation. The foot is a purely metrical unit; there is no inherent relation to a word or phrase as a unit of meaning or syntax, though the interplay among these is an aspect of the individual poet's skill and artistry.

The poetic feet in English
In poetry written in the English language, a foot is a combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables. The following are the four most common metrical feet in English poetry:
 * 1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, a pattern which comes closest to approximating the natural rhythm of speech. Note line 23 from Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples":
 * And WALKED / with IN/ward GLOR/y CROWNED.


 * 1) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable, as in the first line of Blake's "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence:
 * PIPing / DOWN the / VALleys / WILD


 * 1) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in the opening to Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib":
 * The AssYR/ian came DOWN / like the WOLF / in the FOLD


 * 1) Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in Thomas Hardy's "The Voice":
 * WOman much / MISSED how you / CALL to me / CALL to me

Meter also refers to the number of feet in a line: Any number above six (hexameter) is heard as a combination of smaller parts; for example, what we might call heptameter (seven feet in a line) is indistinguishable (aurally) from successive lines of tetrameter and trimeter (4-3).
 * Monometer - one
 * Dimeter - two
 * Trimeter - three
 * Tetrameter - four
 * Pentameter - five
 * Hexameter - six
 * Heptameter - seven

The poetic feet in classical meter
Below are listed the names given to the poetic feet by classical metrics. The feet are classified first by the number of syllables in the foot (disyllables have two, trisyllables three, and tetrasyllables four) and secondarily by the pattern of vowel lengths (in classical languages) or syllable stresses (in English poetry) which they comprise. The following lists describe the feet in terms of vowel length (as in classical languages). Translated into syllable stresses (as in English poetry), 'long' becomes 'stressed' ('accented'), and 'short' becomes 'unstressed' ('unaccented'). For example, an iamb, which is short-long in classical meter, becomes unstressed-stressed, as in the English word "betray."

Disyllables
¯ = long syllable, ˘ = short syllable (macron and breve notation)