But sometimes you’ll want to concentrate visually on just one of them, so at the bottom of the Poem workbox are checkboxes that permit you to toggle your stress or foot marks on and off.

Stress and foot patterns are interdependent. Once you’ve gotten the green light here, click on the last icon (triangle) to open a drop-down menu from which to identify the meter of the scanned line: e.g., iambic tetrameter. (Feel free, at any point in this overview or anywhere else on the site, to look up unfamiliar terms by clicking the Glossary tab above.) These are called feet, as you’ll be reminded when you cursor to the right and click on the middle icon (footprints) to see how you did with this part of the exercise. By clicking within the text you can divide the emerging pattern of stresses and slacks into the constituent units that prevail in English metrics: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, pyrrhic. Moving the cursor directly across the verse line highlights the printed syllables one by one. If at first you don’t succeed, this is the place to try, try again. A green, red, or yellow light will let you know you’ve scanned the line correctly, incorrectly, or somehow problematically. Once you’ve marked each syllable to reflect your reading of the line - and we’ll get soon to some guidelines for doing that - cursor over to the right of the box and click the first icon (arrows). Click once over a syllable to mark it as stressed, twice as unstressed (slack) a third click clears the air for a fresh start. As you move the cursor just above a line of verse, the space above each syllable glows. In the box appears whatever text you select from the List of Poems to its right. The black workbox is the stage or gym where you interact with poetry, and where the real learning of trial-and-error takes place. Besides the general Help overview you’re now reading, you will find back on our homepage a Poem workbox, a List of Poems, and a Glossary. The 4B4V tutorial consists of several elements. First a few words of orientation to the site.

We’ll turn in a moment to how this metrical radiology can illuminate the life in poems. This inner structure arises from the interplay of meter (the bones of a poem) with rhythm (its flesh) of abstracted, regular pattern with the pulse of felt, voiced meaning. By choosing among texts that range metrically from the straightforward to the intricate, you can sharpen your skill at taking an x-ray of the architecture of verse. That’s the kind of verse that remained standard in English during the half millennium from Chaucer’s age until the time of Hardy, Yeats, and Frost about a century ago - and it remains alive and well with some of the best poets active today. Here you can get practice and instant feedback in one important way of analyzing, and developing an ear and a feel for, accentual-syllabic verse. What’s For Better for Verse for? It’s an interactive on-line tutorial that can train you to scan traditionally metered English poetry.

Scansion exercises