 When you go to the eye doctor to check your vision, they sit you down in front of what's called the faux raptor, and they flip through a series of lenses to determine the best one for your eyes. Is this better? Or is this better? When you get the wrong lens combination, the world blurs, and you have trouble reading letters. When you get the right combination, those letters sharpen, and you can read. Reading a poem's meter aloud is a similar way to test your ears. Consider this line of poetry, the opening to William Shakespeare's famous Sonnet No. 18. Which of the following readings sounds better? This one? Shall I compare thee to a somersday? Or this one? Shall I compare thee to a somersday? First one, right? What about this opening line to Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven? This one? Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary. Or this one? Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary. The first one again, right? In both cases, the reason the first example works is because my pronunciation matches the poetic meter of the words in each line. The other readings I've read in the opposite meter, and they sound funny and unnatural. So how do we describe this difference? The most common way to do so in English is to follow the stresses in each phrase of the line. As you probably know, words in the English language are composed of a set of stressed and unstressed syllables. In poetry, these syllables are often arranged to create repeating, sonic units, what literary critics call feet, that compose the meter of a given poem. Shakespeare's Sonnet, Shall I Compare thee to a Somersday, has the following metrical pattern. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. The repeating unit here is one unstressed syllable and one stressed syllable. This type of metrical foot is called an ayam, and there are five of them here. Since penta is the prefix for five, we call this metrical form ayambic pentameter, the most common meter in English poetry. In Poe's line, Once Upon a Midnight Dreary, While I Pondered Weak and Weary, you'll notice the opposite pattern. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. The repeating unit in this pattern is one stressed and one unstressed syllable. This metrical foot is called a troche, and there are eight of them in this line. Since octo, or octah, are the prefixes for eight, we call Poe's metrical form trochaic octameter. Ayams and trochees are two of the most common types of metrical feet, so you'll definitely want to look for them when reading poetry. But poems can also use metrical units of three syllables. Here are the following opening lines from Clement Clark Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas. It was the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Here, the meter pattern is unstressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, unstressed, stressed. It was the night before Christmas. This unit is called an anapest, and there are four of them in each line here. The prefix for four is tetra, so the meter is anapestic tetrameter. The final common metrical foot is the opposite of an anapest, a dactyl, which is a three syllable unit that starts with a stress and ends with two unstressed syllables. The Greek poet Homer adopts this form in his great epic poems The Iliad and the Odyssey, and poems in English that adopt the dactylic form often allude to this legacy. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses dactylic hexameter in his epic poem Evangeline, which begins, this is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. Dactyls may seem rare, but rap artists have recently adopted this triplet form to great effect. Consider the following lyrics from Migos' song Versace. Drowning in compliments pool in the back air that look like metropolis. I think I'm selling a million first week man, I guess I'm an optimist. Born in Toronto, but sometimes I feel like Atlanta adopted us. While the subjects are obviously very different, the meter here is identical to Longfellow's and by extension Homer's epic poetry. Because there are six dactyls in each line, the meter of this song is also dactylic hexameter. I am trochey, anapest, dactyl. If you can recognize these four kinds of metrical feet, you'll be well in your way to reading poetry in a clearer and more natural sounding way. The next step of course is to determine why that matters, how meter can be used not only to read a poem or song, but also to interpret it. While there are many ways to answer this question, let me give you one simple suggestion that I have found useful in my teaching. Once you've identified the dominant metrical form in a given poem, look for moments where the meter breaks from that form. These moments are often good places to build out an interpretation, because when we spot them we can ask why the meter breaks at that place and what that sonic dissonance might be conveying. Consider the start of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, which tells the story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. While the poem is written in iambic pentameter, see if you can spot the moment where that meter breaks in these opening lines. Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe. If you can spot the metrical pattern, you can now ask why Milton might have chosen to break the meter at that specific moment. If you have any ideas, I hope you'll share them with me in the comments section below. In the meantime, good luck, stay healthy, and happy reading.