Scanning a Line: Metre, Stress, and Substitution
Mark the stresses in a line of verse, name the pattern it sets up, and find where the poet departs from it. The departures are usually where the reading starts.
What a learner can do afterwards
- Mark stressed and unstressed syllables across four lines and name the metre
- Find a substituted foot and explain what the interruption does to the sense
- Read a line aloud against its metre and say which wins, the pattern or the speech
1 · Read
To scan a line, read it aloud slowly and mark each syllable. Put a slash (/) over a syllable your voice leans on, a stressed one, and a small u over each softer, unstressed one. Copy the poem with space between the lines so the marks fit above the words. Stress is a sound, so trust what you hear, not how the word looks.
A foot is one unit of the beat. An iamb is da-DUM, as in to-DAY. A trochee is DUM-da, as in GAR-den. A spondee is DUM-DUM, an anapest is da-da-DUM, and a dactyl is DUM-da-da. Count the feet to name the line length: four feet make tetrameter and five make pentameter. A line of five iambs is iambic pentameter.
A substitution is one foot that breaks the ruling pattern, such as a trochee in iambic verse. It often puts a stress where the ear expected a soft syllable, so the word there gains weight or the pace shifts. Circle it and ask what it does to the sense. Scan at least four lines before you name the metre. If one line inside a steady pattern runs differently, read its odd feet as substitutions within the metre, not as a new metre.
Read the line twice: once with the metre's beat, and once as you would say it. Mark stresses where the voice puts them, because stress is something heard. Where speech stresses a syllable the pattern marks soft, report the clash. Then say which wins in that line: does its effect come from the steady beat, or from speech breaking against it?
Mark first, label second. Naming the metre is only useful when you then say what its breaks do.
Mark the stresses, name the pattern, and start reading where the pattern breaks.
Rewritten readings were written for this dataset. The video is a Khan Academy lesson embedded from YouTube. Publisher license terms are not verified.
2 · Watch
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Where this leads
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.