Poetry Tips: Scansion & Syllable Stress
There’s kinda a trick to scanning poetry. You normally just read it as you would a regular sentence, but it helps to figure out which syllables are stressed and which are not if you exaggerate the volume of sound. If it seems to be said quietly, say it even more quietly. If it seems to be stressed, say it even more loudly. This way, there’s a more obvious distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables.
However, sometimes things can be stressed in multiple ways. If this is the case, check if there is any repetition. If previously it was stressed like da-DUM-da-DUM, then it would likely be the way the reader would read it this time, especially if this stress pattern is consistent throughout the poem.
In some cases, you get phrases like “the troublesome person” and “the troublesome behavior.” In this case, “troublesome” can be read either as TROU-ble-some or TROU-ble-SOME. You figure out how it scans by looking at the words immediately around it. Because “person” is stressed like PER-son, and “behavior” is stressed like be-HAV-ior, it would basically be decided by the fact that three consecutive unstressed syllables normally don’t happen. So it wouldn’t be “the TROU-ble-some be-HAV-ior” because that leaves three syllables in a row unstressed. So “SOME” would have to be stressed. Logic.
If you get pretty good at it, you can do tricks like enhancing the meaning of the phrase by putting the stress on a word. For example, this is a stanza in one of my poems:
Before it fades, remember this:
When winter storms extinguished bliss,
the beast had kindled warmth in you.
And this forever will be true.
Your moment thwarts the parasite
called ice with its surpassing might.
The word “will” in line 4 can normally (in colloquial conversation) easily be either stressed or unstressed, depending on the situation. For instance, some phrases that have the word “will” could be, “YOU will LIVE” (“will” is unstressed) or “the WILL of PEOple” (“will” is stressed).
In the given stanza, the word “will” is stressed because of the no-three-consecutive-unstressed-syllables rule. And this stress brings more emphasis to what I was trying to say in that stanza: that regardless of other truths, the situation is engraved in history already.
The consistent stress pattern also confirms the word “will” is stressed in this case because the entire stanza (and poem, actually) reads smoothly with the pattern da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM.
Regarding one-syllable words: they can be generally stressed, unstressed, or either/both/in between. Depending on context, they would be stronger or weaker than the word(s) around them, or if they are very close in strength, to the point where it would make the reader pause to figure out how it should be pronounced, you might want to reword it so that there’s a clear difference between strong and weak.
And here’s another trick that applies to songs/lyrics: You can kind of change the stress from what it normally would be in conversation and have it still make sense in certain cases. The example I’d like to show you is Katy Perry’s song “Chained To The Rhythm” ft. Skip Marley.
In this song, she says the word rhythm like “rhyTHM” even though normally it’s “RHYthm.” This works because this song is saying that people are being caught up in the music of life, that they follow the pattern, and the pattern she established beforehand goes “da-DUM,” so when she sings the word “rhythm,” it follows suit.
