[NOISE] And here we are! Welcome back! Today we're going to be talking about rhythm. Rhythm is a sonic pattern, determined in English at least, by the frequency of stressed and unstressed syllables. Emphasis or accent. English has built in stresses and unstresses. You can hear them in most speech. But, to establish consistent rhythm requires some kind of regularity, some kind of pattern. Now, some of these rhythms are preexisting, they're established. And to make that more clear, let's think about music. There are rhythms in music that are traditional so that we can recognize them the moment we hear them. Let's take for example the waltz. [SOUND] Get your gowns y'all... and your tails. The next one that we can possibly think of would be say dance hall. Which seems almost similar to to the waltz, but has a slightly different pattern. [NOISE] So let's think of some old school hiphop maybe. Maybe even one that might be familiar to some people out there. [SOUND] All right? Now, let's get things a little more complicated. Let's take it to some drum and bass. [SOUND] Or more contemporary: Let's do snap music. [SOUND] So you see, these different rhythms give us a sense of familiarity. Now, in English poetry, traditionally, perhaps the most familiar meter is the iamb. Now the iamb is [SOUND] an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. So for example, [SOUND]. Now this works great in English because we use articles like 'the' and 'a'. And so when you have an article followed by a noun, it usually works iambically: The cat. The dog. A house. A car. All right? Now another meter that's fairly familiar but is a kind of reversal of the iamb - it's not a kind of a reversal, it's absolutely a reversal of the iamb - is the trochee. The trochee [SOUND] is a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. So It goes like this. [SOUND] And if you think of moments in our literature like, "Double, double, toil and trouble." Or words like "mumbo jumbo". These words are trochaic. If we want to go further into the realms of meter, we can go even more complex. We can go with the anapest. Now the anapest is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. So [SOUND]. The dactyl is one stressed followed two unstressed. So [SOUND]. Sounds a bit like that waltz, doesn't it? All right? The spondee is two stressed. I don't mean [SOUND] Not T-O-O stressed but T-W-O stressed [SOUND] [SOUND] All right? And the pyrrhic, which we don't get nearly as often, is two unstressed, so it's seriously chillaxing. [SOUND] Now, how do you find out what you're working with? Well, to identify a meter you use something called scansion. [SOUND] A scansion is the examination of a line of poetry to figure out what its meter is. Now, you've already heard the metrical terms. Right? But let's add something else that's essential to scansion. And this is a term called 'the foot'. The foot is an essential part of Western prosity and most typically, to put it very simply, a foot is a unit of two syllables. Many Greek meters are associated with a set number of feet. And that's when you get the other half of those oftentimes poetically rich-sounding, but seemingly complicated terms like 'iambic pentameter'. The first part, iambic, says where the stress falls. The second part tells you how many feet are in the line. So, pentameter means five feet, which means five times two syllables, ten syllables. Trimeter, means three feet [NOISE] so three feet, two syllables each. [SOUND] Six syllables, you get the idea. We can also go into accentual verse rhythms. And these use a consistent number of accented syllables per line, but disregard the total number of syllables and their sequences. This is more typical of Old English, not the malt liquor, but the language. So, if you wanted to go some place that's a little bit less about the Greek ways of figuring out rhythm, you can begin to use accentual meter. Remember when we talked about Donald Hall. All right, well when we talked about Donald Hall, we where speaking about milktongue, and twinbird. The milktongue meaning the pleasure of word sounds in your mouth. Twinbird meaning the recognition of patterns. Well he had a term for rhythm as well. And he called it goat foot. But that's a different kind of foot altogether.
