What is the METER of this poem?

Question

I know that the rhyme scheme is AABB, but what is the METER (is it iambic/ anapest/ dactyl/ etc..)? And the no. of feet?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_analysis#Meter_and_rhyme

Does the meter have to be the same in each line? Sometimes I find a certain pattern in one line, but am not sure it is similarly reflected in other lines.

Piano -- by D.H. Lawrence:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems...
Here is the poem:

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Answer 1

This is a very tricky poem to analyze. The metre LOOKS messed up but it is not. Lawrence is counting only stressed syllables. There are exactly 5 in each line. Therefore, it is definitely a pentametre. I would say it is a trochaic metre as it begins with the second syllable being stressed and the syllables between stressed syllables are counted as only one, though they are, in fact, more than one. I would not expect most high school kids or even most undergraduates to see this, except perhaps, English majors who are in their junior or senior years.Any English graduate student should be able to spot this in a second, though. I must admit that I did not read the whole poem through a second time, once I discovered the pattern, but it should work. If there is any further challenge with this poem, feel free to e-mail me.