Poems: Stress & Unstressed???

Question

How can you tell the difference between stressed & unstressed?! IM SO CONFUSED. i dont even know how to figure it out. i never even learned this!

Answer 1

Poetry often uses stressed and unstressed syllables to create a rhythm. In some poems you will see accent marks to tell you where to put the emphasis. If you read it without the stresses, it will sound choppy, but with them, it will have a rhythmic flow. A good example is Gerald Manley Hopkins's poem "Spring and Fall":

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older 5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name: 10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I hope this is what you are looking for.

Answer 2

Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm is created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. If a pair of syllables are arranged in a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed pattern, that foot is said to be 'iambic'. The English word 'trapeze' is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables ("tra—peze") and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable ("tra—PEZE", rather than "TRA—peze").

Answer 3

Stress In Poetry Means

Answer 4

In order to understand rhythm in poetry, you first must understand cold what is being meant by stressed and unstressed syllables.

All that is meant by stressed and unstressed is that syllables which are stressed receive more emphasis, more volume, when we speak them, while unstressed syllables receive less emphasis, less volume, when we speak them.
All multisyllabic words have syllables that are emphasized and ones that aren't.

However, it is true that single syllable words are trickier, and what one might consider stressed over unstressed tends to depend on the relationship with other words. So for example the following lines from Frost’s “Birches” stress the pronoun I differently:

When I see birches bend to left and right

…

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

In the first line, the 'I' is stressed, after following the less emphasized when. But in the third line, especially after two lines of the unstressed-stressed rhythm (iambic), the 'I' is unstressed, giving the stress to the verb 'like.'

Answer 5

Stressed and unstressed syllables are in the everything you say you probably just haven't thought about it before. Did you ever see the movie View From the Top? Remember when Mike Myers says: "You put the wrong emPHASis on the wrong sylLABle?" That's only funny because those syllables aren't normally stressed when you say those words. Get used to reading poems out loud. Take a typical example of iambic tetrameter (4 heavy stresses per line), Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174790

/ = heavy stress. _ = light stress

Look at the first stanza. Read it out loud. And get used to the iambic tetrameter rhythm:

_ / _ / _ / _ /

Each of those _ / is called a foot, and there are different variations. The _ / (light stress, heavy stress) is an iamb. Hence IAMBic tetrameter (tetra meaning four, meter meaning beats). So when you divide into feet it looks like this

( _ / )( _ / )( _ / )( _ /)

Alright, alright. Let's actually apply this to that Wordsworth poem. Just put those feet over top of the capitalized words or parts of words and you'll see how the stresses should be marked.

i WANdered LONEly AS a CLOUD
that FLOATS on HIGH o'er VALES and HILLS
when ALL at ONCE i SAW a CROWD

The rhythm drives this along. And look out he makes "over", normally two syllables ("O" and "ver"), into one syllable by taking out (or slighting, as we say) the "v". Notice also when he uses some variation, as at the end of the first stanza:

FLUTtering and DANCing IN the BREEZE

That last line would be marked like this:

/ _ _ _ / _ / _ /

Or, dividing it into feet:

( /_ )( _ _ / )( _ / )( _ / )

The last two feet: iambs. Just like all the feet in the first few lines. The first two feet are two of those variations I talked about (and just about the only two you have to worry about). The first foot is called a trochee: heavy stress, light stress: ( / _ ). The second foot is called an anapest: light stress, light stress, heavy stress: ( _ _ / ) The only other that will almost ever come up is called a spondee: heavy stress, heavy stress: ( / / ) You'll find it, for example, in the first foot of Henry Vaughan's "To His Books": "Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights" Just read that out loud. "Bright books!" Both one syllable words and you stress them pretty much the same. You wouldn't say "bright BOOKS!" or "BRIGHT books" It wouldn't sound right. We tend to talk in iambs as it is. Think of the sentence, "I'll have the special and a glass of milk" That's a perfect iambic pentameter line (penta meaning five, five beats this time):

i'll HAVE the SPECial AND a GLASS of MILK

the stresses can sometimes be light, very light even. Start reading out loud, as I said. Notice how you naturally read the lines. You really have to train your ear to hear these things. When you do, you'll be set. If you want, email me some of the poems you're doing, I'll help you with those in particular.

Answer 6

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Well, the best way is to read it aloud and hear the stresses, but if you have trouble doing that, there are some general rules you can use: For single-syllable words: Nouns are usually stressed. ("test", "poems", "stress") Action verbs are usually stressed ("test", "stress" [although you used them as nouns]). Less "important" words such as linking verbs ("do" in "how do you determine", "was", "is"), conjunctions ("and", "or", "but"), prepositions ("on", "by") are usually not stressed. Pronouns may or may not be depending on context. Usually you can argue either way. Basically, the "key words" get stressed, the words that connect them don't. For multi-syllabic words, it should be easier for you to hear where the stress is. Sometimes there are two--a primary and a secondary (SYL-lab-*ble*--the first is primary, the second is secondary) and whether or not you count the secondary as a stress will depend on context again (e.g. the overall meter of the poem).