I — LOAGAETH

Friend—set thy voice to low and level air,
For syllables are seeds that wake and bear.
A whispered Name, once loosed, may bend the grain,
Or lay a stillness on a raging rain.

Ere stone had learned its patience in the deep,
Ere rivers found their beds, and chose to keep,
The gods drew Breath where no Breath yet had been,
And speech became the first invisible kin.

They spoke in Loagaeth—utterance that makes;
The sound is law, the law becomes the lakes.
A single Word, pronounced with holy care,
Set weight in earth, and stitched a sky from air.

Each True Name carried mastery in its tone:
To know is to command, to touch the bone.
Thus fire was born—kept small, kept bright, kept sure,
A heat that warms the weak and will endure;
Thus water learned its long, obedient path,
Thus earth took oath to hold, and not to wrath;
Thus air became the servant of the least,
A hand unseen that turns the world’s small feast.

Yet where the outer silence gathers cold,
And meanings thin, and every vow grows old,
There rose the Nameless Dark—a hunger wide,
That drank the edges where the Names abide.

It did not strike like armies in their pride;
It simply breathed, and things were void inside.
A field kept standing turned to broken mesh;
A song kept singing lost its inward flesh.
No iron humbled it; no thunder marred—
It ate the letters, and the world grew charred.

Then came the Kindly Ones, of first-born light,
Whose power walked in gentleness and right.
They carried neither trumpet nor display;
They carried Measure, and the quiet sway.

One lifted Mercy, plain as open hand,
And spoke the Still Word—and the Dark was banned.
The Unnaming mouth went slack; the hunger ceased;
The world, re-named, returned to bread and beast.

Lest such a shadow learn the world again,
The Kindly Ones set down, with patient pen,
A relic wrought of dawn’s unspent caress:
The Book of First Breath—a tenderness
Of living vellum, pale as winter wheat,
Whose lines hold Names like heartbeats—close, discreet.

Its pages carry weather in their ink;
Read rashly, kingdoms stagger, rivers shrink.
So sages hid it where the wise convene,
And bound it round with wards of hush and green.

Yet hear this too: what follows, line by line,
Is drawn from that first Breath—made mild by rhyme.
The meter is a bridle on the blaze;
The couplet—Measure—keeps the Word from raze.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

II — THE COUNCIL AND THE BOOK

In Breathward Keep, where elder lanterns burn
With oils that smell of cedar, ash, and fern,
The Council sat beneath a vaulted dome
Whose stones remember how the gods made home.

There sat the Hierophant, severe, upright,
His staff a line that measures wrong from right;
Beside, a Veiled One, quiet as a spring,
Whose gaze made even practiced tongues grow sting.

A Scribe called Justice held the iron quill,
To fix each oath, each tremor of the will;
And Strength, a young guard, kept the threshold fast,
His hand more honest than the masks men cast.

To earn a Chair among that gathered flame
A mage must braid three virtues into Name:
The Crown (to serve what stands above the self),
Wisdom (the deep unwaste of secret wealth),
Intelligence (the fine, discerning art
That reads the world with uncorrupted heart).

Young Aldren came—his cloak still road-stained brown,
His eyes unhooked from hunger after crown.
He carried close, as one would cradle breath,
A book whose hush weighed heavier than death.

He loved the Book beyond his own renown;
Its pages were the gods’ first exhale down.
He dreamed a seat—not for a gilded sign,
But so his hands might guard that fragile line,
So Nameless Dark would find no tongue to eat,
No sacred script to leave as empty sheet.

The Council bade him: “Show thy magick’s core.
Let us behold what thou hast studied for.”
And Aldren, hearing more than testing’s call,
Set down the Book at center of the hall.

He drew a circle wide with careful chalk,
As if his thoughts themselves learned how to walk.
He swore—too loud—his ward would hold secure,
And his sworn fire would keep the Book pure.

He spoke a Name—bright syllables of heat—
And called a wyrm of star-forged furnace-sweet.
It rose, a dragon made of elder flame,
A crown of burning, terrible as fame.

The air grew sharp; the timbers learned to creak;
Men felt their own brave lungs turn thin and weak.
He shaped the blaze to stand like scarlet wall,
A roaring oath that seemed to conquer all.

Then—softly—air remembered how to lean.
A valley-breath slid low, too slight to mean;
It tilted one red moment—barely there—
And turned his dragon into crooked prayer.

The ward unfurled, and curled, and would not heed;
It sought its own wild angle, freed from need.
It licked the rafters; rushed along the beams;
It found the village roofs beyond his dreams.

A cry went up. The Council’s faces tightened.
The Hierophant’s old eyes grew flint-bright, whitened.
Aldren fought flame with flame, and lost the hand;
His thunder only fed the ruthless brand.

One page-edge browned; one letter bled away;
The Book endured—yet sorrow marked the day.
And fire—betrayed—came clawing for the Keep,
A serpent-choir that would not go to sleep.

Then, for their lives, the elders intervened:
The Veiled One whispered—silence turned to green.
The Hierophant laid palm upon the air
And spoke a Word that made the blaze despair.

The dragon’s body folded into ash;
The roar collapsed; the bright spell took its crash.
The village stood. The Council stood. The hall
Kept breath—though Aldren’s heart lay like a fall.

He knelt beside the Book, and could not speak.
His pride, once iron, ran like melted leak.
He touched the singed margin—gentle, slow—
As if his thumb could make lost meaning grow.

He saw, with sudden clearness, what was true:
His might had nearly murdered what he knew.
The Book had been his aim, his north, his vow;
The Council’s Chair seemed smaller to him now.

So in the night—before applause or blame—
He wrapped the Book, and fled his shattered fame.
He took no escort, took no salted bread;
Only the Book’s First Breath above his head.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

III — EARTH: MOSS UPON THE RUIN

He walked until the Keep was smoke behind,
Until the road unthreaded from his mind.
The Book lay close, like winter at the chest;
Its hush was heavier than any rest.

At last he found a tower, broken, old,
A watch that once kept kingdoms in its hold.
Now war had made it hollow, split, and prone;
A crown of stone become unkingly stone.

Yet Earth had come—unbidden—and was king:
Green moss had climbed the cracks with quiet spring.
It stitched the fallen blocks with velvet seam,
And softened pride the way rain softens gleam.

Lichen, pale-scripted, spread its patient hand,
And wrote small alphabets across the sand.
No trumpet marked its conquest; none would boast;
It took the ruin by the selfsame host.

Aldren sat down where broken banners lay,
And watched Earth practice Mercy all the day.
It did not hurry; did not rage; did not
Make spectacle of what it slowly wrought.

He learned: what holds the world is often mild;
The strongest law may wear a humble child.
He pressed his palm to stone grown mossy-wise,
And felt instruction rise where speech denies.

That night he laid the Book on earth made green,
And let the moss breathe cool between.
He slept, and dreamed of roots beneath a plain,
That lift whole hills by never learning strain.

Morning returned with quiet on its brow;
The ruin stood, made gentler by its now.
He rose, and bore the Book, and bore the bruise,
Yet Earth had shown him how to not misuse.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

IV — WATER: DRIZZLE’S SCRIPTURE

Beyond the broken watch, the land grew bare,
And basalt shoulders shouldered up the air.
A cliff arose—black face, severe, and steep—
As if the world had clenched its jaw in sleep.

There, day by day, a thin rain kept its vow:
A drizzle, mild as prayer upon the bough,
Fell without fury, fell without a claim,
And wrote the rock into another name.

Aldren beheld the runnels, line by line—
Channels like letters, patient, strict, divine.
Each drop returned, and found its former trace;
The stone learned yielding by the gentlest pace.

He watched the water teach the cliff to bow,
And felt his own harsh will unlearn its how.
For Water does not shout to make its mark;
It keeps returning, faithful in the dark.

He knelt and listened. In the drip’s small speech
He heard Loagaeth turn itself to teach:
A tongue that alters stone by being true,
A Word that works by choosing to renew.

He washed the Book’s singed edge with careful hand,
As one might cleanse a relic of its sand.
The page did not complain; the ink held fast;
Water’s soft labor made the wound outlast.

He rose, and followed where the stream would go,
As if his fate were something water knows.
And all that day he carried, like a psalm,
A lesson written wet: persistence, calm.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

V — AIR: THE VALLEY‑BREATH

He came to highland, where the grasses thin,
And hawks make scripture out of wind and spin.
There air grew keen; each breath was weighed and tried;
The lungs must learn what pride had once denied.

At dusk he saw a cottage near a slope,
Its thatch laid dry—too ready for the rope
Of careless spark. A shepherd, half-asleep,
Had left his ember-basket set to keep.

A gust came down—no anger in its face—
And turned the smoke aside by slender grace;
It saved the roof by shifting one small thread,
And spared the child who lay with fevered head.

Aldren stood still. The lesson entered clean:
The world is steered by what the eyes miss seen.
His dragon-fire had failed by lacking this—
Attention to the air’s exacting kiss.

He practiced then. He shaped no mighty storm;
He learned the breath that keeps the heart warm.
He spoke no thunder. He let silence reign,
Until his own ribs heard Loagaeth plain—
As if the gods’ first Breath were near again,
And every human breath could join that chain.

He learned a wind so small it barely moved
A hanging cobweb—yet it still approved
The turning of a leaf, the drift of ash,
The secret angle that averts a crash.

So Air became his teacher, light, severe;
Its gentleness grew bright, and very clear.
He took the Book, and held it to his chest,
And felt the world’s thin mercy give him rest.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

VI — FIRE: THE SMALL HEAT

Winter came early in a valley wide;
Frost made white scripture where the deer had died.
Aldren went down where reed and rime are rife,
And felt Time sharpen like a serried knife.

There, under root and snow, a creature shook—
So slight the world would pass and never look.
A field-mouse, drenched; its breath a trembling thread;
Ice jeweled its whiskers; blood ran thin and red.

Aldren remembered flame that would not obey,
The grand fire’s pride that nearly ate the day.
He would not summon dragons from the air;
He chose a heat too small to do despair.

He cupped the creature in his steady palm,
And set his thumb where life was turning calm.
He gave it minute warmth—no blaze, no flare—
A coal of Mercy sheltered from the air.

The wind could not mislead that tender fire;
It held within the flesh, and did not climb higher.
The mouse’s ribs grew brave; its eyes grew clear;
Its tiny heart remembered how to steer.

Then—subtle—something altered in the place.
The cold grew still, as if it knew a face.
The air felt weighted—clean, and strong, and near;
Aldren felt Fear arrive without a spear.

He felt as if a mountain leaned to hear,
As if a Presence watched the world sincere.
His skin went bright with trembling, yet he knew
A safety deeper than the world’s own blue.

The mouse looked up. In that small, common gaze
There moved a dawn older than all his days.
He saw no wing; yet all the valley seemed
To hush, as if the first-born angels dreamed.

Aldren bowed his head. He could not name
What stood within him—quiet as a flame
Banked under ash—yet sovereign, absolute,
A holiness that needed no salute.

The creature slipped away into the snow,
And left no footprint any eye could know.
Only a scent of cedar, and a hush,
And Aldren’s heart made humble by a touch.

He turned then, as if called by inward bell,
And walked again toward Breathward Keep’s gray spell.
The Council watched him enter, road-worn, thin;
He asked to prove anew, to try again.

The Hierophant regarded him long, slow:
“Thou cam’st to end what thou didst never know.
The first trial yet continues—still and wide;
It walked beside thee, hidden, at thy side.”

The Veiled One spoke, and her soft voice was blade:
“The Book drew thee beyond thy craving’s trade.
When thou didst kneel to warm the least of breath,
Thou passed the trial that crowns out Fear and Death.”

Aldren stood silent, like a man re-born,
His mighty wanting made to look forlorn.
And somewhere, far, the Nameless Dark, unblessed,
Shuddered—because a gentle Art had dressed.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

VII — THE THREE AND THE SEETHING

Now in the hall where elder runes reside,
The Council set the deeper tests aside.
Three virtues, braided, must become one flame:
Crown, Wisdom, Intelligence—one Name.

They led him out to where a mountain stood,
A giant shoulder hooded in dark wood.
“Move it,” they said, “and show thy Wisdom’s worth.”
Aldren looked long upon the rooted earth.

He did not call a titan from the deep;
He did not hew with thunder, slash, and sweep.
He spoke a breath—a thin, eastward intent—
So slight the elders smiled at what he meant.

A wind began—no tempest, no command—
A quiet persuasion laid upon the land.
It kissed one face of stone, and lingered there;
It carried grains away like patient prayer.

The Council cried, “We see no moving yet.”
Aldren replied with eyes that would not fret.
He traced a sign—Loagaeth, measured, spare—
And opened Long-Sight in the watching air.

They saw the future like a scroll unrolled:
The mountain’s jaw made sand, made pale, made old;
The selfsame east wind faithful in its tread,
Till earth, unkinged, was carried where it fled.

What force could never do in mortal hours,
A gentle breath achieved with Time for powers.
The elders’ laughter faltered into awe;
They felt the subtlety of ancient law.

Then came the last trial—Intelligence’s crown:
“Go forth,” they said, “to Kestrelford town.
A quarrel grows there, biting like a frost;
A king’s hard will will make the people lost.
Undo it—without banners, without fear.
Return when Mercy rules the market clear.”

Aldren stood. His chest drew in, drew tight;
His body gathered for transcendent light.
He spoke within himself a secret phrase,
And let it burn through all his former days.

His shoulders bowed; his hair went winter-white;
His muscle thinned; his eyes grew deeper sight.
He seemed an elder, frail, by staff sustained—
Yet inward, something seethed and was reined.

The Council named him—one supreme, dread Name:
A Powerful Seething, sheltered from acclaim.
Then four more Names, like elements made mild,
Were laid upon him, each a gentler child:

The Green Measure, Earth’s endurance without pride;
The Tide‑Bearer, Water’s Mercy as its guide;
The Breath That Binds, Air’s unseen ordering care;
Ember‑Safe, Fire that warms and will not flare.

So titled, he went forth—appearing small—
Into the town where sharper voices brawl.

In Kestrelford, the guilds had set their teeth;
Each word was flint; each rumor wanted wreath.
The well grew low; the granaries grew thin;
Men searched for blame, and found it in their kin.

The king, called Dorran, sat with iron brow,
A ruler taught that hardness keeps its vow.
He planned a levy, heavy as a curse,
To fill his chests—yet leaving people worse.

Aldren did not arrive in storm-lit guise;
He came as age, with winter in his eyes.
He listened first. He let the market speak,
And heard where Pride had made the spirit weak.

He spoke to Empress—midwife of the town—
Whose hands knew births, and how to lay grief down.
He told her one clear tale, simple, unforced;
It walked her mouth like water to its source.

He spoke to Justice—scribe with ink-stained thumb—
Who writes what “happened,” while the drums go numb.
He offered one small sentence, measured, clean;
The line became a law the crowd had seen.

He spoke to Strength—the young guard at the mill—
Whose hand was quick, whose heart was learning still.
He taught him how to hold his breath in rage;
The guard grew calm, and calmed a whole street’s page.

He spoke to Dorran’s steward, late at night,
In ordinary words that carried light.
He praised the king’s desire to keep them fed;
He showed how Mercy keeps the realm instead.

So counsel passed as yeast through common grain;
So anger slackened, losing hunger’s chain.
A rumor rose—no trumpet, no decree—
A gentler way might yet the kingdom be.

The well was cleared by hands once clenched in spite;
The levy softened; bread returned by right.
The king believed the thought was his alone,
And thus it rooted deeper than a throne.

When Aldren left, no crowd cried out his name,
He walked away, ungarlanded by fame.
Yet Kestrelford grew quieter in his wake;
Pride lost its appetite for Pride’s own sake.
The Nameless Dark, that fattens on dispute,
Found fewer mouths to hollow into mute.

He came to Breathward Keep ere morning’s bell,
Staff-borne, snow-browed, with inward fire held well.
The Council rose; no herald shook the air;
They felt a different law stand breathing there.

The Hierophant, severe as winter stone,
Set forth a Chair—unadorned, and set alone.
“Sit,” said the Veiled One. “Guard the Breath thou’lt keep;
Let Wisdom wake; let outward wonder sleep.”

They brought the Book, close-wrapped in cedar-cloth;
The hall grew hushed as if the world took oath.
Aldren unbound it; from the pallid hide
A cool, sweet current wandered, tide to tide.

He did not seize its Names to crown his nerve;
He let his own breath settle, clear, and serve.
Then from the shadow at the dais’ stone
The winter-mouse came back, and came alone.

It crossed the floor. No whisper marked its tread;
Yet every candle leaned, as if it read.
It climbed the step and set a paw on page;
The air grew deep with an unmeasured age.

Aldren, now tempered, saw through fur and all
A Presence vast enough to roof the hall.
Its littleness grew lucent, line by line;
As if the world remembered how to shine.

The fur became a mantle wrought of light;
The quiet took a body, mild and bright.
Trumpets slept silent in the vaulted eaves;
The dust stood still, then drifted into sheaves.

It breathed a syllable, and fear was gone;
The singed page whitened, like the edge of dawn.
It settled inward, taking rightful place;
A Word that made the world recall its face.

The hall’s gray stones grew younger to the eye;
A morning older than the sun slipped by.
He tasted clay; he heard the newborn streams;
First Breath returned, half-waking, through his dreams.

And there the Kindly One, unveiled at last,
Showed Aldren all the First Day’s living past.
It spoke its own true Name—too bright to write;
Aldren received it, trembling into light.

It touched his brow; the four-wise elements stirred;
And every element stood clear, and heard.
He felt the Green Measure settle in his bone;
He felt the Tide‑Bearer within his pulse made known.
The Breath That Binds drew order through the room;
Ember‑Safe warmed the cold, and warded doom.

Then, soft as moss that takes a broken crown,
It named him Powerful Seething—without sound.
It asked no praise; it watched his selfsame ways;
And breathed approval through his winter days.

Then turned it, and where’er its gaze was set,
The air grew mild, as if the world must let.
It seemed to see thee reading by thy light,
And bless thy mouth to keep the Names aright.

Friend, take these lines as one takes embered coal;
Hold them in Breath, and they will warm the whole.
The Book’s First Breath, unbridled, burns too vast;
So rhyme gives Measure, lest the world be cast.

Each couplet is a clasp upon the air;
Speak low—and even ruin learns to bear.
The Nameless Dark grows strong when Names lie slack;
Read on—thy measured breath can drive it back.

Write it; the ink remembers what it knew;
Read it; and Loagaeth shall remember you.
So long as tongues keep Mercy joined to Might,
The Kindly Ones keep watch, unseen, in light.

The hidden Art is writ in patient Breath;
One Still Word seals the gate of Fear and Death.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

This time I wanted to try something new, something closer to story telling in poem form (an epic poem). I wanted something occult and fantasy based, with the depth of Tolkein, but with the use of technical poetic devices (iambic pentameter, iambic inversion, etc) in the style of Alexander Pope. It was important to me I incorporated deep real occult symbology as well, so the use of numbers 3, 4, and 7 are very intentional throughout and I incorporate a lot of classical occult ideas like Loagaeth. I wanted something that relied less on metaphor like traditional poetry to give it more of a story telling aspect, so it doesn't quite read like some of my past work.

Why meter and rhyme

There is a moment -- and if you have spent any time at all wrestling with poetry, you know the one -- when a line you are reading suddenly clicks. Not because of what it means, though that matters too, but because of how it sounds. The syllables land in your ear like footsteps on a wooden floor: deliberate, rhythmic, almost musical. You feel the sentence before you finish parsing it. Something in your chest responds to the pattern the way your foot responds to a bass drum at a concert, which is to say, involuntarily and with mild embarrassment if you happen to be in a library.

That moment is what meter does. And once you notice it, you cannot un-notice it. It is the tattoo of poetry: permanent, occasionally regrettable, and the subject of far too many opinions at dinner parties.

When I first learned to write poetry, I treated "meter" and "rhyme scheme" like formalwear: impressive, a little stiff, and not something I'd put on unless I had a special occasion. Iambic pentameter sounded like something you'd order at an Italian restaurant. Dactylic hexameter sounded like a medical condition. And the word "pyrrhic" -- well, I assumed it was a typo someone had been too proud to correct for the last two thousand years. Over time, though, I've come to think of these terms more like instruments. Sometimes you want a drumbeat you can dance to. Sometimes you want a barely-there pulse under a conversational voice. Sometimes you want a pattern that snaps shut like a clasp at the end of every stanza. And sometimes -- let's be honest -- you want to show off at a dinner party.

In English, the most common tradition for organizing poetic rhythm is accentual-syllabic meter: lines built from a set number of feet (small stress-pattern blocks, which we will get to shortly) and usually a predictable overall rhythm. This is the system that gave us Shakespeare's plays, Milton's epics, Dickinson's hymns, and roughly forty percent of all greeting card verses. It is an extraordinarily flexible system, capable of everything from the thunderous grandeur of Paradise Lost to the tipsy sway of a limerick about a man from Nantucket.

And once I started seeing poems as modular -- foot + line length + rhyme (or not) -- forms stopped being rules and started being choices. The difference is enormous. Rules make you anxious. Choices make you powerful. Or at least they make you feel powerful, which, when you are alone at a desk trying to make fourteen lines do something interesting, is close enough.

This post is basically my working notebook: definitions I trust, a generous pile of examples (rhyming and non-rhyming) that mix-and-match feet, line lengths, and stanza patterns on purpose, and enough commentary to (I hope) make the whole business feel less like homework and more like what it actually is -- one of the most satisfying puzzles in the English language.

Fair warning: this is a long post. If you are the kind of person who reads the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article and then opens six more tabs, you are my target audience. If you are the kind of person who skims for the bold words, I have bolded generously. If you are the kind of person who just wants to write a sonnet and get on with your life, skip to the section on pentameter, grab your fourteen lines, and godspeed.

Scanning basics

Before we start cataloguing feet like a particularly obsessive podiatrist, let's talk about the basic mechanics of scansion -- the act of marking which syllables in a line are stressed (louder, longer, more emphatic) and which are unstressed (quieter, shorter, the syllables that get skipped over like the middle child at Thanksgiving).

A foot is the basic unit of accentual-syllabic meter: usually one stressed syllable plus one or more unstressed syllables arranged in a specific order. Think of it as a single "beat" in the poem's rhythm, the way a measure is a single unit in a piece of music. You would not try to describe a song by listing every individual note; you would talk about the time signature, the tempo, the recurring pattern. Feet are the poet's time signature.

A line's meter name is often two-part: the type of foot (iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and so on) plus the number of feet per line (tetrameter for four, pentameter for five, hexameter for six, and so on up to the point where the line becomes so long it needs its own zip code). So "iambic pentameter" means "five iambs per line." "Trochaic tetrameter" means "four trochees per line." "Dactylic hexameter" means "six dactyls per line and probably an epic about someone trying to get home from a war."

When I'm scanning, I use the simplest notation I can:

• u = unstressed syllable
• / = stressed syllable

That's it. No special characters, no arcane symbols, no need to learn a new alphabet. With just those two marks, you can describe every common foot in English verse: the iamb (u /), the trochee (/ u), the anapest (u u /), the dactyl (/ u u), plus the rarer beasts like the spondee (/ /) and the pyrrhic (u u).

Some people use different notation -- x for unstressed, or the classical macron and breve -- but the principle is the same. You are just marking which syllables get the emphasis and which ones are along for the ride. If you have ever clapped along to a song, you already know how to do this. The stressed syllables are where you clap. The unstressed syllables are where your hands are in the air looking foolish.

Three sanity-saving reminders I keep taped to the inside of my brain:

1. Feet and words don't have to match up. This is the one that trips up beginners most often. A single word can spill across two feet, and a single foot can contain parts of two different words. The foot boundaries are rhythmic, not linguistic. English does not care about your neat little boxes. English has never cared about your neat little boxes. English is a language that spells "colonel" with an L and pronounces "Wednesday" with two syllables, and it will put its stress wherever it pleases.

2. Most "real" metrical writing uses substitutions. Even very regular meter -- the kind that sounds like a metronome in a top hat -- often swaps in a different foot for emphasis, variety, or because the poet's ear told them to. A trochee at the start of an otherwise iambic line is so common it has its own name (trochaic inversion). A spondee hammered into the middle of a flowing line is a time-honored way to make the reader sit up and pay attention. If you have ever read a line of Shakespeare and thought "that doesn't scan perfectly," congratulations: you have discovered substitution, which is not a bug but a feature.

3. Your ear is smarter than your notation. Scansion is a useful tool, but it is an approximation. Real spoken English has degrees of stress -- not just "stressed" and "unstressed" but a whole spectrum from barely-there to table-pounding. Two people can scan the same line differently and both be right, because they are hearing slightly different emphases. The goal of scansion is not to produce the One True Reading but to make the underlying pattern visible enough that you can talk about it, learn from it, and -- most importantly -- steal from it for your own poems.

That brings us to the building blocks.

Metrical feet

Here we go: the menagerie of metrical feet, from the common workhorses to the exotic show ponies. Each foot is a small pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and each one gives a line a different feel -- a different gait, if you will. (And you will, because I am going to use the walking metaphor at least four more times before this post is over.)

Iambic

An iamb is u / -- one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Da-DUM. It is the most common foot in English poetry by a margin so wide it barely qualifies as a contest. If English verse were a high school, the iamb would be prom king, class president, and valedictorian, and everyone else would be trying to sit at its lunch table.

Why? Because English speech naturally tends toward iambic rhythms. We say "aLONE," not "Alone." We say "toLDAY," not "TOday." We say "I THINK, thereFORE I AM," not -- well, nobody says it the other way, because it sounds like a robot having a seizure. The iamb mirrors the natural rise and fall of conversational English, which is why iambic verse can sound effortlessly natural even when it is doing something extraordinarily sophisticated.

A "pure" iambic line feels like a steady forward walk -- left-right, left-right, each step landing with quiet confidence. But iambic verse also loves tiny disruptions: extra syllables tucked in like contraband, swapped-in feet that shift the weight, pauses that make the reader stumble and then catch their balance. These aren't mistakes. They're the difference between a metronome and a musician.

Rhyming example in iambic pentameter with alternate rhyme (ABAB), from Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? by William Shakespeare

(A) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
(B) Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
(A) Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
(B) And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

This is a classic ABAB quatrain in iambic pentameter (five feet per line). Shakespeare makes it look easy, which is what four hundred years of cultural reverence will do for you. Notice how "Rough winds" at the start of line three kicks against the iambic current -- that's a trochaic substitution, and it makes the rough winds feel rougher. The man knew what he was doing.

Rhyming example as coupled rhyme (AA) in iambic pentameter, from An Essay on Criticism: Part 1 by Alexander Pope

(A) 'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
(A) Appear in writing or in judging ill;

That's a tight heroic-couplet feel -- two rhyming lines of the same length, snapping together like the two halves of a locket. Pope built entire essays out of these couplets, which is the poetic equivalent of building a cathedral out of bricks: each unit is small, but the cumulative effect is staggering. The heroic couplet was the dominant verse form of the eighteenth century, and Pope wielded it the way a surgeon wields a scalpel -- with precision, confidence, and the occasional alarming enthusiasm.

Non-rhyming example in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), from Henry V

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Blank verse -- unrhymed iambic pentameter -- is the backbone of English dramatic and epic poetry. It is what Shakespeare used for most of his plays, what Milton used for Paradise Lost, and what Wordsworth used for The Prelude. It is also, not coincidentally, the verse form that sounds most like elevated conversation: formal enough to carry weight, flexible enough to sound like someone actually talking. This particular line demonstrates how repetition ("we few, we happy few, we band") can create its own kind of music even without rhyme. It also demonstrates that Henry V was extremely good at speeches, which is convenient when you are trying to get people to charge into battle.

Non-rhyming example in iambic hexameter (alexandrine), original

The town was still, yet in my head a drum at dawn.
I learned to walk my thoughts in six slow beats, alone.

Six feet per line gives you a longer breath, a wider canvas. The alexandrine (as iambic hexameter is sometimes called) has a stately, rolling quality -- it is the stretch limousine of metrical lines. More on this when we get to the section on line lengths.

Trochaic

A trochee is / u -- one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. DUM-da. If the iamb is a steady walk, the trochee is a march -- or perhaps a finger wagging at you from across the room. It tends to feel like a falling rhythm: a strong landing followed by a release, like a gavel coming down or a judge pronouncing sentence. There is something inherently emphatic, even bossy, about trochaic verse. It does not ask; it tells.

This is why trochaic meter turns up so often in chants, spells, songs, and anything that wants to grab you by the collar. "Double, double, toil and trouble" -- that's trochaic, and it sounds like a curse because it is a curse. The trochee's front-loaded stress creates a feeling of insistence, of things being declared rather than discovered. Where iambic verse says "come along, let me show you," trochaic verse says "Sit. Down. Listen."

William Blake opens The Tyger with a predominantly trochaic line, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven -- that magnificently gloomy parlor trick of a poem -- is described as mainly trochaic, which goes a long way toward explaining why it sounds less like a man talking and more like fate itself knocking on your door, eight beats at a time.

Rhyming example in trochaic tetrameter, from "The Tyger" (AABB by line-end sound)

(A) In what distant deeps or skies.
(A) Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
(B) On what wings dare he aspire?
(B) What the hand, dare seize the fire?

This stanza shows the trochaic drive at full gallop: four strong beats per line, each one hammering the question harder. The paired rhymes (skies/eyes, aspire/fire) click shut like handcuffs. Blake is not having a philosophical conversation here; he is interrogating the universe, and the trochees are his badge.

Rhyming example (ABAB) in trochaic tetrameter, original

(A) Cold as Iron, dark the water, 
(B) Sparks of starlight skip like fire; 
(A) Hush the house and hold your breath, 
(B) Let the heartline lift and climb higher. 

Non-rhyming example in trochaic octameter, from "The Raven" (end-rhyme is complex, but the trochaic surge is unmistakable)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

Eight feet per line. Eight. That is a line so long it needs a rest stop in the middle, which Poe obligingly provides with that internal rhyme ("dreary/weary"). The trochaic octameter gives The Raven its hypnotic, almost suffocating quality -- every line is a corridor that just keeps going, and the raven is waiting at the end of all of them.

Non-rhyming example in trochaic tetrameter, original

River-running, city-humming,
Morning-metal, traffic-singing.

Anapestic

An anapest is u u / -- two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. Da-da-DUM. If the iamb walks and the trochee marches, the anapest gallops. It is the metrical foot of speed, momentum, and barely controlled enthusiasm. Two quick unstressed syllables build up a tiny head of steam, and then the stress comes crashing down like a wave breaking on a shore -- or, more accurately, like a horse landing after a jump, because the galloping metaphor is not just convenient but genuinely descriptive. Say "in-ter-VENE" out loud. Say "un-der-STAND." Feel how the word accelerates into its final syllable? That is the anapest at work.

Anapestic meter is the natural home of narrative speed, comic verse, and anything that wants to sweep the reader along at a pace that discourages too much careful thought. This is why it shows up in limericks, in Dr. Seuss, and in Byron's battle poetry. It is hard to be ponderous in anapests. It is hard to be still. The foot itself is a tiny running start, and a line full of them feels like being pulled downhill on a sled.

Rhyming example (AABB) with anapestic swing, from The Destruction of Sennacherib by Lord Byron

(A) The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
(A) And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
(B) And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
(B) When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The Poetry Foundation explicitly notes this poem is written in anapestic meter, and you can feel the cavalry charge in every line. Two light syllables, then a heavy one, over and over -- it is the sound of hoofbeats, of an army in motion, of a poet who understood that rhythm is not just ornament but meaning. Byron does not describe speed here; he enacts it.

Rhyming example as a limerick (AABBA), original (anapestic-leaning, with some natural substitutions)

(A) There once was a writer from brook, 
(A) Who scanned ev'ry line in a book; 
(B) But the stresses ran wild, 
(B) So I laughed and I smiled, 
(A) And I wrote with a rhythm like a hook. 

Limericks are typically five (generally) anapestic lines rhyming AABBA. They are also proof that a fixed metrical form can survive being used almost exclusively for jokes about people from Nantucket. The anapestic rhythm gives the limerick its bouncy, irrepressible energy -- it is very hard to write a sad limerick, though many have tried, usually at two in the morning after a breakup.

Non-rhyming example in anapestic tetrameter, original

In the dusk of the room, when the lights all go low,
I remember the words that I didn't yet know.

Non-rhyming example (shorter, anapestic trimeter feel), original

And the sound of the rain
Kept on tapping again.

Dactylic

A dactyl is / u u -- one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. DUM-da-da. If the anapest gallops forward, the dactyl tumbles downward -- a controlled avalanche of sound that starts with a bang and rolls off into two quick echoes. The word "dactyl" itself comes from the Greek word for "finger," because a finger has one long bone followed by two short ones, and apparently the ancient Greeks had strong feelings about both anatomy and prosody. (They also had strong feelings about democracy, theater, and olives, so let's not judge.)

Dactylic meter often feels like a cascade, a tumbling, emphatic rush that is wonderful for chants, refrains, battle cries, and anything that wants to sound like it is arriving from a great height. It is the metrical foot of urgency and grandeur -- the foot that Homer used (in the original Greek) for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that Tennyson used (in English) for The Charge of the Light Brigade. If iambic pentameter is the sensible sedan of English verse, dactylic hexameter is the chariot.

The Poetry Foundation notes Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade is written in dactylic meter, and once you hear the pattern -- "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward" -- you will never unhear it. That is the dactyl: relentless, rolling, and slightly terrifying.

Rhyming example (ABAB) in dactylic tetrameter-ish, original

(A) Blazing and bravely we rush to the starryline, 
(B) Hurrying, scurrying, out of the dark we climb; 
(A) Loving the dangerous click of a turning key, 
(B) Hear me: the measure is marking its own good time. 

Rhyming example as "double dactyl" style (a form built from dactylic lines with a required rhyme on the final spondee words), original-ish homage

(A) Higgledy-piggledy, metrical mayhem,  
(B) Blazingly, boltingly, running around--  
(C) Proso-dy prodigy, wordily whirling--  
(B) Close it with one hard, end-word: "sound."

The "double dactyl" (also known as a "higgledy-piggledy") is a recognized light-verse form built around dactylic movement and a rhyming requirement on specific end words. It is the poetic equivalent of a party trick: technically demanding, inherently ridiculous, and deeply satisfying when you pull it off. The form requires that one line in each stanza be a single double-dactylic word (like "heterogeneously" or "sesquipedalian"), which means writing a double dactyl is also an excellent vocabulary exercise.

Non-rhyming example (dactylic dimeter feel), from "The Charge of the Light Brigade"

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die

Three lines, each one a falling dactyl, each one stripping away another option until all that remains is the terrible simplicity of the last: "do and die." The repetition of structure makes the inevitability feel structural, as if the meter itself is closing the trap.

Non-rhyming example in dactylic hexameter, from Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and longer,
And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters.

Hexameter is a six-foot line -- often dactylic in classical tradition -- and Longfellow is cited as one of the major English poets to attempt sustained dactylic hexameter. It was a bold choice. English is not naturally hospitable to dactylic hexameter the way Greek and Latin are (our language has too many monosyllables and too few inflectional endings), but Longfellow made it work through sheer stubbornness and talent, which is, come to think of it, how most good poetry gets made.

Spondee

A spondee is / / -- two stressed syllables in a row, back to back, with no unstressed syllable to soften the blow. DUM-DUM. If the iamb is a walk, the trochee a march, and the anapest a gallop, the spondee is a dead stop. A slammed door. A fist on a table. Two heavy boots landing at the same time.

In English accentual-syllabic verse, spondees rarely build an entire poem -- a line of pure spondees would sound less like poetry and more like a very angry telegram. ("Stop. Now. Come. Home. Bring. Food.") Instead, they appear as substitutions: a way to slam emphasis into an otherwise flowing line, the way a drummer drops in a double hit to make you flinch. The spondee is the metrical equivalent of bold text. It says: this syllable matters, and so does the one right next to it.

The Poetry Foundation calls Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty "heavily spondaic," and if you read Hopkins aloud -- which you should, because his poetry is wasted on the eye alone -- you can feel the spondees landing like stones dropped into water: "swift, slow; sweet, sour." Each pair is a small collision, two stresses crashing into each other with no buffer between them.

Rhyming example (AA) with spondee punches inside iambic pentameter, original

(A) I walked through soft, soft rain and felt it rise. 
(A) My heart said stay, stay here--two drumbeats--stay--and dies. 

Rhyming example (ABBA) that uses spondees as "weight," original

(A) I saw the stormcloud break with bright, bright light, 
(B) And all my words went still, still in my throat; 
(B) Then time grew hard, hard as a hea-vy note; 
(A) I let the line fall down through dark, dark night. 

Non-rhyming example (famous spondaic texture), excerpt from "Pied Beauty"

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Hopkins is doing something extraordinary here: he is using the spondee not just as a substitution but as a structural principle. The pairs of stressed words ("swift, slow; sweet, sour") enact the very idea the poem is about -- the beauty of contrasts, of things that are dappled and various and refuse to settle into a single smooth rhythm. The spondees are the argument.

Non-rhyming example (spondees used as a sudden brake), original

I held my breath--then: stop. now.
That's how the line insists.

Pyrrhic

A pyrrhic (sometimes discussed as "pyrrhic meter" in English prosody, though that phrase is slightly misleading) is u u -- two unstressed syllables in a row. It is the ghost of the metrical world: barely there, more felt than heard, a tiny pocket of quiet in the rhythmic fabric. If the spondee is a fist on a table, the pyrrhic is the moment right after, when the vibrations are dying away and nobody has spoken yet.

The Poetry Foundation points out that while pyrrhics exist clearly in classical quantitative verse (where syllable length rather than stress determines the pattern), they are not usually treated as stand-alone feet in modern English scansion. Instead, they tend to get absorbed into the surrounding feet -- a pyrrhic followed by a spondee, for example, just sounds like a four-syllable unit with the stress shifted to the end. This is one of those areas where the theory gets a little fuzzy, like trying to identify the exact moment when twilight becomes night. You know the pyrrhic is there because you can feel the line go soft for a beat, but pinning it down to a precise two-syllable foot is a matter of some scholarly debate and, at poetry conferences, occasional raised voices.

Rhyming example (AA) featuring a famous pyrrhic-identified phrase, from The Garden by Andrew Marvell

(A) Annihilating all that's made
(A) To a green thought in a green shade.

The Poetry Foundation explicitly flags "To a green thought in a green shade" as containing pyrrhic meter. Listen to "in a" -- those two little unstressed syllables create a moment of almost weightless suspension before "green shade" brings the stress back. It is like the poem takes a breath and lets you float for just an instant.

Rhyming example (AABB) with pyrrhic "soft spots," original

(A) I let it go in a quiet way, 
(A) As if it had to fade today; 
(B) The sound of it--so very low-- 
(B) Was almost not a thing to know. 

Non-rhyming example in iambic context (pyrrhic substitution illustrated), from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

This line is commonly discussed in teaching materials as containing a pyrrhic substitution within an iambic framework. "Dark and" is often scanned as pyrrhic -- two unstressed syllables that create a brief, hushed pause before "deep" lands with full weight. It is a tiny effect, but it is exactly the right tiny effect: the line enacts the quiet of the woods it describes.

Non-rhyming example, original (two deliberate "u u" dips)

I went to the edge of the ordinary day,
And listened in a room with no name.

Trochaic inversion

Trochaic inversion (also called trochaic substitution) is when a poem built on iambs suddenly pops a trochee -- typically at the start of a line -- for emphasis. It is one of the most common "legal disruptions" in English iambic verse, so common that it barely registers as a disruption at all. If iambic pentameter is a highway, trochaic inversion is the speed bump that makes you pay attention to the school zone.

The reason it works is simple physics -- or rather, simple psychoacoustics. In an iambic line, your ear expects unstressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed, a steady da-DUM da-DUM. When a line opens with stressed-unstressed instead (DUM-da), the reversal jolts you. Not a lot -- just enough to make the first word land harder than it otherwise would. Poets have been exploiting this for centuries, the way a good comedian exploits a pause: the surprise is small, but the effect is disproportionate.

It is worth noting that trochaic inversion is so standard in English iambic verse that some metrists barely bother to flag it. It is the exception that proves the rule -- or rather, the exception that is the rule. Shakespeare does it constantly. Milton does it. Keats does it. If you read a hundred lines of iambic pentameter and none of them start with a trochee, either the poet is being deliberately rigid or you are reading a textbook example, which amounts to the same thing.

Rhyming example (ABAB quatrain) demonstrating inversion, from Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

(A) In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
(B) As after sunset fadeth in the west,
(A) Which by and by black night doth take away,
(B) Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

This quatrain is discussed explicitly as iambic with a trochaic substitution (inversion) at the opening of the final line. "Death's second" -- DUM-da DUM-da -- hits with a weight that "In me" does not, and that weight is the whole point. Shakespeare puts the most important word in the stanza ("Death") in the most emphatic possible position: the start of a trochaic inversion in the final line. The form serves the meaning. The meaning justifies the form. This is what good metrical writing looks like.

Rhyming example (ABAB) with an obvious inverted first foot, original

(A) Now do I feel the clock begin to tick, 
(B) And then I hear the city start to sing; 
(A) I thought I knew the rule, the metric trick, 
(B) But first comes force--then after comes the spring. 

Non-rhyming example (blank-verse feel) with inversion for command, original

Stop at the door, and listen to the heat.
I meant the line to walk; it had to leap.

Non-rhyming example (iambic line with a trochaic kick), original

Bright birds are gone; the branches still remember.

Line lengths

Here is a thing that nobody tells you when you start writing poetry: the length of your lines matters at least as much as what is in them. A short line is a gasp. A long line is a sigh. A very long line is a monologue from your uncle at Thanksgiving -- technically complete, but by the end you have forgotten how it started and you are mainly focused on getting to the mashed potatoes.

Line length, in metrical terms, is counted by feet per line: monometer (one -- extremely rare and slightly unhinged), dimeter (two), trimeter (three), tetrameter (four), pentameter (five), hexameter (six), heptameter (seven), and octameter (eight, at which point you are basically writing prose with delusions of grandeur).

I think of these as breath decisions: how long I let a thought run before I force (or invite) a turn. Short lines create urgency, fragmentation, staccato energy. They make the reader's eye move fast. They make the white space loud. Long lines create expansiveness, meditation, the feeling of a mind that has room to wander. They let subordinate clauses sprawl. They let the thought develop before the line break interrupts.

The relationship between line length and meaning is one of the most powerful and least discussed tools in a poet's kit. Choose the wrong line length and your elegy sounds like a jingle. Choose the right one and your jingle sounds like an elegy. (Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham is in anapestic tetrameter. Tennyson's In Memoriam is in iambic tetrameter. Same line length. Very different effect. Context is everything.)

Pentameter

Pentameter is five feet per line, and it is described -- accurately, if a bit boringly -- as the most common metrical line in English. This is not an accident. Five feet turns out to be the sweet spot for English: long enough to hold a complete thought, short enough that the line does not collapse under its own weight. It maps roughly onto the length of a natural English sentence, which is why pentameter can sound conversational even when it is doing something extraordinarily formal.

Pentameter is the line of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Prelude, Keats's odes, Frost's narratives, and roughly every sonnet written in English since the fourteenth century. If you learn one line length, learn this one. It is the Swiss Army knife of English verse: not always the best tool for a specific job, but always a perfectly adequate one.

Rhyming example (ABAB) in iambic pentameter, from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

(A) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
(B) The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
(A) The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
(B) And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

This is a clean ABAB quatrain and a frequently cited model of the form. Notice how each line is a complete grammatical unit -- subject, verb, object -- and how the rhymes ("day/way," "lea/me") feel inevitable rather than forced. That is pentameter doing its job: giving each thought exactly enough room to land, and not a syllable more.

Rhyming example (AABBCC) in heroic-couplet motion, from "An Essay on Criticism"

(A) 'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
(A) Appear in writing or in judging ill;
(B) But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' offence
(B) To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.
(C) Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
(C) Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;

That's three consecutive rhyming couplets (AA BB CC), a classic didactic-satiric engine. Pope used this form to argue, to mock, to instruct, and to devastate his enemies, often in the same poem. The heroic couplet's tight rhyme creates a sense of logical inevitability -- each pair of lines feels like a premise and conclusion, a setup and punchline, an accusation and verdict.

Non-rhyming example (blank verse), from Paradise Lost: Book 1 by John Milton

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:

Blank verse -- unrhymed iambic pentameter -- is a major mode for Milton, who used it to write the most ambitious poem in the English language. The absence of rhyme gives Milton's lines a forward momentum that rhymed verse cannot easily achieve: there is no couplet-snap to stop the thought, so the sentences pour across line breaks and stanza breaks like water flowing downhill. This is enjambment (which we will discuss shortly), and Milton was its greatest practitioner.

Non-rhyming example in strict iambic pentameter, original

I write to hear the click of stresses fall.
I write to feel the thought complete its arc.

Tetrameter

Tetrameter is four feet per line, and if pentameter is the workhorse, tetrameter is the racehorse: lighter, faster, and with a tendency to break into song at the slightest provocation. Four beats per line is the natural rhythm of English ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and about eighty percent of all pop lyrics. It is brisk, songlike, and incredibly durable -- the metrical equivalent of a good pair of boots.

The difference between tetrameter and pentameter is only one foot, but the effect is disproportionate. That missing fifth foot tightens the line, speeds up the pace, and gives the verse a quality of compression that pentameter cannot match. Pentameter explains; tetrameter declares. Pentameter meditates; tetrameter marches. If you want your poem to sound like someone thinking, use pentameter. If you want it to sound like someone singing, use tetrameter.

Rhyming example (AABB quatrain) in iambic tetrameter, from To an Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman

(A) The time you won your town the race
(A) We chaired you through the market-place;
(B) Man and boy stood cheering by,
(B) And home we brought you shoulder-high.

The Poetry Foundation lists AABB as a common quatrain pattern, and this stanza exemplifies it beautifully. Housman's tetrameter gives the poem the feel of a ballad or a folk song, which is exactly right for a poem about a young athlete who dies at the peak of his glory. The form says "this is a story everyone knows," even though the specific story is heartbreaking.

Rhyming example (AA couplet) in iambic tetrameter, from "The Garden"

(A) How vainly men themselves amaze
(A) To win the palm, the oak, or bays,

Non-rhyming example in trochaic tetrameter, from The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,

This poem is a well-known English example of trochaic tetrameter, and the trochaic rhythm gives it a distinctly different flavor from the iambic tetrameter of Housman. Where Housman's lines rise, Longfellow's lines fall. Where Housman sounds like a ballad singer, Longfellow sounds like a chant, an incantation, a story being told around a fire. Same number of feet, different foot, entirely different world.

Non-rhyming example (tetrameter pulse), original

I count my steps, I count my breath,
I let the sentence end in air.

Hexameter

Hexameter is six feet per line, and it is the longest standard line that English uses with any regularity. In classical tradition -- Greek and Latin epic -- hexameter is most often dactylic, and it is the meter of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and approximately every other poem that involves gods, heroes, and questionable decision-making on the high seas. In English, a six-foot iambic line is often called an alexandrine, a term that sounds very distinguished and comes from a medieval French poem about Alexander the Great, because of course it does.

Hexameter gives you room. A lot of room. Each line is long enough to contain a complete thought, a parenthetical aside, and possibly a subordinate clause, all without feeling cramped. This makes it ideal for epic and ceremonial poetry, where the subject matter demands a certain grandeur and the poet needs space to be expansive without running out of line. It also makes it a little unwieldy for shorter forms -- a hexameter sonnet would feel like a limousine trying to parallel park.

Rhyming example (Spenserian stanza ending in an alexandrine), from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

(A) Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
(B) As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,
(A) Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
(B) For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine oaten reeds,
(B) And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
(C) Whose prayses having slept in silence long,
(B) Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
(C) To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
(C) Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.

A Spenserian stanza is defined as eight iambic pentameter lines plus a final alexandrine, with rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC. That final long line -- the alexandrine -- acts like a deep breath at the end of the stanza, a moment of expansion before the next stanza tightens things back up. Spenser invented this form for The Faerie Queene, and it is one of those rare cases where a poet creates a stanza form so perfectly suited to a particular poem that nobody else has ever used it quite as well. (Keats tried, in The Eve of St. Agnes, and came close. Byron tried, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and came closer. But the form still belongs to Spenser.)

Rhyming example (AA) in iambic alexandrines, original

(A) I walked through winter streets and let my thoughts be slow, 
(A) As if the world were made to teach me how to go. 

Non-rhyming example in dactylic hexameter, from Longfellow's "Evangeline"

Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the ice-bound,
Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropIcal islands.

Non-rhyming example (iambic hexameter) original

I tried to make a lonGer line, to hold a lonGer thought.
It did not need a rhyme to end; it needed room to breathe.

Caesura, enjambment, and end-stopping

If metrical feet are the notes and line length is the time signature, then caesura, enjambment, and end-stopping are the rests, ties, and bar lines -- the punctuation of the music itself. These three devices control how a line delivers its rhythm, and they are responsible for the difference between meter that sounds like a metronome and meter that sounds like a human being.

Neglecting these is like learning to play piano by memorizing scales but never learning about dynamics. Technically impressive, aesthetically unbearable. So let's give these workhorses their due.

Caesura

A caesura is a pause in the middle of a line, usually created by punctuation (a comma, a semicolon, a period, a dash) or by a natural break in the syntax. The word comes from the Latin caedere, "to cut," and that is exactly what it does: it cuts the line in two, creating two shorter units of rhythm that play off each other.

Consider this line from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be, || or not to be, || that is the question.

Those pauses (marked with ||) are caesurae. They break the pentameter line into three rhythmic phrases, each one shorter and more emphatic than a full five-foot line would be. The effect is conversational, halting, uncertain -- which is exactly what Hamlet is. The caesura makes the meter act like the character.

Caesura can fall anywhere in a line, but it is most common near the middle. A line with a strong caesura near its center feels balanced, like a seesaw. A line with a caesura near the beginning or end feels lopsided, which can be exactly the effect you want.

Enjambment

Enjambment (from the French enjamber, "to straddle") is what happens when a sentence or phrase does not end at the end of a line but instead flows over into the next line without a pause. It is the opposite of a neat, self-contained line. It is the sentence refusing to stay in its box.

Here is Milton, the undisputed champion of enjambment, from Paradise Lost:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

Notice how "the fruit / Of that forbidden tree" straddles the line break. Your eye hits the end of line one and expects a pause, but the grammar yanks you forward into line two. That tension -- between the line's desire to end and the sentence's desire to continue -- is what gives enjambment its power. It creates momentum, urgency, and a feeling of thoughts tumbling over each other faster than the form can contain them.

Enjambment is also one of the most effective ways to create surprise. If you end a line on a word that seems to complete a thought, and then the next line reveals that the thought continues in an unexpected direction, you get a tiny shock of reorientation. Poets have been using this trick since at least the Renaissance, and it never gets old, because the human brain never stops expecting lines to end where lines end.

End-stopping

End-stopping is the opposite of enjambment: a line that ends where its sentence or clause ends, with a pause -- usually a period, comma, or semicolon -- that lets the reader breathe before moving on. An end-stopped line is a completed thought. It lands, it settles, it allows a moment of stillness.

Pope's heroic couplets are almost entirely end-stopped:

'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;

Each line is a complete unit. Each couplet is a complete argument. The end-stopping gives Pope's verse its epigrammatic snap -- every pair of lines feels like a quotation you could frame and hang on the wall, which is exactly the effect he was going for.

The interplay between enjambment and end-stopping is one of the most important variables in a poem's texture. A poem made entirely of end-stopped lines feels stately and deliberate. A poem heavy on enjambment feels restless and propulsive. Most good poems mix the two, using end-stopping for moments of clarity and resolution and enjambment for moments of tension and discovery.

Rhyme schemes

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes in a stanza, conventionally labeled with letters: A for the first rhyme sound, B for the second, C for the third, and so on. So ABAB means the first line rhymes with the third, and the second with the fourth. AABB means the first two lines rhyme with each other, and so do the third and fourth. ABBA means the first line rhymes with the fourth and the second with the third, which is the rhyme scheme equivalent of a literary hug.

Here's my personal rule: rhyme scheme is never "just decoration." It is a way of controlling three things at once: prediction (will the reader know where the next rhyme is coming?), closure (does the stanza feel finished?), and echo (which ideas get sonically linked?). A couplet rhyme (AA) creates immediate satisfaction -- call and response, question and answer, setup and punchline. An alternate rhyme (ABAB) delays gratification -- you have to wait a full line for your sonic payoff, which creates suspense. An enclosed rhyme (ABBA) buries its satisfaction in the middle and then circles back, creating a feeling of return, of things coming full circle.

Choosing a rhyme scheme is choosing an emotional architecture. It is not just "what sounds nice" but "what pattern of expectation and fulfillment serves the poem's meaning." And for the non-rhyming poets in the audience: even if you never use end rhyme, understanding these patterns helps you understand how poems create structure through repetition, variation, and return.

Below are the major schemes, with at least two rhyming and two non-rhyming examples each. For the "non-rhyming examples," I'm giving unrhymed analogs: same stanza shape (and sometimes the same refrain logic) but without end rhyme.

Alternate rhyme

Alternate rhyme is the interlaced quatrain pattern ABAB. It is probably the second most common rhyme scheme in English (after couplets), and it has a naturally pleasing quality of delayed completion: you hear a sound, wait a line, and then hear it again, like an echo bouncing off a far wall. The delay creates a feeling of weaving -- two threads intertwining -- which is why this scheme turns up in everything from ballads to sonnets to the verses of pop songs you can't get out of your head.

Rhyming example (ABAB), from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

(A) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
(B) The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
(A) The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
(B) And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Rhyming example (ABAB), original (iambic tetrameter)

(A) I held the page up to the light, 
(B) And let the margin show; 
(A) The line looked simple, sharp, and right, 
(B) Until it couldn't go. 

Non-rhyming example (unrhymed quatrain), original

I opened the window and heard the street.
Somewhere a door shut softly.
The air changed.
My thought changed with it.

Non-rhyming example (unrhymed quatrain), original

The sentence turns, but does not chime.
I want the meaning more than the bell.
A quatrain can still be a room
Even without a latch on the sound.

Ballade

A ballade (not to be confused with a "ballad," which is a different thing entirely, because English spelling exists primarily to cause suffering) is an Old French verse form typically built from three eight-line stanzas plus an envoy. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbc for each stanza and bcbc for the envoy, with a repeated refrain line at stanza ends. If that sounds complicated, it is. The ballade is the Rubik's Cube of verse forms: there are rules, there is a specific arrangement you are trying to achieve, and most attempts end with at least one piece in the wrong place and a strong desire to throw the whole thing out the window.

The form was perfected by Francois Villon in the fifteenth century, which means it has been tormenting poets for over five hundred years. It was revived in English by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and (gloriously) G.K. Chesterton, who proved that the ballade could be both formally rigorous and genuinely funny -- a combination that many people consider impossible and that Chesterton considered Tuesday.

The refrain is the key. That repeated final line of each stanza creates a drumbeat of return, a phrase that accumulates meaning with each repetition. Done well, the refrain changes its resonance every time it appears, saying the same words but meaning something different. Done badly, it sounds like a parrot with a one-track mind.

Rhyming example (ABABBCBC + refrain), original (iambic pentameter-ish)

(A) I came to write, not knowing where I'd land, 
(B) To test a rhyme and let the thought be true; 
(A) The line would turn, as if it understood, 
(B) And give me back the sound I'd overdo; 
(B) I held it close, then let it breathe again, 
(C) I cut it short, then stretched it anew; 
(B) I wrote my doubt in ink, not in my head-- 
(C) And ended with the line I must redo. 

Rhyming example (ABABBCBC + refrain), original (tetrameter feel)

(A) I learned the rule, I broke the rule, 
(B) I kept the rhymes in view; 
(A) I found the line that left me cold, 
(B) Then warmed it up anew. 
(B) I took the word that would not stay, 
(C) And made it say what's true; 
(B) And when I doubt the next right step, 
(C) I end where I began: with you. 

Non-rhyming example (ballade-shaped, no end rhyme), original

I came to write, not knowing where I'd land.
I tested sound, but did not make it chime.
I turned the sentence over in my hand.
I let it end without a closing time.
I kept one line and returned to the line.
I kept one line and returned to the line.
I kept one line and returned to the line.
I kept one line and returned to the line.

Non-rhyming example (ballade-shaped, no end rhyme), original

The stanza repeats its last sentence.
The stanza repeats its last sentence.
This is how obsession is built.
This is how obsession is built.
The envoy arrives like an afterthought.
The envoy arrives like an afterthought.
Nothing rhymes, but everything echoes.
Nothing rhymes, but everything echoes.

Coupled rhyme

Coupled rhyme is a run of rhyming couplets: AA BB CC and onward, like a string of pearls or a row of dominoes or, if I am being honest, a very determined poet refusing to let go of the letter A until they absolutely have to. A couplet is a pair of successive rhyming lines, often of the same length, and there is something deeply satisfying about the form: each pair is a small, complete unit, a little room with a door that clicks shut. Two lines. One rhyme. Done. On to the next.

The couplet is one of the oldest and most versatile units in English verse. Chaucer used it (in iambic pentameter) for The Canterbury Tales. Pope used it (also in iambic pentameter) for his satires. Dryden used it for his translations. And approximately every nursery rhyme you know uses it (in tetrameter) because couplets are easy to remember, easy to recite, and deeply pleasing to the human brain, which likes its patterns the way it likes its socks: in pairs.

Rhyming example (AABBCC), from "An Essay on Criticism"

(A) 'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill 
(A) Appear in writing or in judging ill; 
(B) But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' offence 
(B) To tire our patience, than mislead our sense. 
(C) Some few in that, but numbers err in this, 
(C) Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss; 

Rhyming example (AABBCC), original

(A) I trust the line that ends in sound; 
(A) I trust the next that turns it round. 
(B) I set two rhymes, then set two more, 
(B) And feel the stanza find its door. 
(C) By six I know just what I've done: 
(C) A string of bells, not just one. 

Non-rhyming example (couplet-shaped, unrhymed), original

I wrote two lines and let them sit together.
They did not rhyme; they simply belonged.

I wrote two more and let them answer quietly.
The ear can hear pairing without chiming.

I wrote two more and ended without a snap.
Some endings close like hands, not locks.

Non-rhyming example (couplet-shaped, unrhymed), original

This is a couplet by layout.
This is a couplet by layout.

The poem leans on spacing.
The poem leans on spacing.

Even unrhymed, the pair feels intentional.
Even unrhymed, the pair feels intentional.

Enclosed rhyme

Enclosed (or envelope) rhyme is ABBA -- a pattern where the first and last lines of the stanza rhyme with each other, and the two middle lines rhyme with each other, creating a kind of sonic sandwich. (The technical term is "envelope," not "sandwich," but I find the sandwich metaphor more honest.) The outer rhymes wrap around the inner ones like arms around a child, or like parentheses around a subordinate clause, which is why this pattern often feels meditative, circular, and emotionally contained.

The most famous example in English is Tennyson's In Memoriam, which uses ABBA quatrains for 131 cantos -- a feat of sustained formal discipline that would be impressive even if the poem weren't also about the death of his best friend. The enclosed rhyme gives the poem a feeling of thoughts turning inward, of grief folding back on itself, of endings that return to beginnings. It is the perfect rhyme scheme for a poem about loss, because loss is itself a kind of enclosure: the thing you have lost is always in the center, and everything else wraps around it.

Rhyming example (ABBA), from In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: [Prelude]

(A) Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
(B) Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
(B) By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
(A) Believing where we cannot prove; 

The Poetry Foundation explicitly cites ABBA as an enclosed/envelope quatrain pattern (with "In Memoriam" as an example).

Rhyming example (ABBA), original

(A) I wrote the first line like a closed in door, 
(B) Then hid the middle thoughts in si-lence deep, 
(B) So they could turn and talk themselves asleep; 
(A) At last the outer rhyme came back once more. 

Non-rhyming example (ABBA-shaped stanza, no rhyme), original

I start with a statement.
I move inward to qualification.
I move inward again to a deeper turn.
I return to the statement changed.

Non-rhyming example (ABBA-shaped stanza, no rhyme), original

The outer lines mirror each other in idea.
The inner lines mirror each other in tone.
Nothing rhymes at the edge.
But the stanza still feels enclosed.

Simple four-line rhyme

The "simple four-line rhyme" -- ABCB -- is the classic ballad-quatrain pattern, and it is one of the most forgiving and enduring forms in English verse. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme; the first and third are free to end on whatever sound they please. This creates a looser, more conversational feel than ABAB, because the reader is not waiting for two rhymes per stanza but only one. It is the metrical equivalent of a handshake rather than a bear hug: friendly, sufficient, and not overly committed.

The ballad tradition -- those great anonymous narrative poems of the medieval period, full of murders, ghosts, doomed lovers, and talking birds -- runs almost entirely on ABCB. Coleridge used it for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Dickinson used it for most of her poems, though she hid the pattern behind her dashes and slant rhymes the way a cat hides behind a curtain while remaining perfectly visible. It is a form that says "I am telling you a story," and stories, unlike arguments, do not need the tight logical closure that couplets or ABAB provide.

Rhyming example (ABCB), from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(A) It is an ancient Mariner, 
(B) And he stoppeth one of three. 
(C) 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, 
(B) Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? 

The ballad tradition is associated with rhymed ABCB quatrains, and this is a textbook example of the form.

Rhyming example (ABCB), original

(A) I met a line that would not rhyme, 
(B) It just refused to do; 
(C) It kept its meaning close to home, 
(B) And left the chime for you. 

Non-rhyming example (ballad-quatrain shape, no rhyme), original

I tell a story in four lines.
I make the second line feel like a hinge.
The third line swerves.
The fourth line lands without chime.

Non-rhyming example (ballad-quatrain shape, no rhyme), original

The stanza wants a chorus.
The stanza wants a turn.
I give it neither rhyme nor refrain.
But I keep the narrative pressure.

Limerick

A limerick is a fixed light-verse form of five (generally) anapestic lines with rhyme scheme AABBA. It is simultaneously one of the most rigidly structured and most gleefully anarchic forms in English. The structure is strict: three longer lines (the first, second, and fifth) rhyme with each other, and two shorter lines (the third and fourth) rhyme with each other. The content, however, is traditionally as undignified as possible.

The limerick was popularized by Edward Lear in the nineteenth century, though Lear's limericks are tame by modern standards -- he had a habit of making the last line a mild variation of the first, which, frankly, feels like a missed opportunity. The form reached its true potential in the hands of anonymous versifiers in pubs and barracks rooms, where the anapestic bounce and the AABBA snap were discovered to be the ideal delivery system for jokes that cannot be repeated in polite company.

The anapestic meter is essential to the limerick's character. Those two unstressed syllables before each stress create a rollicking, tumbling energy that is almost impossible to take seriously. You cannot write a tragic limerick. (You can try. People have tried. It does not work. The meter keeps grinning at you like a drunk uncle, and eventually you give in.) The form is proof that rigid structure and wild content are not enemies but co-conspirators.

Rhyming example (AABBA), original

(A) There once was a poet in spring, 
(A) Who made ev'ry comma a thing; 
(B) But the rhymes ran away, 
(B) So I wrote it this way, 
(A) And the last line came back with a ring. 

Rhyming example (AABBA), classic limerick cited in teaching materials (Lear example)

(A) There was an Old Lady of Chertsey,
(A) Who made a remarkable curtsey;
(B) She twirled round and round,
(B) Till she sunk under ground,
(A) Which distressed all the people of Chertsey.

Note how Lear's last line circles back to the first line's rhyme word, creating a feeling of comic inevitability. The Old Lady of Chertsey is trapped not just underground but inside her own rhyme scheme, which is either profound or silly depending on how much coffee you have had.

Non-rhyming example (limerick-shaped, no end rhyme), original

There once was a writer at midnight
who counted the beats as a comfort
the short middle lines
fell quick like a sigh
and the ending arrived without echo

Non-rhyming example (limerick-shaped, no end rhyme), original

I keep the stride and the turn.
I keep the stubby third and fourth line.
I drop the rhyme entirely.
It becomes a limerick skeleton.
It still wants to be funny.

Monorhyme

Monorhyme means all lines share the same end rhyme: AAAA, on and on, as far as the poet dares to go. It is rarer in English than in some other traditions (Arabic and medieval Latin poetry made extensive and beautiful use of it), partly because English has fewer rhymes for any given sound than, say, Italian, and partly because a monrhyme stanza in English can very quickly start to sound like a list of words from a rhyming dictionary rather than a poem.

But when it works, it works. The relentless return of the same sound creates a feeling of obsession, incantation, or inescapability. The poem keeps circling back to the same sonic destination, like a dog returning to the same spot on the carpet. (A noble dog. A literary dog.) The challenge is to make each line feel fresh and meaningful even though it ends in the same place every time, which is harder than it sounds and sounds harder than it is, which is a sentence that probably should have been a monorhyme.

Rhyming example (AAAA), original

(A) I wrote my fear and ended it with night, 
(A) I hid my doubt and ended it with night, 
(A) I said "be brave," and ended it with night, 
(A) Then learned the dawn can also rhyme with night. 

Rhyming example (AAAA), original

(A) The line will end where ev'ry line must end: "more," 
(A) I push it on, I pull it back to "more," 
(A) I give the thought a doorway made of "more," 
(A) And hear the stanza ring itself to "more." 

Non-rhyming example (four lines, no rhyme), original

I try the monorhyme trick without rhyming.
It becomes repetition of tone.
The ear stops expecting a chime.
The emphasis moves elsewhere.

Non-rhyming example (four lines, no rhyme), original

One sound can unify a stanza.
Without that sound, unity can be syntax.
Or image.
Or sheer insistence.

Terza rima

Terza rima is made of tercets (three-line stanzas) with interwoven rhymes: ABA BCB CDC..., typically continuing as long as the poem wants, and often closing with a couplet or single line that seals the chain. It is the metrical equivalent of a zipper: each stanza is locked to the one before it and the one after it by a shared rhyme, creating a forward momentum that is almost impossible to resist. You cannot stop reading terza rima in the middle of a stanza, because the middle rhyme has already promised you a resolution in the next stanza, and so on, and so on, until you reach the end of the poem or the end of the universe, whichever comes first.

The form was invented by Dante Alighieri for The Divine Comedy, which is the single most influential poem in Western literature and also, at 14,233 lines, proof that Dante had strong opinions about both the afterlife and the virtue of not stopping. The interlocking rhyme scheme mirrors the poem's structure: everything is connected, every circle of Hell leads to the next, every sin is linked to its punishment, and every tercet is linked to its neighbors by sound. The form is the argument.

In English, terza rima is challenging because English has fewer rhymes than Italian (where every third word seems to end in "-are," "-ire," or "-one"). But Shelley managed it brilliantly in Ode to the West Wind, and Frost gave it a characteristically understated twist in "Acquainted with the Night."

Rhyming example (ABA BCB CDC...), from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

(A) O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
(B) Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
(A) Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 

(B) Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
(C) Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 
(B) Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

(C) The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 
(D) Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
(C) Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Terza rima is defined by these interlocking tercet rhymes, and Shelley is a canonical English example. Notice how the B rhyme in the first tercet ("dead") becomes the anchor of the second tercet ("red/bed"), pulling you forward through the poem like a chain being drawn through a pulley.

Rhyming example (ABA BCB CDC), original

(A) I try to write without a map to day, 
(B) But find a rhyme that pulls me on again, 
(A) It leads my thought where I would not yet stay. 

(B) The next line borrows sound and makes it plain, 
(C) So I must search for words I did not plan, 
(B) And let the form be part of what I gain. 

(C) Each new third line requires a new command, 
(D) And so the poem moves--unbroken, tight-- 
(C) A chain that makes the ending understand. 

Non-rhyming example (terza-rima-shaped tercets, no rhyme), original

I write in tercets.
I let the second line feel like a bridge.
But I do not rhyme the bridge.

I let sound-linking happen inside the line.
I let consonants answer each other.
I keep the chain as an idea, not a chime.

Non-rhyming example (tercets, no rhyme), original

Three lines at a time:
statement,
turn,
arrival.
No rhyme. Still a forward pull.

Triplet

A triplet is a tercet where all three lines rhyme: AAA. If terza rima is a chain, the triplet is a knot -- three lines tied together so tightly that the stanza feels like a single, concentrated unit. There is a feeling of inevitability in a triplet, of a point being made three times for emphasis, like a lawyer summarizing their closing argument or a parent telling you to clean your room.

The triplet shows up most often as a variation within a longer couplet-based poem -- Dryden and Pope both drop in occasional triplets to break the monotony of heroic couplets, the way a drummer drops in a triplet fill to keep things interesting. On its own, the AAA pattern is intense: three consecutive rhymes on the same sound create a feeling of hammering insistence that can be powerful in small doses and exhausting in large ones.

Rhyming example (AAA), original

(A) I wrote it fast to make it stay, 
(A) I wrote it small to make it stay, 
(A) I wrote it true to make it stay. 

Rhyming example (AAA), original

(A) The word "alone" returned again, 
(A) It beat like rain, like rain, like rain, 
(A) It made my throat remember pain. 

Non-rhyming example (three-line stanza, unrhymed), original

I keep three lines.
I let them hang together.
I refuse the easy echo.

Non-rhyming example (three-line stanza, unrhymed), original

A triplet without rhyme is just a tercet.
Which is still useful.
It just speaks differently.

Villanelle

A villanelle is a highly structured form that combines repetition, rhyme, and obsession into nineteen lines of tightly wound music. The structure: five tercets followed by a quatrain, with only two rhyme sounds in the entire poem, and two refrains -- the first and third lines of the opening stanza -- that alternate throughout the poem and then appear together, side by side, in the final couplet of the closing quatrain.

If that sounds like a recipe for madness, it is. The villanelle is the form you choose when you want to say the same thing over and over again and have it mean something different every time. Poets.org gives a compact scheme using refrains: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.

The most famous villanelle in English is Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," which proves that the form's obsessive repetition can be not just tolerable but devastating. When Thomas repeats "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," the repetition is not redundancy but urgency: a son begging his father not to die, saying the same thing over and over because saying it once is not enough, could never be enough.

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is the other canonical example, and it demonstrates the opposite possibility: the villanelle as a vehicle for ironic understatement, where the repeated refrain ("The art of losing isn't hard to master" / "the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster") becomes increasingly unconvincing as the losses the poem describes become increasingly catastrophic. The form's insistence that everything is fine makes it devastatingly clear that nothing is fine.

Rhyming example (famous excerpt): One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (villanelle opening lines)

(A) The art of losing isn't hard to master;
(B) So many things seem filled with the intent
(A) To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The villanelle form is explicitly defined on Poetry Foundation and Poets.org, and this poem is featured as a key example.

Non-rhyming example (villanelle-shaped refrains, no end rhyme), original (first two tercets + final quatrain only)

I keep returning to the same first line.
I keep returning to the same third line.
That is the point: return.

The stanza turns, but does not need a chime.
The stanza turns, but does not need a chime.
That is the point: return.

I keep returning to the same first line.
I keep returning to the same third line.
Both arrive together, insisting.

Non-rhyming example (villanelle logic, no rhyme), original (miniature demonstration)

Refrain A1: I said it once; I have to say it again.
line: the world changes, but the sentence stays.
Refrain A2: the second refrain waits its turn.

line: I try to move on; the form pulls me back.
line: I try to move on; the form pulls me back.
Refrain A1: I said it once; I have to say it again.

Mixing the dials

When I'm drafting, I think of metrical feet as the beat-unit, line length as breath-span, and rhyme scheme as the architecture of expectation. These three variables are independent -- you can combine them in any permutation -- but they interact in ways that are worth thinking about before you start writing, in the same way that it is worth thinking about what key, tempo, and time signature you want before you start composing a song. You can figure it out as you go, but you will save yourself a lot of revision if you make a few deliberate choices up front.

Here is a rough guide to some combinations and what they tend to produce:

• Iambic pentameter + no rhyme (blank verse) when you want seriousness without sing-song -- especially for argument, drama, or narrative that needs room to turn mid-line. This is the form of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's epics, and Wordsworth's autobiographical meditations. It sounds like elevated speech, like someone thinking carefully in real time. It is the closest thing English has to a "default" serious verse form, and there is no shame in reaching for it, the same way there is no shame in reaching for a hammer when you need to drive a nail.

• Iambic pentameter + couplet rhyme (heroic couplets) when you want wit, argument, or epigrammatic snap. This is Pope's territory, and Dryden's: verse that thinks in pairs, that sets up and knocks down, that makes you feel clever for following the argument and then makes you feel foolish for agreeing with it. The tight rhyme creates a sense of logical inevitability that is perfect for satire, because satire works by making the absurd seem rational.

• Iambic tetrameter + ABCB or ABAB rhyme when you want a ballad or a song. This is the form of the English folk tradition, of Emily Dickinson, of A.E. Housman. It is compact, musical, and easy to memorize, which is why it has survived for centuries in oral tradition. If you want your poem to feel like it has always existed, use this combination.

• Trochaic tetrameter + strong couplet rhyme when you want incantation, urgency, or a chantlike forward shove. This is Blake's "Tyger" territory: verse that does not ask but demands, that does not observe but declaims. The falling rhythm plus the tight rhyme creates a feeling of relentless forward motion, like a spell being cast.

• Anapests + limerick or tight stanza rhyme when you want speed, comedy, or a little controlled chaos. The anapestic bounce makes everything feel lighter and faster, even when the subject is serious (as Byron demonstrated). Combined with rhyme, it creates an almost irresistible forward momentum that sweeps the reader along before they have time to object.

• Dactylic hexameter when you want something epic, ceremonial, or sweeping -- even (especially) without rhyme. This is the meter of Homer and Virgil, of Longfellow's Evangeline, of anything that wants to sound like it is being carved in stone. It is not a subtle form. It is the form you choose when you want to be heard from a great distance.

And then there's the practical truth: even in strict meter, English verse typically uses substitutions -- trochaic inversions, spondaic weight, pyrrhic lightness -- to avoid monotony and to make stress follow meaning. A perfectly regular line of iambic pentameter sounds like a machine. An iambic pentameter line with a trochaic inversion at the start and a spondee in the middle sounds like a person. The substitutions are not violations of the meter; they are the meter breathing.

If you take one thing from my obsessive scansion habits, it's this: form isn't a cage. It's a mixing board with half a dozen knobs, and you can turn each one independently until the poem sounds like what you mean. The best formal poets are not the ones who follow the rules most rigidly but the ones who understand the rules well enough to know exactly when and how to break them.

Mixed feet

Mixed metrical feet show up all the time in "regular" English meters, and there are also forms where mixing different feet is the rule, not an exception. Understanding this is important, because one of the most common misconceptions about meter is that it requires robotic regularity -- that an "iambic pentameter" poem must be five perfect iambs in every single line, and any deviation is a failure. This is not true. It has never been true. It would be awful if it were true.

A quick way to think about the spectrum of mixing:

• Substitution (light-to-moderate mixing): a poem has a "default" meter (say, iambic pentameter), but poets swap in other feet (trochees, spondees, anapests) in specific places for emphasis or variety. This is the most common kind of mixing, and virtually every metrical poem in English does it. It is the salt and pepper of verse: you do not notice it until it is missing, at which point the poem tastes bland.

• Composite / "made of multiple feet" meters (methodical mixing): the line is built from a fixed sequence of different feet. The sapphic stanza (which we will examine below) is a perfect example: each line follows a specific recipe of trochees and dactyls, and the mix is not a deviation from the pattern but is the pattern. This is the literary equivalent of a cocktail recipe: two parts trochee, one part dactyl, shake vigorously.

• Stress-counting systems (methodical mixing): the poem keeps a fixed number of stresses per line, while the unstressed syllables vary freely. This produces lots of different feet systematically and was the basis for Gerard Manley Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," as well as the English dolnik (a tradition that runs from Coleridge through Auden and Eliot). In a stress-counting system, the meter is defined by what stays the same (the number of stresses) rather than by what varies (everything else), which makes it simultaneously more flexible and harder to describe, like a jazz musician who can play in any key but cannot read sheet music.

Below are two concrete examples (one "everyday" and one very methodical), plus an original demonstration where the feet are deliberately mixed in a repeating pattern.

Substitution in Shakespeare

Shakespeare's blank verse is "iambic pentameter," but he constantly varies it. Every good poet does. The question is never "did the poet deviate from perfect meter?" (they did) but "why did they deviate here, and what effect does it create?" A famous line that starts with a trochee (a common substitution called "initial inversion") is:

Now is the winter of our discontent

One plausible scansion:

Now is | the win | ter of | our dis | content
trochee   iamb    iamb    iamb    iamb

So the line is mostly iambs, but it begins with a trochee -- mixed feet, but still inside a clear underlying meter. The trochee makes "Now" land with extra force, which is exactly right for the opening word of a play. Richard III is not easing into his monologue; he is announcing himself, and the trochee is his entrance music.

Sapphic stanza (Swinburne)

A Sapphic stanza is a classic example of planned mixing: each of the first three lines is built from a set sequence of feet, then the fourth line ("adonic") is a shorter mixed pattern. The form was invented by the Greek poet Sappho (hence the name), and it was later adopted by the Roman poet Horace, who made it a standard lyric form in Latin verse. In English, the form has been attempted by various poets since the Renaissance, with results ranging from "triumphant" to "well, they tried."

In accentual (stress-based) terms, the pattern is commonly taught like this:

• Sapphic line (repeated 3x): trochee | trochee | dactyl | trochee | trochee (/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u)
• Adonic line (line 4): dactyl | trochee (/ u u | / u)

Here's the opening stanza of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Sapphics":

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of Iron Stood and beheld me.

Scanned (one readable stress-based way):

All the | night sleep | came not up | on my | eye-lids
T         T            D            T       T

Shed not | dew, nor | shook nor un| closed a | feath-er
T         T           D            T         T

Yet with | lips shut | close and with | eyes of | i-ron
T         T            D             T       T

Stood and be| held me
   D        T

What makes this "methodical mixing" is that the mix is baked into the form: you're supposed to combine trochees and dactyls in those slots. There is no "default" foot being violated; the combination is the default. It is like a quilt made of two different fabrics: the pattern requires both.

(Note: with any scansion, especially in English, there can be small differences depending on how you voice a phrase -- but the underlying sapphic template is the key point. If your scansion differs slightly from mine, congratulations: you are a person with ears, and ears disagree.)

Designed mixed-foot pattern

Here's an example where the feet are heavily mixed on purpose in the same repeating order each line. This is not a historical form but an original demonstration of what happens when you commit to a specific, repeating sequence of different feet:

Pattern per line: iamb | trochee | anapest | dactyl (u / | / u | u u / | / u u)

We see | sunlight | in the remote | wilderness
iamb     trochee    anapest         dactyl

We hear | midnight | in the below | murmuring
iamb      trochee    anapest        dactyl

We feel | frostbite | on the ground | silently
iamb      trochee     anapest        dactyl

We turn | homeward | afternoon | wearily
iamb      trochee     anapest      dactyl

That's "methodical" because the mixing is systematic and repeatable, not occasional substitutions. Each line follows the same recipe: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl. The effect is strange and incantatory -- the ear keeps adjusting to a new rhythm within each line, which creates a feeling of restlessness or searching that would be impossible to achieve with a single, uniform foot.

Free verse

Having spent several thousand words discussing the elaborate architecture of metrical verse, I should pause to acknowledge the elephant in the room: most contemporary poetry is written in free verse. And free verse, despite what its name suggests, is not the absence of form. It is the absence of predetermined form. There is a difference, and it is an important one.

A free verse poem does not have a set number of feet per line, a required rhyme scheme, or a fixed stanza pattern. But it still has rhythm (all language does), and the poet still makes deliberate choices about line length, line breaks, repetition, syntax, and sound. The difference is that these choices are made on a line-by-line, poem-by-poem basis rather than being dictated by a form chosen in advance.

Think of it this way: writing in meter is like dancing a waltz. The steps are predetermined, and the skill lies in executing them with grace and personality. Writing in free verse is like improvising on a dance floor. There are no predetermined steps, but there are still rhythms to follow, partners to respond to, and the very real possibility of falling on your face.

The reason I bring this up in a post about meter is that understanding metrical form makes you a better free verse poet, not a worse one. If you know what an iamb sounds like, you can use iambic rhythms in your free verse when you want the feeling of regularity -- and break them when you want the feeling of disruption. If you understand how a caesura works, you can place one in the middle of a free verse line and know exactly what effect it will have. If you have internalized the feel of pentameter, you can write a free verse line that is almost pentameter, and the reader will feel the ghost of the form even though they cannot name it.

Free verse is not the rejection of everything in this post. It is the internalization of everything in this post, followed by the decision to apply it selectively rather than systematically. The best free verse poets -- Whitman, Williams, Bishop, Heaney -- knew their meters cold. They just chose not to use them all the time, the way a jazz musician who has memorized every scale chooses which notes to play and which to leave out.

Conclusion

If you have made it this far -- and if you have, you deserve a medal, or at least a beverage of your choice -- you have traveled from the humble iamb to the exotic sapphic stanza, from the snap of a heroic couplet to the relentless chain of terza rima, from the gasping brevity of dimeter to the oceanic sprawl of hexameter. You have met spondees that stop you in your tracks and pyrrhics that let you float. You have seen how a trochaic inversion can make a single word hit like a hammer, and how a caesura can make a pause speak louder than the words around it.

And the central lesson, the one I hope you carry away from all of this, is simple: these are tools, not rules. A metrical foot is not a commandment; it is an option. A rhyme scheme is not a prison; it is a floor plan. A line length is not a constraint; it is a breath.

The poet is, in the end, a sound engineer. You have a mixing board in front of you with knobs labeled "foot," "line length," "rhyme," "caesura," "enjambment," "substitution," and a dozen others. Each one controls a different dimension of the poem's music. Your job is not to set them all to the same position, or to follow a manual that tells you where each knob should go. Your job is to listen -- to the poem, to the language, to the meaning you are trying to make -- and to turn each knob until the sound matches the sense.

Sometimes that means writing a perfect Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter with an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, because the form's architecture is exactly what the poem needs. Sometimes it means writing a free verse poem with no regular meter and no end rhyme, because the thought refuses to be contained by any predetermined pattern. And sometimes -- often, in fact -- it means something in between: a poem that starts in iambic pentameter and then breaks into shorter lines when the emotion intensifies, or a poem that uses slant rhyme instead of perfect rhyme because the subject is slightly off-kilter and the sound should be too.

The point is not which tools you use. The point is that you know they exist, that you understand what each one does, and that when you reach for one, you reach for it on purpose.

Now go write something. And if it scans, so much the better. And if it doesn't scan, make sure it doesn't scan on purpose.

I. Threshold

You were eight months into this bright, baffling world—
eight months of milk-breath and clenched wonder—
when I met you.

Not a thunderclap.
Not a prophecy.
Just a doorway inside my ribs
opening on its quiet hinge
the instant your eyes took hold of mine.

Your mother—my beloved—
set you into the air between us,
and for a heartbeat the room went hushed,
as if even the curtains leaned in.

You did not know the word father.
You knew weight, warmth, return—
the grammar a baby speaks with her whole body.

You offered one hand,
a small question made of fingers.
I answered with my hands
and with the only vow that matters to an infant:

I stay.

From that first staying,
something crossed—
a single bright strand of me,
fine as dust in a sunbeam—
and settled softly inside you,
not as a claim,
as a beginning.

II. Choosing

Now you are ten months of morning,
two months of my learning your weather:
your sudden suns, your quiet moons,
the way you study faces
as if each one is a continent
you are deciding to trust.

Each day I am with you
that strand thickens—
not by force,
by returning.

Some families are inherited.
Ours is composed.

We chose each other
in the small, honest court of the living room,
with vows written in ordinary acts:
a bottle warmed at midnight,
a blanket found and tucked back in,
a lullaby hummed until the tears loosen.

Adoption is not an absence.
It is a second birth of the heart—
a yes made deliberate,
a home built from consent and care.

To be given you this way
is to be gifted twice:
first by love,
then by choice.

And I—astonished—
keep answering your reaching
with my staying.

III. The Hidden Harp

Listen, little one—

Inside your ribs there is music,
a small instrument the world cannot steal.
Sometimes it shows itself as laughter,
sometimes as the fierce hush of concentration,
sometimes as the way you lean into sleep
like a tide leaning into shore.

I hear it most clearly
when the house is dim
and your breathing turns steady:

a harp-song without words,
thin gold strings under the skin,
plucked by the patient hand of life.

This is the sound
of your true self practicing.

When the world grows loud,
return to that music.
When they try to tune you to their noise,
keep your own key.

Know this:
my love has slipped into that song
the way moonlight slips into water—
not to drown your melody,
to hold it.

Day by day,
the harmony deepens.

IV. The Guardian

And deeper still—
beyond even music—
there is a watcher in you.

Not a fairy-tale wing.
Not a borrowed halo.
A fierce, private brightness
assigned to you alone.

In the old Thelemic tongue, they call it
your Holy Guardian Angel—
the truest you given a name,
your inner star behind every veil,
your clear will at the center of your chest
saying: be what you are.

I will spend my life protecting that center.
I will not try to own it,
or speak over it.
I will help you hear it
when the days get complicated.

And here is my secret work,
done without ceremony:

I have braided a thread of my own spirit
into the hem of that guardian’s robe,
so you will carry my staying
even when you walk beyond my reach.

If I am taken from you—
if my bones become quiet
and my voice is only remembered warmth—
I will not vanish.

I will be there
as a calm note in your guardian,
as moonwater in your blood,
as the soft insistence that says: return.

So long as you do not forget yourself,
so long as you keep faith with your own inner light,
you will find me—
not in the sky,
but in the place where you are most you.

V. Sun and Moon

You are the sun in my life—
fire-energy:

transcendence in a small body,
warmth that turns rooms into home,
strength that makes purpose from mere hours,
a radiance that teaches even the day
how to be brave.

I cannot be that blaze.
But I will be your moon.

I will be water-energy at your shoulder:
peace, and soul, and the slow art of tranquility;
patience that does not tire;
kindness that keeps returning;
forgiveness that turns sharp edges soft again.

I will take your light into me
and give it back to you
when you need it most—
not brighter,
not louder,
just steady.

I will be the light that waits awake in the hallway.
The hinge that closes with mercy.
The mast that holds its silence through weather.
The shore that stays
while waves do what waves must do.

I will do everything in my power
to guard your long happiness and your safety—
not by shrinking your world,
but by making it sturdy enough
for you to grow wide.

And if I reach for the best in me,
it is only because you already live there.

You are the best part of me
walking around outside my body,
laughing, learning, becoming.

Let me return what you have given:
this softened heart,
this purpose,
this sudden holiness of ordinary days.

Sleep now, little one.
Let the house go dark without fear.
Let your guardian keep its bright watch.
Let your inner harp keep singing
even in silence.

I am here.
I am yours by choice.
And the strand of me in you
will keep growing—
as surely as the moon
draws the sea toward home.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A poem I wrote for my daughter, Harper, for her to read when she gets older.

I

I sought you first for splendour—
as boys seek brass upon the breast, or lovers seek a name
carved deep in bark to outlast weather.
I wanted the shining proof of you,
a bright device to wear above my ordinary days,
and set my heart between two inward columns
as if a hall could be raised by pride alone.
I hung my silence with imaginary banners,
and called the trembling in my blood reverence.

Yet you came, not with trumpets,
but with the mild insistence of a wick finding its oil—
a low flame, honey-coloured, patient as a bee’s work,
and all my finery turned in that light
to something thin, like gilt on cheap wood.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

II

I sought you then for comfort—
as the tired seek a threshold and a basin of cool water,
as one pursued by winter seeks any room that holds a little heat.
I asked for the gentle part of mystery:
a charm to set against grief,
a spell to blunt the tooth of memory,
a soft hand laid across the brow.

And you were gentle:
your warmth was like beeswax melting—
a scent of old books, cedar, and clean linen;
your hush was the hush before a vow,
the hush that gathers when a circle closes
and even the proudest breath grows careful.
But comfort is a veil, and you—
you are the lifting of veils.

You widened, you steadied;
you leaned your clarity upon me as moonlight leans
upon a floor of dark and pale—
and what I called “peace” turned to seeing.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

III

O light, you were never ornament.
You were the true angle set against the tongue,
the cold arc of a compass drawn around desire,
the plumb-line dropped straight through the chest
to sound what lies beneath the speech of virtue.
You measured me without malice—
as a star measures a traveller,
as a tide measures a shore.

I began to fear you, then—
not as men fear thunder,
but as men fear mirrors in the morning.
For you made plain the small deceits
that live like soot in the hinge of habit:
the quick, sweet lie; the lazy mercy withheld;
the secret pleasure of being right.
My will, that proud stallion, stamped and flared.

And somewhere in the hush, behind the eyelids,
a phrase rose like incense from a hidden brazier:
thelema—the burning word for will—
and with it, softer than steel yet harder than stone,
the law that is not licence but a yoke of stars:
Love is the law, love under will.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

IV

Then the work began—
not in the hands, but in the inward grain of me.
I had thought myself a temple already,
finished, worthy, roofed in gold.
But you showed me roughness—
not monstrous, not dramatic—
only the ordinary jutting edges of the self,
the places where pride catches cloth and tears it.

So I struck at what was needless—
not with fury, but with rhythm:
a small, steady knocking in the dark,
as if some quiet gavel in my marrow
refused the luxury of despair.
Each blow sent up a little cloud—
motes turning like planets in your beam—
and I learned this strange arithmetic:
what falls away is often what I loved most.

You were an alchemist’s fire, O light:
in your heat the leaden habits softened,
the dull old weights began to run like metal,
blackened first, then paling—
as if the soul must pass through soot and salt
before it can bear the blush of gold.
And still the air was full of drifting witness.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

V

I had imagined mystery as theatre—
a robe, a word, a sudden blaze;
but mystery is also the discipline of the unseen.
It is the hand that smooths what anger cracked,
the careful laying of mercy between living stones,
the trowel of the heart moving in silence
to bind what would fall apart.

So I began to carry you outward—
not as a lantern held high for praise,
but as a hidden flame kept from the wind.
I let you level my gaze
until I could meet the stranger without hunger
for superiority or reward.
I learned to bow to grey hair
as one bows to snowfall—
not because it is weak,
but because it has endured.

I kept a white cloth at the waist of thought—
not a badge, but a reminder:
keep clean hands, keep humble hands,
even when the world is mud.
And a beehive woke beneath my ribs,
a humming industry of care,
where each small sweetness was made from labour,
not from talk.

When widows stood at the edge of winter,
I tried to be a door that did not slam.
When the orphaned heart shivered in the street of the spirit,
I tried to be bread without questions.
When the helpless were hunted by the loud,
I tried to be a shield made of quiet.
When the oppressed bent like grass beneath boots,
I tried to be the hand that lifts—
not to boast of strength, but to restore the spine.
When the downcast spoke in broken syllables,
I tried to be listening, not instruction.
When the rejected wore their shame like a torn coat,
I tried to stitch dignity back into the seam.

And where the common road is held by law—
that hard, necessary iron that keeps the cart from chaos—
I did not spit upon it for the sake of pride;
I honoured the order that lets the weak sleep.
Yet I remembered: obedience without morality
is only a well-swept cage.
So I kept you burning:
a private tribunal of conscience,
a lamp that judges without hatred.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

VI

And you asked of me knowledge—
not the cold hoard of clever men,
but the common stock of understanding,
the shared loaf of meaning broken for the many.
So I opened the book where my heart had been closed,
and let its pages breathe upon my eyes
like a night wind off a river.

I set one candle more in the library of the world.
I spoke a word that loosened another’s fear.
I learned a thing and gave it,
as bees give honey—
not because they are praised,
but because abundance is their nature.
I honoured the bonds of friendship
as one honours a bridge in flood—
by walking it faithfully, by not testing it for sport.

And sometimes—
when the ritual hush came down like snowfall
and the air seemed thick with older names,
when gestures felt like keys turning
in locks I could not see—
I sensed each soul as a star kept under cloth,
each life a point of fire sworn to its own orbit;
and I understood the terrible tenderness of it:
not all stars are kind,
yet all are meant to burn true.

So you made a temple of me, O light—
not a temple of marble,
but of measured hours and reined desire,
of mercy laid carefully like mortar,
of truth squared to the tongue,
of love made obedient to will.
And because you built, you also exposed—
for temples gather dust as surely as cottages do.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

VII

Now I do not ask you to flatter me.
I do not ask you to be soft.
I ask only that you remain—
that you keep your steady, intimate gaze
upon the checkered floor of my days,
upon the twin pillars of my breath,
upon the door of my choosing.

Let your eye be in the flame,
not to terrify, but to teach me
what it means to be seen and not be ashamed.
Let your circle close around my appetite
until my wildness becomes music,
until my “want” becomes “ought,”
until the lead in me remembers gold.

And when I fall—
for dust is faithful, and returns—
give me the humble courage to sweep again,
to strike again, to measure again;
to lift the bowed, to shelter the storm-tossed,
to defend what is pure when purity is mocked,
to hold the old in honour,
to keep the friend,
to steady the trembling,
to raise the crushed,
to comfort the dimming,
to restore the outcast’s face to itself,
to respect the law that guards the small,
to promote the quiet goodness that outlasts noise,
to add my handful of light to the world’s great need.

For this is the true enchantment—
not a word spoken once,
but a life spoken daily,
a vow renewed in ordinary rooms,
a green sprig in ash, a promise in winter:
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust—
so I sweep on, and let the lamp be judge.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A poem I wrote about Freemasonry.

Where mists of silver robe the pilgrim road,
I found a door within the night that sings;
Its lintel carved, an omen of abode,
And laughter rose as if on unseen wings;
There beat a hearth whose coals like roses glowed,
And reined-in Time bowed low and rest bestowed.

The boards swung wide, a whisper: enter, wait,
And candles flamed to music of desire;
A gargoyle spout breathed alchemy of late—
Soft smoke curled up as if from Cupid’s lyre;
Transmuted tears to gold within the fire,
And named me brave who dared the inward choir.

Above the bar, the thoughtful goddess’ brow,
The arctic curtains trembled into glow;
Stern Pallas watched, as if she would avow,
While ravens, warned by wisdom, would not show;
My heart, once winter-locked, regained its throne,
And ruled the hush with warmth it called its own.

I ate from plates that seemed of morning’s glass,
And drank a night that tasted bright as prayer;
The throng, unyoked of debt, let all things pass,
While pixies salted joy into the air;
With manna-clear and amber, feast increased,
Till hunger knelt, delighted and released.

The clocks unhooked their hands from mortal walls,
And set the hours adrift like lanterned seeds;
Untraveled ways grew green through open halls,
And truth came dressed in simple pilgrim’s weeds;
I learned the tender grammar of our needs,
And wrote my soul in what the silence reads.

I have kept watch beneath the moon’s command,
A cavalier whose plume is ash and rain;
I courted storms and kissed the tempest’s hand,
And every wound returned to me as grain;
For love’s deep field is fenced with living reeds,
And peace climbs out where faithful labor bleeds.

If you, dear wanderer, have known this ache,
The candle’s hush that wraps the heart in balm;
If moonlit doors within your dreaming wake,
And all your scattered breath returns to calm;
Draw nearer, friend; let silence tune the lyre,
And lean with me into the waiting fire.

For ink is mercury that seeks the star,
And words are leaves that set the soul to gleam;
I write; the line writes back; we are not far
From arches where the elder heavens dream;
The moon and sun, by odal’s braided sign,
Make twinned horizons answer: thine and mine.

Now take my hand; the tavern walls take wing,
The pages lift; the ink turns auroral;
We step inside the stanza’s living spring,
And feel our pulse become the poem’s choral;
Until no I remains, no you apart—
We are the road, the door, the wine, the heart.

So let the rune within our breaths ignite,
Let every star accord its ancient part;
What once was text now opens into light,
And gilds our joined horizon, heart to heart;
The spell completes: your name and mine unite,
And time bows down to bless our single rite.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Now that I have gotten better at writing poetry I wanted to try to re-write one of my old poems and keep the same story but otherwise rewrite it. This is effectively a rewrite of the following poem: The Mage's Tavern.