Loose iambic meter

Metrical English poetry comes in two varieties, as proposed by Robert Frost (Frost 1939).

One variety of meter, which following Frost we call ‘strict’, includes the iambic, trochaic, anapaestic and dactylic meters discussed in the previous chapter; in these meters, syllables are grouped into either ternary or binary groups but never with mixtures of binary and ternary. The other variety of meter is ‘loose’, and may at first appear to permit the grouping of syllables into mixtures of both binary and ternary groups within a single line (it is sometimes called ‘iambic-anapaestic’) and admits also one-syllable groups. In this chapter we will show that in loose meters the syllables are grouped into pairs (iambs, trochees) or into triplets (anapaests, dactyls) by parentheses inserted by iterative rules, and that the interactions of this rule with a non-iterative rule of parenthesis insertion generates ungrouped asterisks as part of the sequence, which results in irregular intervals between heads of consecutive Gridline 0 groups.

Loose meters are found in ballads, songs, nursery rhymes and other folk genres, and from Romanticism onwards in art poetry as well. Coleridge claimed to have first introduced loose meter into art poetry in his poem ‘Christabel’, whose beginning we quote in (1).