Poetic Meter
Today, the rhythm of poetry. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Rhythm plays such a strong role in poetry. But it’s a tricky part of poetry. In its most obvious form, poetry combines rhythm with rhyme. Like, say,
I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!
Technically speaking, that’s rhymed tetrameter – four beats to each line with an ABAB rhyme scheme. It’s easy to hear and understand when we’re six years old. But you and I are no longer six.
Shakespeare is famous for writing his plays in an iambic pentameter. That is, in five beat lines that’re seldom rhymed. We’re all familiar with that five-beat line, “To be, or not to be, that is the question:” Of course, he wasn’t consistent, but pentameter did set the rhythm of his plays.
And there’s far more to meter than simply punching out beats. I really like Walt Whitman. And therein lies a tale: A friend once told me of a conference where a young man was dissecting Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl. Ginsberg had been a leading light of the Beat Poetry movement in the nineteen-fifties – a rebel using Howl to throw down the gauntlet.
The young man went on about how Ginsberg abandoned poetic discipline. As he talked, my friend watched an old man getting increasingly restive and annoyed. He finally leapt to his feet and said, “Listen, son, I spent five months studying Walt Whitman’s metrics before I wrote Howl.” It was Ginsberg himself!
So what’d he seen in Whitman? Whitman didn’t use rhyme; and he seldom used formal meter. But Ginsberg recognized the force of his rhythmic structure. And I love his poem, To a Locomotive in Winter. It begins ...
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
Whitman catches the rhythm of the moving locomotive. We can feel its engine’s power driving through the winter storm. But: Beneath his free flowing sound, we feel a disciplined poetic structure. Listen as he finishes – as he returns to this idea with a more balanced intensity:
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
Suddenly we feel a pentameter beat. Those three five-beat lines leave us with a visceral sense of those wonderful old steam locomotives.
Steam locomotive in winter. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia)
I’d love to give more examples. Poetry exposes how attuned we are to rhythm. We feel it – listening to music, or just tapping our fingers. Good poetry captures the pulse of that living world around us.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: Howl | The Poetry Foundation
Walt Whitman: To a Locomotive In Winter 1876, (later to be included in his Leaves of Grass.)
Thee for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
Video of steam locomotives in winter.[LJH1]
This Episode first aired on April 22, 2026.