Hi Everyone! I am so glad you are back as we continue our journey together to learn, understand, read, and write poetry. Today we will be using Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant –“ to learn and understand how a poet uses rhythm in a poem through the form of the poem. Poems are essentially songs. Great songs are written in verse, that is to say that they are written as poems. This is why it is best to read a poem out loud to fully appreciate its strength, power, and beauty.

First we ask ourselves: “Well, why does she [the poet] say it this way then?” When asking ourselves this question we should first look at the structure of the poem. The structure of a poem is called its form. Here, Emily Dickinson is drawing on the long history of “common meter” or “ballad meter” in English. This has been a popular form since the Middle Ages.

Next, we ask ourselves: “Well, what does that mean? What is structure / form of a ‘ballad meter’” poem?” The first part of the answer to that question is to know the poem’s rhythm. Yes, poems have rhythm, like songs. An eight-line ballad meter poem, like this one, uses an alternating rhythm of iambic pentameter (8 syllables) and iambic triameter (6 syllables) What does that mean in English?

It means that each odd-number line has eight syllables, divided up into four “iambs” per line. An iamb is a two-syllable pair that stars with an unstressed (not emphasized) syllable and ends on a stressed one (emphasized): daDUM, with the da being unstressed and the DUM being stressed. This means that in Dickinson’s poem we have four of those in each odd line. Here is the rhythm in the first line (odd numbered line), which the bolded words being stressed (emphasized):

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –   (line 1)

Hear the iambs (the stressed and unstressed syllables)? When you say this line out loud you should hear the following rhythm: daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM.

            For the even-numbered lines you should one less iamb (one less daDUM). Lines in poems that have three iambs (daDUMs) are called iambic trimeter (“tri-“ meaning three), daDUM daDUM daDUM. Here, it is important to know that the iambs occur within single words as well if they are more than one syllable. Each word in the first line was one syllable, so Dickinson got by with using eight words. Here is the second line:

            Success in Circuit lies    (line 2)

As you can see, because the first and third word are two-syllable words, Dickinson is only able to use four words to maintain the ballad form that requires three iambs in the even-numbered lines.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Tomorrow, we will discuss rhyme scheme. Please let me know if you would like too discuss this more in-depth or discuss something else. See you tomorrow!

Ben Crittenden

Anchorage, Alaska