1. Introduction to Scanning Poetry

2. *Inversion
Inversion is a literary technique in which the words of a sentence or phrase are wrenched out of our normal English syntax, or word order.
In English poetry, poets used inversion frequently to accommodate the demands of meter or rhyme.

3. What does it mean to scan poetry?
Scanning is the analysis of a poem to determine its meter.
Meter is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.

4. Iambic
Iamb – A metrical foot in poetry that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
Example: proTECT

5. Trochaic
Trochee – A metrical foot made up of an accented (or stressed) syllable followed by an unaccented (unstressed) syllable.
Examples: TAxi, CAREless, DOUble

6. Dactylic
Dactyl – a metrical foot of three syllables in which the first syllable is stressed and the next two are unstressed.
Examples: TENdency, TENderly, JUliet

7. Anapestic
Anapest – A metrical foot that has two unstressed syllable followed by one stressed.
Examples: by reQUEST

8. Name That Foot Monometer = one foot Dimeter = two feet
Trimeter = three feet
Tetrameter = four feet
Pentameter = five feet
Hexameter = six feet
Heptameter or the septenary = seven feet
Octameter = eight feet

9. What’s the Point?
Sometimes, poets will cheat and change the meter in certain parts of the poem.
These changes allow poet to subtly emphasize the meaning of the poem.
There are three possible kinds of substitution.
1. stressed/unstressed. This is a trochee, and is therefore trochaic substitution.
2. stressed/stressed. This is a spondee, and is therefore spondaic substitution.
3. unstressed/unstressed. This is a pyrrhus, and therefore pyrrhic substitution.

10. Spondaic
Spondee -- a metrical foot of two syllables in which both syllables are stressed.
Example: DIM SEA

11. Pyrrhic Pyrrhic – a metrical foot of two unstressed syllables
Example: “and the”

12. Scanning Exercise
The falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love Double double toil and trouble I am monarch of all I survey Take her up tenderly