Welcome to our poetry corner, where we will discuss a poetic form known as common meter today. Common meter grants authors an easy-to-follow structure with freedom in subject but structure in harmony and tune.

COMMON METER POETRY

Common meter poetry is a poetic form with a structure that easily makes hymns and ballads. This poetry features four-line stanzas known as quatrains that alternate between iambic tetrameter, which includes eight syllables, and iambic tetrameter with six syllables. To increase emphasis and create flow, iambic meter uses metrical feet that alternate unstressed syllables and stressed syllables. Iambic meter is considered speech-like, which creates easy-to-speak lines that contribute to the common meter’s song-like rhythm. Common meter poetry features a rhyme scheme of abab or abcb in its pattern as well. This structure creates poems that are lyrical in verse, inspiring timeless works that relate to varying subjects such as daily activities and conversation or death and memory.

Often associated with common meter, Emily Dickinson took the traditional 19th-century common meter of Protestant hymns to create subversive and diverse poems. She used methods such as slant rhyme, which creates near rhymes, along with unconventional punctuations like dashes to create variations of the common meter form. To generate cadence and song-like quality, she used common meter in her works, such as the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” with the verses, “Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me/ The Carriage held but just Ourselves/ And Immortality.” Her writing, along with other common meter poetry, demonstrates a steady, heartbeat-like flow that is natural and melodious.

EXCERPT FROM “MOON”

On the evening you stole the moon

I whispered in somber

Weave the fright under moonlight and

Don’t forget to wander

But you stared doggedly down on

The Earth beneath Your feet

With little care and much glare

As you watched Earth and I deplete