The Little Black Dress of English Verse

     Most of the poetry written in English before the 20th century was metric, and by that we don't mean that it was measured in litres. No -- poetic meter is about 1) what syllables are stressed, and 2) how many stresses there are in a line.
     The other day we talked about iambic verse. "Iambic," remember, means "unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable." As in:

     The RAIN in SPAIN stays MAINly IN the PLAIN.
     The LONEly FERret WENT to FIND a FRIEND.

     You'll notice that there are five pairs of unstressed/stressed syllables in each example. That means that these lines are written in iambic pentameter. (Penta = five, as in "Pentagon.") Iambic pentameter is the meter favored by most of English poetry's heavy hitters, from Shakespeare to Milton to basically anyone who ever wrote a sonnet.

 

     That includes Edna St. Vincent Millay, the wisp of a girl from Maine who took Greenwich Village by storm in the 1920s with her writing and her liberated ways. She took the tradition of men writing sonnets to woo women and turned it right around, as you can see and hear in this poem.