AP® English Literature and Composition · Poetry Craft: Meter, Rhythm and Scansion
3.C The Spondee, Pyrrhic, Anapest and Dactyl
These four feet are the main exceptions to the steady weak-STRONG beat: anapests and dactyls use three syllables to speed a line up, while spondees and pyrrhics double up stress or slack to stop or slide it.
Most English verse runs on two-syllable feet, especially the iamb (weak-STRONG), which gives a line its basic walking pace. The four feet here break that pattern on purpose. The anapest (weak-weak-STRONG) and dactyl (STRONG-weak-weak) add a second unstressed syllable, so each beat has farther to travel before it lands. Drawn as bars - short, short, tall for the anapest, tall, short, short for the dactyl - you can see the stretch: two short marks open a gap the voice has to cross quickly to reach the tall one. That gap is what makes anapestic and dactylic lines feel like they are galloping or tumbling forward instead of walking.
The spondee (STRONG-STRONG) and pyrrhic (weak-weak) work on stress itself rather than syllable count. A spondee gives you two tall bars in a row, so the voice lands hard twice with no release between them; the line stalls, the way a sentence stalls on a hard fact. A pyrrhic gives two short bars in a row, so the voice has nothing to push against and slides through almost unheard, often borrowed from the beat on either side to keep the line's overall count honest. Neither foot can sustain a whole poem - try reading only spondees and you will hear how quickly it becomes exhausting, and only pyrrhics would leave no beat to hear at all. They work as substitutions, dropped into an iambic or anapestic line for one or two feet. That is their real job: they are the tools a poet reaches for when the steady background meter needs a jolt or a glide, and they only mean something against that background.
Key terms
- Foot
- A recurring unit of one stressed syllable plus its neighboring unstressed syllables, the basic building block of meter.
- Spondee
- A foot of two stressed syllables in a row, such as 'black rock', which halts the line's rhythm.
- Pyrrhic
- A foot of two unstressed syllables in a row, which lets the line glide without a felt beat.
- Anapest
- A three-syllable foot, weak-weak-STRONG, that widens the stride between beats and speeds a line up.
- Dactyl
- A three-syllable foot, STRONG-weak-weak, that gives a tumbling, falling-away rhythm.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do anapests gallop and dactyls tumble when you draw them as bars?
- How it worksHow does a spondee stop a line dead while a pyrrhic lets it slip by?
- Worked exampleFind the anapests in 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house'.
- Going furtherWhat happens when a spondee and a pyrrhic sit side by side in one line?
Check yourself
End of topic.