3.C Syllable Stress and the Metrical Foot

English speech is never flat. Say any word of more than one syllable and one part of it rises over the rest: it's not re-PEAT, it's re-PEAT. That built-in unevenness exists before any poet writes a line, because the language itself leans harder on certain syllables. Poets don't invent stress; they arrange it. Scansion is the act of marking that natural rise and fall, usually with a tall bar (/) over a stressed syllable and a short curve (u) over an unstressed one, so the ear's work becomes visible on the page.

To hear which syllable carries the stress, say the word naturally and notice which syllable you could shout a single note on without sounding strange. 'Begin' stresses the second syllable (u /), 'garden' stresses the first (/ u), and 'understand' stresses the third while the first two stay weaker (u u /). Once you can mark individual words this way, you can group the stresses and non-stresses of a whole line into small repeating units called feet. A line of 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' breaks into five such units, each one weak-strong: shall I / com PARE / thee TO / a SUM / mer's DAY. That repeating five-unit pattern is iambic pentameter, and naming the foot and counting how many fit in a line is how a reader describes any meter.

This matters because meter sets up an expectation, and expectation is what a poet can satisfy or break. Once an ear accepts a steady weak-strong beat, a sudden reversed foot or an extra syllable stands out and carries weight, which is the substitution and variation this unit builds toward next.