Question

Select the correct answer.
How many feet are in each of these lines from “Easter, 1916” by William Butler Yeats?

Answer 1

Answer:

Huh, I’ve never heard meter called “foot pattern” before. But anyway, I’ll try to respond to this.

Notice I did not say I would “answer” your question. That’s because formal meter is far from the most important thing about this poem. When I look at online analyses of this poem I see it called iambic tetrameter, but that mystifies me because there are dactyls and anapests all over the place. The first line starts with an anapest and finishes with iambs; the second line starts with a dactyl but then switches to spondees; the third line is all anapests; and this irregularity continues throughout the poem.

This is iambic tetrameter (Tennyson):

I hold it true, whate’er befall;

I feel it when I sorrow most;

’Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Now read these lines from Yeats’s poem:

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

There’s none of that “ta-dum ta-dee” of the iambic foot here. There’s some of the leaping and bounding of the anapest, usually at the beginnings of the lines, but the speed of the anapests is repeatedly dragged back by strong spondees and iambs at the ends of the lines. Yeats was a transitional figure who started with mastery of traditional forms and then increasingly loosened them up over time, so that the meter of the poem could better serve the ideas he wanted to put forth, as well as sounding more natural to the 20th-century ear.

I won’t go on, although I dearly love Yeats. Better people than me have written about him and his work. Read it and enjoy it, and don’t worry too much about the matter.

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