Prosody: A Practical Guide — with examples from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This guide introduces the principles of prosody — the study of sound patterns in poetry — with examples drawn throughout from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Steve Harris’s 1984 Iron Maiden adaptation. It covers everything from basic stressed and unstressed syllables to the subtleties of secondary stress and interpretive scansion, and includes four interactive exercises.

Topics covered include: metrical feet (iamb, trochee, anapaest, dactyl, spondee); line lengths; ballad metre and its ABCB rhyme scheme; accentual-syllabic versus quantitative metre; secondary stress and why scansion is sometimes a matter of interpretation rather than rule; Coleridge’s metrical variations and their expressive effects; the interplay of metre with sound patterning, enjambment, caesura, and other techniques; Harris’s adaptation of Coleridge’s metre for heavy metal; and an introduction to free verse prosody.