Question

Which meter is used in these lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

dactylic hexameter
iambic pentameter
trochaic tetrameter
spondaic dimeter
trochaic trimeter

Answer 1

OTTOMY:




might be wrong :-|

Answer 2

@IrishBoy123 I think it's Iambic pentameter as well. And one day (in my dreams) I might actually work out what the words mean. I get the impression that Iambic P is the sort of "catch all" of "blank verse", and that the other metres are sort of "the frillybits". I don't know what metre "The Charge of the light brigade" is in, and my english book is just out of reach (ie I can't be bothered) ... maybe it's the trochee but that's a desperate guess.

Ahhhhhh the rhythms of rhythm ... or some such ... (weird spelling, come to think of it)

Answer 3

I think that the charge of the light brigade could be a mixture of Trochee and Dactyl.
The idea is to try to convey the spectacular mess that occurred (or heroic failure, as the propaganda people wanted) of the British horse mounted soldiers went up agains the Russian live cannons.
The charge was a mistake, because the Brigade was meant to take the "other" cannons which were the ones the commanding officer could actually see.
So, when the regiment went for the "wrong" cannons and got shredded, the Commanding Officer may have asked "where's my regiment gone ?"

It would have been pretty noisey, and the metre is presumably meant to convey that.
A line such as
"Volley'd and thunder'd" probably gets the message across in the voice of an experienced speaker.

(Above is from a chat I had with someone years ago about this)

I think there's a poem "In Flanders field" which is about the bloodshed on The Somme in ww1. It may contain the line "my love lies bleeding ... " The Anapaest seems to be designed to convey a sense of solemnity. I'd look more for a sense of desperate sorrowful lonely yearning if I've got the poem and things right on this one. However, solemnity might be a start.