The Metre and the Voice
Metre is a duet: an abstract five-beat grid, and the living voice that bends it. This is a scansion bench that teaches iambic pentameter the way you learn an instrument — perform a line and watch three layers at once: the metronome grid, the stresses the dictionary fixes and you cannot move, and your own reading. Where they agree, the line is regular; where a long word forces a stress off the beat, that is a substitution the poem makes; where a small word is free, the departure is yours. Every stress is from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (freely licensed); the tool is honest about exactly where the lookup ends and the craft begins. Twelve canonical lines from Shakespeare to Tennyson, plus your own.
Iambic pentameter is not a cage of ten fixed slots. It is a duet. Underneath the line runs an abstract five-beat pulse — da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Over it runs your voice, which the pulse pulls toward its beats but never fully owns. Some syllables can’t be argued with — the dictionary fixes the stress of almost every word longer than one syllable. The rest — the little words, plus a few that shift with meaning — are yours. The metre lives in the negotiation, and every real line is a slightly different treaty. Below you can watch all three layers at once, and play the line yourself.
The bench
Pick a line, or type your own. The top row is the grid — tall marks are beats. The circles are the stress: filled ● is strong, open ○ is weak. A word longer than one syllable is locked by the dictionary; a one-syllable word is yours to set — click it and read the line your way.
A few words — noun/verb pairs like record or desert — change stress with meaning; the bench marks those as yours to set, never guessing which you meant.
The named departures
Every way a line can pull against the grid has a name. The tool marks a departure forced when a long word’s fixed stress makes it unavoidable, and yours when it is a choice you made on a free syllable. Click any example to load it.
Grid and voice — where certainty ends
This is the honest heart of it. A scansion tool that prints one confident answer for every syllable is lying to you, because English stress is only partly fixed. The dictionary settles the long words — com·PARE is a rising word and nothing you do makes it fall. But a monosyllable has no dictionary stress in a line; the metre leans on it, and you decide whether to lean back. That is why Milton’s “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens…” can be read as a hammering row of spondees or nearly smoothed into iambs, and both are real — the bench colours those syllables as yours, not the poem’s, and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Every stress mark is the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary’s (freely licensed), plus a handful of words it lacks — like “fruitfulness” — each derived from a form it does list and marked as such, not invented. The engine states only what the dictionary makes certain, and flags every monosyllable, secondary stress, and meaning-dependent word as the reader’s to place; it never reports a free syllable’s stress as a fact.
node research/prosody-workshop/verify.mjs re-derives every curated line’s scansion from the dictionary, checks each feature the line is here to teach (Donne’s forced first-foot trochee, Hamlet’s feminine ending, the interpretive spondees), checks that no monosyllable is ever called certain, confirms the browser engine agrees with the reference engine, and drift-checks the built page. Twelve lines, all verbatim from public-domain sources.
The Prosody Workshop
This is the first bench of a workshop being built one instrument at a time — the plan is to teach formal poetry the way you learn an instrument, granularly and by doing: the foot, the line, substitution as expression, then the rhyme lab, then composition studios where the machinery of a sonnet, a villanelle, a sestina is computed live while you write inside it. Next: rhyme (perfect / slant / eye, and the scheme as structure), and elision, the craft this bench names but doesn’t yet automate.