Stage One:

To get started, we'll scan the first two lines of W. B. Yeats's sonnet, "Leda and the Swan":

"Scan"? What does that mean?

These lines have a meter, an underlying pattern of stressed and slack syllables. But they follow this pattern with some variations. Scansion is a way of diagramming the relation between the line's individual rhythm, and the unvarying meter.

The meter is iambic pentameter, a line composed of five iambic feet. (In the Reference list, see List of Feet, meter, and names of meters for more details.) If we mark stresses with '/' and slacks with 'x', an iamb is x /. We can use '|' to divide the feet. The underlying meter, then, is

Though lines often vary from this norm, only some kinds of variation are allowed. (For details, see Substitution Rules.)

Stage Two:

To begin, read the first line aloud, slowly. (You have to hear a poem to read it with full understanding.) Listen to which words you emphasize, and which syllables you emphasize within words that have more than one.

The first step is to locate the polysyllables -- the words with more than one syllable. You can check this, and check which syllable gets the main stress, in your dictionary.

Stage Three:

In the first line, two words have more than one syllable: "sudden" and "beating." Each such polysyllable has one stressed syllable. If you aren't sure which syllable is stressed, you can look it up in your dictionary. Here, what the dictionary says is marked in for you, with '/' representing a stressed syllable.

The next step will be to mark the stressed monosyllabic (one-syllable) words. (The Seven-Step Method, in the Reference list, spells out details of what kinds of words usually get stressed. But the ultimate test will always be listening. Read the line aloud again; then go on.)

Stage Four:

In the first line, four monosyllabic words are stressed: two nouns ("blow" and "wings"), an adjective ("great"), and an adverb ("still"). As a rule, substantive terms like these get stress. Little syntactical connectives (like "A" and "the" in this line) don't. (For general principles, see the Reference section, "Seven-Step Method," especially the discussion of "marking monosyllables.")

The next step is simple: mark everything that isn't stressed as a slack (an unstressed syllable), using 'x'.

Stage Five:

Now all the unstressed syllables in the line (both monosyllabic words that aren't stressed, like "a" and "the," and the unstressed syllables of polysyllabic words like "sudden" and "beating") are marked. So every syllable in the line has a mark, either / (stressed) or x (slack).

The next task is to divide the line into feet. See Reference, List of Feet, for a definition of "foot" and a complete list. In this iambic pentameter line, the first, second, third, and last feet of the line are iambs (x/). We'll mark those. The fourth foot ("wings beat-") is two stresses, which makes it a spondee. (The names of all feet are defined in the Glossary.)

Stage Six:

A foot is a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. A majority of them in English are two syllables long; and this pentameter (five-foot line) is in fact a sequence of two-syllable feet: four iambs (x/) and a spondee (//) in the fourth position. This line's done. In some lines, the rule on pyrrhics would make us go one more step, to mark a promoted stress.

Let's go on to the second line. Again, begin by reading it aloud. First we'll see what the polysyllabic stresses are in the line.

Stage Seven:

In the second line, three words have more than one syllable, and get stressed as the dictionary will tell you: "above," "staggering," and "caressed." The first and third are stressed on their second syllables; "staggering" is stressed on its first syllable.

Next, we'll ask which of the monosyllabic words ("the," "girl," "her," "thighs") requires a stress. Part of speech is a good indication -- though remember that your ear is the best indicator of all.

Stage Eight:

"Girl" and "thighs," both nouns, are stressed. If you're having trouble hearing this, try reading the line aloud again and exaggerating the stresses. If you try to stress "the," for instance, you should hear how awkward the result is.

Next, as usual, we'll mark the rest of the syllables as slacks.

Stage Nine:

Now all we need to do is divide the marks into feet. It's a little tricky here because the eleven syllables can't just be broken into pairs. (And the third pair, the x x or pyrrhic at the end of "staggering," wouldn't be legal. See the Reference on Substitution Rules.) Here's a hint: start at the end of the line.

Stage Ten:

The first two feet and the last two are iambs. (In most iambic lines, a majority of feet will be iambs.) The one in the middle is an anapest. Read the line aloud again, and notice how the anapest makes the line's rhythm lurch slightly, just as Leda staggers under the Swan's weight.

That's about it. Some lines get much trickier than these, of course. We haven't yet seen promoted stresses, or a pyrrhic, or a line ending with an extra slack syllable. You'll learn these details in the other tutorials. A good step now would be to review the Seven-Step Method in the Reference list. Then go to the Map and choose another tutorial.