Scanning is the study of a poem’s rhythm and meter, which provides clues on how it should be read. It involves identifying “feet” and marking strong and weak syllables. Scanning is important in poetry translation and can be found in political speeches and prose works.
Scanning is a word that is used both to refer to the study or scanning of the verse to determine its meter, and to the meter itself. Scanning is an important part of analyzing any verse work, because it provides clues about how the work should be read. Many poets spend a lot of time scanning, finding the perfect arrangements of words to create the desired mood or sound in their finished pieces. Scanning does not require great skills; After reading this article, you should be able to take a piece of verse and think about its scansion, even if you won’t have the experience of years of study that can help form your critical opinion about the piece.
The meter of a poem refers to the rhythm of the verse as it is read. Some poems have an extremely regular, precise metre; Shakespeare’s poem is an example of this. Other works in verse have a more complex or difficult meter to work with; the work of William Carlos Williams, for example, may not seem easily equipped with a meter, but it is. You can identify the meter when reading a piece aloud; even if you haven’t been trained, you may find that your voice falls into a pattern as you read a piece, and reading aloud is one way to identify scanning patterns in a verse composition.
When people analyze a poem’s scan, they often break it down into “feet.” Each foot is a line in the poem and each foot will have a specific scan. In Shakespeare’s work, for example, the scansion is typically iambic, alternating strong and weak accents. The rhythm of “I must compare you to a summer day,” for example, goes ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM, illustrating a classic form of tempo known as iambic pentameter, which means there are five iambs in each foot.
When people look at the scan of a poem, they can use special marking tools around the syllables of the poem to identify them as strong or weak, creating a pattern that can be used to know the scan of the poem. Scanning is one of the reasons why poetry and verse compositions are so difficult to translate, because in addition to translating the meaning of the passage, the translator must also try to capture the scan, which is created with carefully chosen words and accents syllabic.
If you’ve ever composed verses yourself, you know how frustrating scanning can be. It can be extremely difficult to find the ideal words to use in a verse composition, not just because you are looking for the perfect meaning, but because you want to find a word that scans correctly, making sure that the finished product is harmonious to the reader’s ear or of the listener.
You can also identify scanning in other places. Many political speeches, for example, have a specific scan designed to hook listeners and send a clear message on the subject. Scanning also appears in prose works; you may have noticed that some authors have a smoother writing technique that makes their work easier to read, and this is partly due to carefully planned scanning.
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