Tetrameter

   A Page Devoted to Four-Footed Verse

What Is Tetrameter?

"Tetrameter" means "four measures." Verse written in tetrameter has four measures, which are also called feet. In English, the most common foot or measure is the iamb, which is a pair of syllables that follow this pattern: ta TUM. Iambic tetrameter has four such feet, for a total of eight syllables. A line of poetry is in iambic tetrameter if it follows this pattern:
ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM.
Some variation is allowed. An extra or missing syllable may be tolerated, and an occasional reversal of the ta TUM pattern (to TA tum) is common, even desirable as a way to avoid monotony. An example of four lines of tetrameter is the first stanza of the introduction to Milton,by William Blake:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

The tetrameter pattern can be demonstrated by overdoing the rhythm and pronouncing the stanza like this:

And DID those FEET in ANcient TIME
WALK upon ENgland's MOUNtains GREEN?
And WAS the HOly LAMB of GOD
On ENgland's PLEASant PAStures SEEN?

By far, however, iambic pentameter (five feet) is the most widely used meter in English. Here is a sample of pentameter (the first sentence of "Tithonus" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson):

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Tetrameter is the underdog to pentameter (and, for about the last 100 years, free verse) but its charms are worth exploring. Most notable among tetrameter's advantages is its usefulness in songs and poems that, like songs, make a direct appeal to emotion. Like any other meter, tetrameter can be rhymed or unrhymed. A very common verse form, ballad verse, features alternate lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter (three feet, six syllables), typically in rhymed, four-line stanzas. Hymns, songs, and of course ballads use this verse form. One famous poet who wrote ballad verse is Emily Dickinson. Here is a four-line stanza of her ballad verse:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Ballad verse is beyond the scope of this site, which is intended as an educational reference source for English poems written in tetrameter.

How can you tell if a poem is in tetrameter? If you can sing it to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway," it is in tetrameter.

Just knock three times and whisper low
That you and I were sent by Joe
Then strike a match and you will know
That you're in Hernando's Hideaway...OLE

Scroll and click on the poets' names to read their poems in tetrameter.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Anonymous
Matthew Arnold
William Barnes
Francis Beaumont
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Aphra Behn
Hillaire Belloc
William Blake
Anne Bronte
Robert Browning
Lord Byron
Thomas Campion
Lady Mary Chudleigh
Arthur Hugh Clough
Richard Corbet
William Cowper
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thomas Ford
Robert Frost
Thomas Hardy
Robert Herrick
Gerard Manley Hopkins
A. E. Housman
Eric Howard
Helen Hunt Jackson
Samuel Johnson
Ben Jonson
John Keats
Walter Savage Landor
Philip Larkin
Vachel Lindsay
James Russell Lowell
Christopher Marlow
Andrew Marvell
Edna St. Vincent Millay
John Milton
Vladimir Nabokov
Coventry Patmore
Edgar Allan Poe
Sir Walter Ralegh
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Christina Georgina Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Vikram Seth
William Shakespeare
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sir John Suckling
Jonathan Swift
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Henry Vaughan
Edmund Waller
Oscar Wilde
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
William Wordsworth
Sir Henry Wotton
Sir Thomas Wyatt