Scanning a Poem: Finding the Pattern

1The text

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (1807, revised 1815), stanza 1

Wordsworth's sister Dorothy recorded in her journal the day in April 1802 when the two of them came upon a long belt of wild daffodils beside Ullswater, a lake in the English Lake District. Two years later the poet turned the memory into this poem. Read the stanza aloud and tap the beats on your desk. Most lines give you four steady taps. One line does not.

2Scanning in six steps

1. Read the line aloud naturally, two or three times. Never force a pattern before you have heard the sense.
2. Count the syllables.
3. Mark the stresses you are sure of: first the dictionary stress of every word of two or more syllables (WAN-dered, LONE-ly), then important one-syllable words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives).
4. Mark the rest as unstressed, giving small words such as as, in or the a light beat only where the pattern clearly expects one.
5. Divide into feet and name the metre (for example, iambic tetrameter).
6. Find the variations, and ask what each one does for the meaning. This step earns the marks.

3What the scansion shows

• Lines 1 to 5 are regular iambic tetrameter (four iambs), a calm, walking rhythm that suits a man wandering alone.
• The rhyme scheme is ABABCC (cloud/crowd, hills/daffodils, trees/breeze): a quatrain closed by a couplet.
• Line 6 breaks the pattern. Whether you say "fluttering" in two syllables or three, the line begins on a stress: FLUT-tering. The trochee at the start makes the rhythm itself flutter, so that the sound of the line acts out the movement of the flowers. A metrical variation at the exact moment the poem describes movement is not an accident.
• Line 4 has a caesura after "A host," || which makes us pause and correct "crowd" to a grander word, as if the poet's wonder is growing.

4Identifying the pattern in a whole poem

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923) is a model of quiet regularity:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.