This poem by St. Vincent Millay is a classic example of a Shakespearean sonnet, composed of fourteen lines – three quatrains and a final couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efefgg. These types of sonnets are predominantly written in iambic pentameter, and “If I Should Learn in Some Quite Casual Way” is no exception. An iamb is a metrical foot composed of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable; pentameter...
This poem by St. Vincent Millay is a classic example of a Shakespearean sonnet, composed of fourteen lines – three quatrains and a final couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. These types of sonnets are predominantly written in iambic pentameter, and “If I Should Learn in Some Quite Casual Way” is no exception. An iamb is a metrical foot composed of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable; pentameter refers to five such feet in a single poetic line. So in each line of a poem written in iambic pentameter, there are ten syllables total, with every other syllable being stressed. If we consider the first two lines of this poem, we can see that it follows this pattern (the word casual is here treated as if it has only two syllables; stressed syllables are here in bold):
If I should learn in some quite ca-sual way
That you were gone, not to re-turn a-gain –
There are two places where elision has been used to omit a syllable that would otherwise exist in careful pronunciation, to ensure that the poem maintains this stress pattern throughout – the first example of this is above, in the word casual; the second example is the word hurrying in line 7, where, rather than having three syllables (hur-ry-ing), the word has been reduced to only two, maintaining the iambic integrity of the line: “A hurr-ying man – who hap-pened to be you.”
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