scansion

1 9.9

Marking the beats and rhythm in a line of poetry

noun
/ˈskænʃən/

Literature

: escaneo

In poetry class, we learned how to perform scansion to understand the rhythm of our favorite poems.
a strict scansion
a loose scansion
an iambic scansion

Examples

Scansion: The system of describing conventional poetic rhythms by visual symbols for metrical analysis and study.

Fiction book (2000)
Swinburne himself makes the connection between flogging and scansion in his letters.

Academic text (2016)
So too, this essay argues, is the opposition of meter and its scansion to poetic innovation.

Academic text (2016)
The professor demonstrated scansion by breaking down the metrical pattern of a famous sonnet.
To analyze the structure of a line of verse, students practiced scansion using various techniques.

Surface Forms

scansion singular

scansions plural

Morphology

scansion = scan (semi-transparent) = scan + sion

Formed from the verb 'scan' with the noun-forming suffix '-sion'; the relation is clear but the meaning is a technical term in prosody that learners may not infer from 'scan' alone.

Etymology

Scansion comes from the Latin scandere, meaning 'to climb', and is related to the familiar verb scan ('to look closely'). Think of reading a line of poetry like climbing steps to find the beats, so scansion is the way we step through a poem to find its rhythm.