Scanning a poem is a way of listening extremely closely to a poem's rhythm and marking what we hear. Notating the rhythm can force us to make crucial choices about the poem's music and meaning and their effect on us. Scanning teaches us to hear po

A graphic scansion visually marks the syllabic rhythm and feet in a line of poetry. A simple scan of a poem might simply bold or underline the stressed syllables. More formal scansion places a graphic representation to denote the feet and stresses in a li

Scanning a poem, also known as prosody, is the process of marking the stresses in a poem. You will need to note where the sound is stressed when the poem is read aloud. You may need to scan a poem for a class or decide to try it to deepen your reading of