What Is Monometer in Poetry?
Quick answer: Monometer in poetry is a line containing just one metrical foot, often only two syllables. See classic examples, what the tiny line does, and how to use it.
Monometer is a line of verse containing a single metrical foot, which usually means just two or three syllables per line. An iambic monometer line is one da-DUM and nothing more. It is the shortest standard line length in English prosody, sitting below dimeter with two feet, trimeter with three, and so on up the scale to the pentameters and hexameters that carry most of the tradition's weight. Whole poems in monometer are genuine rarities, small enough to feel like stunts and difficult enough to be anything but.
The honest caveat is that monometer is a technical term from metrical verse, and it gets loosely applied to any poem with very short lines. Strictly, a line of free verse containing one word is not monometer unless the poem is keeping a metrical contract, one recognisable foot per line, all the way down the page. The distinction sounds fussy but it matters, because the pleasure of true monometer is watching a strict pattern survive inside an almost impossibly small space.
The poem
Thus I
Passe by,
And die:
As One,
Unknown,
And gon:
Robert Herrick, 'Upon His Departure Hence' (1648)
What One Foot Per Line Looks Like
Picture a poem as a column barely wider than a finger. Each line offers the reader two or three syllables, then a break, then two or three more. The white space around the words does enormous work: every line ending is a pause, so a monometer poem has more silence in it than speech. Reading one aloud feels like descending a ladder rung by rung.
Because each line holds a single foot, every word is exposed. There is nowhere for a weak choice to hide, no surrounding clause to carry it. Poets who work at this scale talk about the form the way engravers talk about small plates: the discipline is not fitting things in, it is deciding what deserves to exist at all.
The Classic Example: Herrick's Farewell
The poem every metrist cites is Robert Herrick's Upon His Departure Hence, published in Hesperides in 1648. It is a complete meditation on mortality conducted in iambic monometer, and its opening rungs show the form perfectly.
The poem descends like a coffin being lowered, one small line at a time, and the shape is the meaning. A statement about how brief and thin a life is gets a poem exactly as brief and thin. Herrick, a poet capable of lavish long-lined abundance elsewhere, chose starvation rations here on purpose.
What the Tiny Line Actually Does
Monometer creates two opposite effects at once, and which one dominates depends on handling. Read quickly, the short lines accelerate: the eye drops down the page and the poem is over in seconds, which suits subjects like falling, fleeing or vanishing. Read as punctuated, each line break a full pause, the same poem becomes glacially slow, a word placed, a silence, another word. Herrick's poem works in this second mode, each tiny line a footstep in a funeral procession.
The form also rations emphasis democratically. In a pentameter line, five stresses compete and the important word must fight for attention. In monometer, every line crowns one stress. This gives the poet a strange power: any ordinary word, set alone on its rung, acquires weight it could never earn mid-sentence. The cost is that the effect cannot be turned off, so a monometer poem that runs long begins to feel like being tapped on the shoulder every half second.
Monometer or Just a Short Line?
Modern free verse loves the one-word line, and readers reasonably ask whether that counts. The strict answer: monometer names a metrical pattern, so the label applies when the poem sustains one foot per line as a rule, not when a poet breaks a single word onto its own line for emphasis. A free verse poem with lines of one, four and nine syllables is simply free verse with short lines.
That said, the two traditions share a craft insight. Whether you call it monometer or a minimal line, extreme shortness converts the line break into the poem's loudest instrument. The skills transfer both ways, and metrical monometer is excellent training for anyone whose free verse line breaks have gone slack.
Writing Your Own: A Micro-Workshop
Start with a sentence of ordinary prose about something ending: the last bus pulls away and the street goes quiet. Now rebuild it as iambic monometer, one da-DUM per line, letting rhyme bind the rungs together: the bus / departs; the dusk / imparts / a hush; my heart / stays here / apart. Eight lines, eight feet, and the sentence has become a small machine of pauses. Rhyme is nearly essential at this scale; with so few syllables per line, it is the glue that convinces the ear the fragments belong together.
Two practical warnings from everyone who has tried it. First, syntax must flow across the line breaks, a complete sentence poured down a narrow pipe, because end-stopping every two syllables produces a shopping list. Second, keep it short. Herrick needed only a few dozen syllables, and the form's intensity is best drunk from a small glass. A monometer section inside a longer poem, marking a moment where time thins out, is often stronger than a whole poem in the meter.
Where You Will Meet It Today
Contemporary poets deploy monometer mostly as a passage rather than a whole poem: a sudden narrowing of the column when a speaker's breath shortens, a countdown, a prayer, a list of the last few things left. Children's verse and light verse also visit the form, since its ladder shape is visually playful and its rhymes arrive at a delightful rate.
It also thrives in the contest world precisely because it photographs well on a page and rewards precision. A tightly built short-line poem shows a judge deliberate structure at a glance; in Writory's monthly rounds, where structure and language are two of the five scored criteria, a controlled miniature can outscore a baggy epic. Small is not easy, and readers who know poetry can tell the difference between compressed and merely brief.
What poets can take from this
- Sustain one foot per line for the whole passage; a single stray three-foot line breaks the contract.
- Let full sentences run across many tiny lines instead of end-stopping every rung.
- Use rhyme to bind the fragments; at two syllables a line, the ear needs the extra glue.
- Reserve monometer for subjects where thinness means something: endings, breath, descent, solitude.
- Keep whole monometer poems under roughly twenty lines before the tapping rhythm wears thin.
- Try converting one stanza of an existing draft to monometer to find which words actually matter.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in iambic monometer, one two-syllable foot per line, spoken by someone climbing down a ladder into a cellar, letting each line be one rung and the poem end when their feet touch the floor.
Questions
What is the difference between monometer and dimeter?
Monometer has one metrical foot per line and dimeter has two, so an iambic dimeter line runs da-DUM da-DUM. Dimeter is noticeably more common because four to five syllables give a poet just enough room for a phrase, while monometer allows barely a word or two.
Can an entire poem really be written in monometer?
Yes, though examples are rare enough to be famous. Robert Herrick's Upon His Departure Hence is the standard classic, a complete poem in iambic monometer from 1648. Most poets instead use monometer for short passages inside longer poems, where the sudden narrowing has dramatic effect.
Is a one-word line in free verse monometer?
Not strictly. Monometer describes a metrical pattern sustained across a poem, one foot per line, while a lone short line in free verse is a layout choice without a metrical contract. The effects overlap, but prosody keeps the terms separate for good reason.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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