The first tactic you should use in scanning a poem is to look for words containing more than one syllable. Start with the line:
If showing mine so caused to bleed
The word "showing" can only be pronounced one way, showing (NB: the bolded syllable is stressed). Say it out loud. Try pronouncing the word first as showing and then as showing, and it will be obvious that the word must be...
The first tactic you should use in scanning a poem is to look for words containing more than one syllable. Start with the line:
If showing mine so caused to bleed
The word "showing" can only be pronounced one way, showing (NB: the bolded syllable is stressed). Say it out loud. Try pronouncing the word first as showing and then as showing, and it will be obvious that the word must be stressed on the first syllable.
This then gives us the first clue as to how to scan the line. Next, think about the word "if." It is a small, monosyllabic word, and probably less important than the verb "showing" and thus we would not be likely to stress it in reading. So far, we have:
If showing mine ...
Next, you should look at the other words in the line and read them aloud. In general, small, unimportant words such as conjunctions and prepositions are naturally unstressed and more important words such as nouns and verbs stressed. Thus one would say "to bleed" rather than "to bleed".
Thus the line would be scanned:
If showing mine so caused to bleed
You can see a regular pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (thus the basic foot of the line is iambic) repeated four times (thus the line is a tetrameter). The meter of the line therefore is iambic tetrameter. The lines you quoted all follow the identical pattern of regular iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is ABABCC.
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