A Haunted house at night

Here is this week's poem, in anapestic tetrameter.

On a dark stormy night I came up to a door
And, wet as can be in that nasty downpour,
I knocked, in the hopes to escape for a time
The wetness and darkness of that cold nighttime.

When no answer I got, that door shoved I open,
And found that abode was not lived in by men
The halls, they were empty and dark as can be,
I thought to abandon the place, and to flee.

Then the thought came to me as I stood in the night
I could either be wet or be dry till daylight,
So I set aside fear and just walked right on in
Never mind that it's dark and that ghosts live within.

A lesson in the grammar of poetry

Since I've been posting all this stuff about poetry, I thought I'd post something about the grammar of poetry. I mentioned things like trochaic, iambic, and tetrameter, and for some people, that's practically Greek. I'll try to make this stuff a little clearer.
trochaic and iambic refer to the feet of the poem. Iamb is an unstress, stress, and trochee is stress, unstress. For example, in my poem "Seasons of a tree", it says "beneath the tree there lies a mound." You say that sentence using the pattern unstress, stress. Trochee is the exact opposite. In my poem "My Shadow", the meter goes "'Will you follow me this day?'" That sentence you say with the pattern stress, unstress.
Does that make sense? If your still confused, chant the poems, instead of saying them like you would normally. If it still doesn't make sense, go ask someone else, like Wikipedia.
Other forms of feet are anapest, which goes two unstresses, one stress, (like "with the leaves on the ground"), dactyl, which goes one stress, two unstresses, (such as "down to the creek we run"), and spondee, which goes two stresses (I don't quite understand this one. How can a poem be all stresses and no unstress?)

The other word I used was tetrameter. This refers to the number of feet in each line of the poem. "My Shadow" and "Seasons of a Tree" both have four feet per line, so they are tetrameter. I think that's pretty standard.
The others are:
momometer - one foot
dimeter - two feet
trimeter - three feet
tetrameter - four feet
pentameter - five feet
hexameter - six feet
heptameter - seven feet
octameter - eight feet

I hope that was helpful to someone. Maybe one of these days I'll write about the figures of speech, such as simile and metaphor. Next week I ought to have a poem though. I find it so much easier to write the real thing then to just talk about it.

My Shadow

This is yet another exercise in poetry, this time with trochaic tetrameter.

"Will you follow me this day?"
Called I to my shadow dark
"If the sun shines, then I may
By your side, there will I hark."

All day long he follows me
Fastened to my side
Always will I talk of "we",
He, from me he cannot hide.

Only in the dark of night
Does he leave me by myself
Frolicking until the light
With the books upon my shelf.

Another poem

This also is one that I wrote a while back for school, as an exercise of writing in iambic tetrameter.

Seasons of a tree

Beneath the tree there lies a mound
Of golden leaves, all on the ground
The wind blows more down with his breath,
And sends them down to certain death.

The winter comes, as does the cold
The trees, their arms stretch out so bold
The sky of winter to defy
On coming spring do they rely.

With spring comes leaves, and buds, and sun
The birds do chirp, the kids do run
The trees are born again to live,
Their shade and beauty to us give.