poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings ...

, metre ( Commonwealth spelling) or meter (

American spelling Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and America ...

; see

spelling differences Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American ...

) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional

verse form Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

s prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody. (Within

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

, " prosody" is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of

prose Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the f ...

, whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)

Characteristics

An assortment of features can be identified when classifying poetry and its metre.

Qualitative versus quantitative metre

The metre of most poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called qualitative metre, with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in

iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Ia ...

s, usually every even-numbered syllable). Many

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language f ...

use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable (e.g. the last) needs to be fixed. The metre of the old

Germanic poetry In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of ...

of languages such as

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...

and Old English was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns. Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as quantitative metre, where patterns were based on

syllable weight In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical Indo-European verse, as developed in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin, distinctions of syllabl ...

rather than stress. In the

dactylic hexameter Dactylic hexameter (also known as heroic hexameter and the meter of epic) is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows (writing – for a long syllable, ...

s of

Classical Latin Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin. In some later pe ...

and

Classical Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

, for example, each of the six

feet The foot ( : feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg mad ...

making up the line was either a

dactyl Dactyl may refer to: * Dactyl (mythology), a legendary being * Dactyl (poetry), a metrical unit of verse * Dactyl Foundation, an arts organization * Finger, a part of the hand * Dactylus The dactylus is the tip region of the tentacular clu ...

(long-short-short) or a

spondee A spondee (Latin: ) is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables in modern meters. The word comes from the Greek , , 'libation'. Spondees in Ancient Greek ...

(long-long): a "long syllable" was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominalization, nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cul ...

, Persian,

Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language. Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other ...

and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the , with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone,

classical Chinese poetry Classical Chinese poetry is traditional Chinese poetry written in Classical Chinese and typified by certain traditional forms, or modes; traditional genres; and connections with particular historical periods, such as the poetry of the Tang dyn ...

also had more strictly defined rules, such as thematic parallelism or tonal antithesis between lines.

Feet

In many

Western Western may refer to: Places *Western, Nebraska, a village in the US * Western, New York, a town in the US *Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western world, countries that i ...

classical poetic traditions, the metre of a verse can be described as a sequence of ''

'', each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types – such as relatively unstressed/stressed (the norm for

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

poetry) or long/short (as in most classical

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

and

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

poetry).

Iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Ia ...

, a common metre in English poetry, is based on a sequence of five '' iambic feet'' or ''iambs'', each consisting of a relatively unstressed syllable (here represented with "˘" above the syllable) followed by a relatively stressed one (here represented with "/" above the syllable) –

 ˘  /   ˘   /   ˘    /      ˘  /     ˘   /
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
 ˘  /    ˘      /   ˘     /   ˘     /    ˘   /
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This approach to analyzing and classifying metres originates from

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

tragedians and poets such as

Homer Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the '' Iliad'' and the '' Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of ...

Pindar Pindar (; grc-gre, Πίνδαρος , ; la, Pindarus; ) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar i ...

Hesiod Hesiod (; grc-gre, Ἡσίοδος ''Hēsíodos'') was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by western authors as 'the first written poet i ...

, and

Sappho Sappho (; el, Σαπφώ ''Sapphō'' ; Aeolic Greek ''Psápphō''; c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied ...

. However some metres have an overall rhythmic pattern to the line that cannot easily be described using feet. This occurs in Sanskrit poetry; see

Vedic metre Vedic metre refers to the poetic metre in the Vedic literature. The study of Vedic metre, along with post-Vedic metre, is part of Chandas, one of the six Vedanga disciplines. Overview In addition to these seven, there are fourteen less frequent ...

and Sanskrit metre. (Although this poetry is in fact specified using feet, each "foot" is more or less equivalent to an entire line.) It also occurs in some Western metres, such as the

hendecasyllable In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and ...

favoured by

Catullus Gaius Valerius Catullus (; 84 - 54 BCE), often referred to simply as Catullus (, ), was a Latin poetry, Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical h ...

and Martial, which can be described as: x x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — — (where "—" = long, "∪" = short, and "x x" can be realized as "— ∪" or "— —" or "∪ —")

Disyllables

'' Macron and breve notation: '' Long-foot-meter

= stressed/long syllable, Short-foot-meter

= unstressed/short syllable

Trisyllables

If the line has only one foot, it is called a ''

monometer In poetry, a monometer is a line of verse with just one metrical foot. Example Monometer can be exemplified by this portion of Robert Herrick's poem "Upon His Departure Hence": Thus I Passe by, And die: As one, Unknown, And gone. See also *Troc ...

''; two feet, ''

dimeter In poetry, a dimeter is a metrical line of verse with two feet. The particular foot The foot ( : feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In m ...

''; three is ''

trimeter In poetry, a trimeter (Greek for "three measure") is a metre of three metrical feet per line. Examples: : When here // the spring // we see, : Fresh green // upon // the tree. See also * Anapaest An anapaest (; also spelled anapæst or anap ...

''; four is ''

tetrameter In poetry, a tetrameter is a line of four metrical feet. The particular foot can vary, as follows: * ''Anapestic tetrameter:'' ** "And the ''sheen'' of their ''spears'' was like ''stars'' on the ''sea''" (Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacher ...

''; five is ''

pentameter Pentameter ( grc, πεντάμετρος, 'measuring five ( feet)') is a poetic meter. А poem is said to be written in a particular pentameter when the lines of the poem have the length of five feet, where a 'foot' is a combination of a particula ...

''; six is ''

hexameter Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...

'', seven is ''

heptameter Heptameter is a type of meter where each line of verse contains seven metrical feet.Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. ''A Handbook to Literature.'' Eleventh ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2009. 264. It was used frequently in Cl ...

'' and eight is '' octameter''. For example, if the feet are iambs, and if there are five feet to a line, then it is called an

. If the feet are primarily ''dactyls'' and there are six to a line, then it is a

Caesura

Sometimes a natural pause occurs in the middle of a line rather than at a line-break. This is a

caesura 300px, An example of a caesura in modern western music notation A caesura (, . caesuras or caesurae; Latin for "cutting"), also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. ...

(cut). A good example is from ''

The Winter's Tale ''The Winter's Tale'' is a play by William Shakespeare originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, many modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some cri ...

'' by

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

; the caesurae are indicated by '/':

:It is for you we speak, / not for ourselves: :You are abused / and by some putter-on :That will be damn'd for't; / would I knew the villain, :I would land-damn him. / Be she honour-flaw'd, :I have three daughters; / the eldest is eleven

In Latin and Greek poetry, a caesura is a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. Each line of traditional Germanic

alliterative verse In meter (poetry), prosody, alliterative verse is a form of poetry, verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying Metre (poetry), metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The ...

is divided into two half-lines by a caesura. This can be seen in

Piers Plowman ''Piers Plowman'' (written 1370–86; possibly ) or ''Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman'' (''William's Vision of Piers Plowman'') is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in un-rhymed, alliterative v ...

:A fair feeld ful of folk / fond I ther bitwene— :Of alle manere of men / the meene and the riche, :Werchynge and wandrynge / as the world asketh. :Somme putten hem to the plough / pleiden ful selde, :In settynge and sowynge / swonken ful harde, :And wonnen that thise wastours / with glotonye destruyeth.

Enjambment

By contrast with caesura, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Also from Shakespeare's ''The Winter's Tale'':

:I am not prone to weeping, as our sex :Commonly are; the want of which vain dew :Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have :That honourable grief lodged here which burns :Worse than tears drown.

Metric variations

Poems with a well-defined overall metric pattern often have a few lines that violate that pattern. A common variation is the ''inversion'' of a foot, which turns an iamb ("da-DUM") into a

trochee In English poetic metre and modern linguistics, a trochee () is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. But in Latin and Ancient Greek poetic metre, a trochee is a heavy syllable followed by a light one ...

("DUM-da"). A second variation is a ''headless'' verse, which lacks the first syllable of the first foot. A third variation is catalexis, where the end of a line is shortened by a foot, or two or part thereof – an example of this is at the end of each verse in Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci":

:And on thy cheeks a fading rose (4 feet) :Fast withereth too (2 feet)

Modern English

Most English metre is classified according to the same system as Classical metre with an important difference. English is an accentual language, and therefore beats and offbeats (stressed and unstressed syllables) take the place of the long and short syllables of classical systems. In most English verse, the metre can be considered as a sort of back beat, against which natural speech rhythms vary expressively. The most common characteristic feet of English verse are the iamb in two syllables and the

anapest An anapaest (; also spelled anapæst or anapest, also called antidactylus) is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one; in accentual stress meters it consist ...

in three. (See

Foot (prosody) The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. ...

for a complete list of the metrical feet and their names.)

Metrical systems

The number of metrical systems in English is not agreed upon. The four major types are:

accentual verse Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English, as opposed to syllabic verse which is common in syllable-timed langua ...

accentual-syllabic verse Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical foot ...

syllabic verse Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syll ...

and quantitative verse. The

of Old English could also be added to this list, or included as a special type of accentual verse. Accentual verse focuses on the number of stresses in a line, while ignoring the number of offbeats and syllables; accentual-syllabic verse focuses on regulating both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in a line; syllabic verse only counts the number of syllables in a line; quantitative verse regulates the patterns of long and short syllables (this sort of verse is often considered alien to English). The use of foreign metres in English is all but exceptional.

Frequently used metres

The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the

, in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations are practically inexhaustible.

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and polit ...

's ''

Paradise Lost ''Paradise Lost'' is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674 ...

'', most

sonnet A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's inventio ...

s, and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as

blank verse Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and ...

. Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of

and the great works of Milton, though

Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

('' Ulysses'', '' The Princess'') and

Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's '' ...

(''

The Prelude ''The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem '' is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem ''The Recluse,'' which Wordswor ...

'') also make notable use of it. A rhymed pair of lines of iambic pentameter make a

heroic couplet A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the ''Legend o ...

, a

which was used so often in the 18th century that it is now used mostly for humorous effect (although see ''

Pale Fire ''Pale Fire'' is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic col ...

'' for a non-trivial case). The most famous writers of heroic couplets are

Dryden '' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the pe ...

and

Pope The pope ( la, papa, from el, πάππας, translit=pappas, 'father'), also known as supreme pontiff ( or ), Roman pontiff () or sovereign pontiff, is the bishop of Rome (or historically the patriarch of Rome), head of the worldwide Cathol ...

. Another important metre in English is the

ballad metre Common metre or common measure—abbreviated as C. M. or CM—is a poetic metre consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter (four metrical feet per line) and iambic trimeter (three metrical feet per line), with each foot con ...

, also called the "common metre", which is a four-line stanza, with two pairs of a line of

iambic tetrameter Iambic tetrameter is a poetic meter in ancient Greek and Latin poetry; as the name of ''a rhythm'', iambic tetrameter consists of four metra, each metron being of the form , x – u – , , consisting of a spondee and an iamb, or two iambs. Ther ...

followed by a line of

iambic trimeter The Iambic trimeter is a meter of poetry consisting of three iambic units (each of two feet) per line. In ancient Greek poetry and Latin poetry, an iambic trimeter is a quantitative meter, in which a line consists of three iambic ''metra''. E ...

; the

rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...

s usually fall on the lines of trimeter, although in many instances the tetrameter also rhymes. This is the metre of most of the Border and Scots or English ballads. In

hymn A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hymn ...

ody it is called the "common metre", as it is the most common of the named hymn metres used to pair many hymn lyrics with melodies, such as ''

Amazing Grace "Amazing Grace" is a Christian hymn published in 1779 with words written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman and poet John Newton (1725–1807). It is an immensely popular hymn, particularly in the United States, where it is used for bot ...

'':

:Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound ::That saved a wretch like me; :I once was lost, but now am found; ::Was blind, but now I see.

Emily Dickinson Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most importa